Monday, January 21, 2013

Swamp Thing Better Run!

Things have finally picked back up with the Kraken! With his body all painted up, it was time to move on to the base.

While I was painting up a super-secret part of the base, I kept thinking to myself "yeah, the Kraken would look great standing atop [redacted] on some regular dirt and grass, but wouldn't it look even better... in a swamp?" And since I have a bad habit of needing bases to look good, I put away all my basing materials and started working on the swamp!

I started off with some epoxy. I was originally just going to do a large puddle, but once I looked at it I realized how silly it'd look to have a mound of dirt around a puddle and then particles of dirt making up everything else. So I decided to just smear the whole thing in epoxy, leaving the puddle alone so that I could give it some depth later. While that was drying, I dyed a few batches of Realistic Water to find the right color for the water. I let everything sit overnight to harden up and prepare for the final lap.


The next day I back at the base with some umber paint. I really wanted to shoot this through my airbrush, but I'd have to mask the edge of the base perfectly. I'm sure it would have been fine, but I didn't want to cover a bit of epoxy or miss a bit of base and have the colors be off. I also smudged the epoxy over small bits of the base so that a messy, untamed swamp wouldn't look perfectly circular, thus making masking even more difficult. So I went old school, blew the dust off my basecoat brush, and got to work.

 After an hour it was dry and ready for a dry brush of Bestial Brown to bring out the raised areas. I then lightened the brown and hit the highest pieces to bring them out. I checked the results of my realistic water test and settled on 2 drops of light brown/green ink and 1 drop of black. I mixed that up and poured it on the base. Despite its name, Realistic Water has a lot of surface tension, so I had to keep going back to the edges and make sure everything was smooth.


And that's where I'm at. I saved a bit of the water so that I can poke it to test if it's ready, which will save me from messing up the base. I also had some epoxy left over and made a small prototype of a sandbag wall. If that goes well I'll have a tutorial up soon.

Tomorrow I'll hit the base with some vegetation, mount the Kraken on the super-special piece (which I'm building up for more than I should), and then he should be ready to go! I'm very excited to see this thing completed. Everything about it has gone so well, and I can't wait for the customer to finally get it back.

See you tomorrow!

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