Painting Enormous Bugs!

This month I’ve been very busy, but in my downtime I worked on this!

 

 

Regular followers of this blog may remember that I have done a previous tutorial on painting the Carcass Scavenger from Otherworld, but I thought that some people may be interested in learning a little about this paint job (and conversion ) specifically, so here it is.

 

 

As can be seen in this image, I changed the position of the crawlers head by a significant amount. At the bottom of the photo you can just about make out the original row of holes for the legs and you can see the two body sections I had to rebuild completely. I also had to remove the two rows of spines from the top of the model after several failed attempts to add matching ones to the rebuilt body sections. As you may be able to make out this led to me adding more grey-stuff to try and smooth out the top sections.

Overall it’s not a very profession sculpting job, but here is a secret, you only have to be good at one thing. A bad sculpt painted well can look great, while a great detailed sculpt can be painted with simple techniques (like base coats and washes) and still come out look great. So, knowing I could fix or at least hide most of my sculpting sins I set out painting.

I began with a coat of Knarloc Green. You’ll notice the mini has no legs yet, they will come later because they will only get in the way of painting the lower body.

 

 

Next I began one of the most time-intensive parts of the entire paint job. Using my clay shaper I added hundreds of dots of Celestra Grey. This has become my new favourite for the base when using this “dotty” system. Any grey will work, like white, grey tends to turn the same colour as any wash layered over it, adding a lighter variation to the overall skin tone, unlike white though grey is more muted in the end result without being entirely unnoticeable. I ran these dots part way down the tentacles wanting to leave them with a smoother feel than the rest of the body.

 

 

This was then washed with green ink (I used Vallejo) This left the gaps in the body segments darker than I would have liked but I’ll fix that later. This was left to dry before I added a layer of Balor Brown dots to the top half of the body (creating a separation between the softer underbody and the harder carapace.) I also drilled out new holes for the legs and filled the lower holes with more grey-stuff (smoothed out with Liquid Green Stuff).

 

 

Next up I added another layer of Grey dots to the lower body, while adding a new layer of Sand dots to the upper to create a highlight (adding them around features like the eyes). Each subsequent layer of dots is faster to do as the aim really is to eliminate the base coat and create layers of varied colours. The more layers you do the more the dots look like a cohesive whole and less like… well dots. It is similar to how images on a computer work, the eye sees a picture, but in truth its a series of pixel.

 

 

Next up I mixed up some washes using Lahmian Medium as the base. For the top I mixed up something yellowy green, while the bottom I used something grey-green, I cannot remember the exact mix, but the joy of working with paint is that you can keep mixing until are happy with the colour. The aim of this layer is to mute the dots and bring all the varied colours closer together. I find that this generally works better using washes with paint in them than just inks or GW washes, I feel that the paint “flattens” everything better. Subsequent washes will bring back the detail.

 

The whole thing was then washed with Thraka Green, Seraphim Sepia and Waywatcher Green. The brown wash takes edge off the greens and helps bring out the yellow. Finally I added a single line of highlights in Balor Brown along the most prominent edge of the mini.

 

 

I did some base coating and detail work on the legs while they were on the sprue. The reason for this was two fold, painting them after attaching them would be a nightmare and could lead to me getting paint on to the base etc, but painting them individually without attaching them would be fiddly and annoying, so on the sprue was a compromise.

 

 

Of course it mean after attaching them I would have to touch them up. I actually used more Liquid Green Stuff to help here, hiding some of the gaps and giving the paint a good surface to adhere to. I then inked the legs, rebased them with Knarloc Green, highlighted with a mix of Knarloc and Balor brown. Added more dots in Celestra Grey and Balor Brown before adding various coats of the three washes I applied to the body.

 

 

The eyes were done with scab red and then dots of increasingly lighter versions, mixing in Elf Flesh and White. They were then washed with various coats of Baal Red and Bloodletter Red before finally adding two dots of white to the back edge of each.

 

And that’s it. I hope you enjoyed this and I’ll leave you with some close ups of the finished piece.

 

		My Carrion Crawler VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

 

Until the next, happy painting,

 

The Duke