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A couple that I decided to finish up, Mr Bones (77195) from Kickstarter 1 and the third Chton (77228) I own, this time painted as a blue flower.

The Spirit of the Forest mini (Bones 77184) sat half painted for at least a year. I was originally going for greyish bark, but it just looked dumb. I repainted the bark multiple times, just could not get it to look that great. Finally decided to just finish up with what I had. The Chtons (Bones 77228) painted up very quick, and they were fun to paint.

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.

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.