The blog has been pretty quiet lately, as work has been really hectic. We put together an academic seminar, which was this year’s biggest work-related thing (I assume/hope), so stress is now starting to ease up. Painting mojo has been somewhat down because of the lack of time, so I’ve spent most of my free time playing Age of Empires III and alternatively watching either Kengan Ashura or pro wrestling. With the seminar now behind me, I’m getting back to painting, with new mini projects looming again!
Before this cooldown period, I did manage to print and paint up a giant, six-legged lizard from Papsikels! It proved to be a bit of a bastard in a few ways. First of all, I struggled to print the base, which simply wouldn’t sit level when I printed it in resin. After a lot of sanding and cursing, I decided to print it on the FDM, and it came out perfect. The next hurdle was putting it together. It just would sit nicely on its rocky base, so I had to do a fair bit of putty work so it didn’t hang in thin air. After that, I got on with the painting…
My idea was to paint it in some kind of an exotic colour scheme, rather than dulled down brownish greens. I asked some nice people in our Ghost Archipelago group for ideas, and they suggested all sorts of colourful real-life lizards, so I ended up drawing inspiration from these. Now, the start of the painting was really easy. Spray undercoat, drybrush, Contrast, Contrast, Contrast. Then came the patterning part. The worst part of doing patterns on a very textured model, on which the painting relies mostly on washes and drybrushing, is that if you screw something up, you have to go back quite a few steps to fix your “canvas” for another try. Red patterns turned out to look too much like bloody wounds, black stripes made it look too much like a tiger. Repainting galore!
In the end I settled for a pale tail, an orange back pattern, and some irregular blue splashes of colour to suggest both toxicity and a fantastic element. Maybe when they’re small, they’re a great delicacy for some beast, resulting in warning colours. Or who knows about mythical islands, there’s probably something out there that snacks on these creatures when they’re fully grown.
Click for a larger version
Click for a larger version
Click for a larger version
Click for a larger version
After wrestling with the model quite a bit, I’m really happy it turned out as nice as it did. I went to town on the base, partly also to hide some spots where the model doesn’t quite sit right. Anyway, lots of new things on the painting desk, so hopefully I’ll get some of that out on the blog as well!
Dawn of the Lead 