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This is going to be one of the most ambitious projects I've ever attempted, so I thought making a WIP thread would be a good idea. If everything goes well, I plan to enter this beastie at ReaperCon this year, so fingers crossed! This is an idea I've had bouncing around in my head for awhile, and started gathering materials for it last year. My plan is to take this lovely critter: and rather than using the shipwreck as a base, use half of one of these: and paint the Kraken to look all spacey and such. So! To that end, I now have one of these! I'll just be using the top half for the base, though: Which means that the bottom hemisphere is available for...testing. Huzzah! --OneBoot :D

I like to think of this as an "all-that-can-eat-you meal", best prepared deep fried. :-) This beastie was very challenging to paint, and all throughout I kept trying to figure out what I would do for a base. The shipwreck is awesome, but it left the tentacles so close to the tabletop that I felt it might make play challenging, assuming we ever use it, so I figured it needed some seafloor and weeds.

Here is my version of Bones Kraken !

I've started the Kraken, since I've gotten strong hints that it will be a useful figure soon. Here are the pieces primed with Reaper's Brown Liner: You may notice that not only is the shipwreck separate, but the Kraken itself is in two pieces, the body / tail and the mouth / head / tentacles. This is because yesterday my youngest pointed out that another Kraken I was assembling for a friend, parked briefly in a decorative candleholder, looked just like a giant plant monster. Sort of like this: Anyhow, I plan to paint the front end sort of plantlike and the back end sort of spiny lobsterlike and blue-tac them together when needed to be a Kraken. The first thing I did was throw some medium bright green on, because plants and algae. It's still a bit wet in these pictures, and so looks brighter and more opaque than it really is. I'm just slopping the paint on at this point, getting color more or less where I want it, to be refined and nuanced later. Next I added some pure Mars Red, thinned down a bit so it's not opaque, to make the body look more lobsterlike. I mixed the red with some Titanium White to make a dull pink and painted around the creature's mouth. I hope to eventually make the tentacle canopy look disturbingly flowerlike. I mixed a soft yellow-brownish very pale cream color and scumbled it almost dry onto the creature's belly and corresponding outside of its tentacle canopy. Then I started mixing some dull grey-browns and bringing up weathered wood lights on the shipwreck (Reaper Sea Hag, unfinished, for scale). I started painting the creature's tentacles green. I ran out of the color about halfway around. I mixed a new batch which was brighter and yellower, and here is one of my big painting principles: It doesn't matter if the colors don't match. I almost never paint with a single color, and I layer on so many different colors for highlights and shading that by the end they more or less match anyway. Not only don't I sweat color matching, I prefer to paint with variations of colors to get a richer effect than any single color can manage, no matter how pure. Anyway, here are the tentacles in progress. I didn't take any in-focus pix of the shipwreck, but I dry-brushed some of the same bright green on it for more algae. And here's one last shot of the tentacles with more of the yellower brighter green brought over the duller, darker one.

Forumites may remember I painted this more than a year ago. Which I did, and then I, errr forgot to take finished pictures and post them. Sorry. I'm fixing that. This is Reaper's Bones kraken, #77291, which I believe was once offered in a resin-metal combo but is now sold in the much lighter and less fragile (and less expensive) Bonesium. When I put one together for a friend, I noted that the front end would make a pretty good carnivorous plant, especially when tucked into a lotus flower-shaped candleholder we have. It also seemed a pretty good evocation of the Sarlacc in "The Return of the Jedi". So when I put my own together, I left the body and the front end separate, both for ease of storage and for versatility of use. (I never did figure out how to put the tentacles on, though. I tried to follow the store image in both the ones I put together and they still both came out different.) I also love this model because it comes with a wonderfully elaborate base, the prow of a wrecked ship. We have been using that as scenery. Some of the creature has been painted with interference paint, which is either near-transparent or luminously glowing iridescent color depending on the angle of light and viewing. I've tried to include pictures to show the change. First are photos with a white background, to show the model clearly (I went a little overboard with underwater effects later). A few have Dark Sword Miniatures' mermaid warrior, DSM 1197, to show the scale of the model. This creature is BIG. Dark Sword Miniatures' mermaid warrior, DSM 1197, included to show the scale of the model. Very, very old WIP thread here.

So this is the start of a big project...Space Kraken!! I picked up 77291: Kraken in Bones, today i'm going to the hobby store to take a look and see what I want to do for basing if you dont' know who space kraken is, here's what he is: and he's going ot be painted up like this dragon i painted

A Kraken painted for a friend, done up in red, purple, orange and yellow and a side by side with my own Kraken

Painting a Kraken for my friend This is basecoated

For when the party is traversing a swamp and someone rolls a 1:

Yesterday one of our gaming friends showed up with a bagged Reaper Bones kraken and asked me prettily to please assemble it (he brought steak; it wasn't all one-sided). We were gaming, so I did the usual Bones prep beforehand and started gluing during lulls in the game. When I had the front tentacles and mouth assembled, I needed to set them in something to cure while getting back to the game. I nabbed the first likely thing, a votive candleholder shaped like a lotus blossom (available wherever vaguely spiritual tchotchkes are found), plopped the front end in it and set it on the sideboard. At which point my youngest pointed out that it looked like a terrifying plant creature. I didn't leave it like that because my friend needed his kraken, but it suggested some interesting directions for conversion of the kraken into a giant carnivorous plant.

Finished! 3 days work, not bad. Pretty happy with him. He's a very pretty sculpt he's based on a old CD with cork coral and green stuff fishies =P And a few greenstuff anemones too WIP: http://forum.reapermini.com/index.php?/topic/59698-77291-the-kraken/

So, I determined the first Bones 2 mini I would paint would be the Kraken, so far I've only had the chance to glue him up and put a base coat of dark grey on him, but I'll try to post more pics as I continue painting his Cephalopodishness.

The first of my Bones 2 minis to get paint on him! I will attach the tentacles after I've done most of the work in his mouth He's going to be a Cuttle-Kraken, based off a Cuttlefish, so lots of browns, creams, and striping