My second wave of gators represented filling out choices that I did not have with my initial set. Adding in Rask as my likely caster to have with Barnabus, I wanted to get some of the non-gator elements ready. They all follow the theme of having lost their left eye's during some sort of Blindwater Congregation ritual. I did not want to overstate this though, so the modeling doesn't always call attention to it. Caliban and one of the goblins simply have masks with the left eye pieces closed up, while rask and another goblin have patches. The Swamp horror apparently doesn't care, or was a recent convert due to its open bloody eye socket.
Rask was a lot of fun to make. I really wanted a different pose, and this one ended up being very natural to convert to. It was relatively easy to remove his gun and replace it with a wire frame of the tree. I made a wire frame of the gun handle connected to the removed gun, and used pliers to close his pointing hand grip around it. I then greenstuffed a passable tree and pistolgrip, and an eye patch. You can see more of the WIP from the previous post. Painting-wise, I struggled for a while on what colors to make him. I had been moving towards the greygreen as seen on the base-lip as my standard basecoat, and decided to work with that. I washed his fins towards a much darker blue-green, but eventually built up the layers to be much brighter. I remembered my experiments with glaze medium, and it worked very well to get brighter highlights. His armors were done in a new purchase of blackmetal, which I am liking a lot. I may be using it on my newer Tau reinforcements.
The Swamp Horror was definitely a horror to convert. I had the misfortune of getting two of the same halves of the tentacles, and being too impatient to get replacements I modified the set to work on the other side. This meant a million hours of filing to make the mouth fit. I've talked about this in the previous post, but the painting is new! I started with some purple and pink basecoats, and got a little worried that it would be way off the feel of the rest of the army. I decided to try for an oily black latex kind of look for the skin, and something more earthy/bone for the chitin. It worked much better than I could have hoped for, and halfway through it was no longer a chore but a great paint sessions to work on all the little folds and tentacles. I painted the Ryan with a few muted Cygnar colors, and gloss coated the whole thing a few times. I also experimented with my new blood source of Tamiya clear red, and it works very well. All I can say is bring on a minions Gargantuan version for me to paint!
In addition to these models, my second wave efforts were also to finish up my accessories for the army. One thing in particular at the back of my mind was to make a movement tray that would both transport my stuff, and look good in my display case. I will go into the build on a seperate post, but here it is in it's completed glory!
I also finished off 3 more 5" swamps for Barnabus to sling around. More gameplay with them have definitely required 3-4 to operate without picking old ones up that still have models on them. I experimented with how much wash, and adding water-effects. I will probably resin over the water ripples, they didnt come out very well.
Thats that! On to a break for some Tau, and then Wave 3 and Wave 4 of my Gators! You can see some of them already have some greenstuff work on them in the display board picture, but I still have a long way to go before they are ready for paint. Below are some more shots of the completed wave 2 stuff!
______________________________________________
So I never completed my 2012 challenge goals. As I am moving towards a new challenge to be unveiled on Sunday, I should really finish the previous ones off!
.jpeg)
