I kept staring at these figures, but nothing came to mind...
So I contacted Cathy at White Ape Painting Studio, and told her:
I've got a pair of Demonic Gnoll Adepts (from Chainmail), I'm perplexed how to paint them, and from your approach to the Simian Messengers, I suspect you'd be good on this one.
As you probably know, Gnoll are basically hyena-men in D&D, so there are some good ideas for painting schemes from the various types of real hyenas. However, a Demonic Gnoll is a Gnoll which also has some Demon blood (i.e., is part-Demon), so the challenge is to take the Gnoll idea and add something that is a demonic element.
To my delight, she accepted the assignment, and here they are:
And the second variant:
As you can see, she's taken a natural hyena look, and added to it a strong influence of red representing the demonic element.
These Gnolls stand 45mm tall, wear armor, and carry a nasty form of flail. And based on the armor, I'm presuming that these are female Gnolls, and that Gnoll litters come in batches of six...?
The only changes since Cathy sent them to me are that I added black art sand to the bases (so I can use them for dungeons or regular battlefields), and I repaired the tails (they broke off in shipping, so I pinned them back into place and touched up the paint).
These models are from the defunct Chainmail line of metal figures. (I know that some of the Chainmail figures were produced later as pre-painted plastics, but I don't know if the Gnolls were reproduced in pre-paints.)