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!