Beholder Cloning

The Beholder is one of the classic D&D monsters, and necessary for any collection of fantasy miniatures. I own two old school Beholder miniatures. The first figure is my favorite. It is from Grenadier's Dwellers Below boxed set (2012). It looks exactly like the Tom Wham illustration of the beholder from the AD&D Monster Manual. The smaller Beholder is a 15mm Beholder made by Ral Partha for the AD&D Battlesystem line. This particular figure was from the Chipco Evil Army set. I'm almost positive that it is the only Beholder in 15mm.



I wanted to take the Grenadier Beholder and mount it on a flying stand, but the miniature is so heavy, that it would have tipped almost any stand over, so I resorted to the Dark Art, and created a duplicate in resin.


I painted the clone as close to the original as possible, but afterwards I wondered why my past-self selected the colors that he did? I looked in the Monster Manual, and found nothing saying that the Beholder's eye was green and orange. Then I remembered this:


Which contains the following passage:


Well, the appearance of my Beholder is probably not what Gary Gygax had in mind, but at least I know where the color scheme came from now.