Kaladrax In Seven Days! Buglips is Crazy! WIP

[Dadcubed]

This is pretty crazy to do with that tiny brush. Actually makes me have a little bit of sick in my mouth.

 

I'm watching this WIP to your bitter end, I mean the bitter end.

 

Good luck and good start so far! :)

[Talae]

This is pretty crazy to do with that tiny brush. Actually makes me have a little bit of sick in my mouth.

 

I'm watching this WIP to your bitter end, I mean the bitter end.

 

Good luck and good start so far! :)

I reread to be clear you didn't write biter end. I was under the impression that Buglips stopped that habit...

[Nocturne]

If you finish this in one week that's one impressive painting spike you have.

[buglips*the*goblin]

 

 

More basecoating. At least all the parts are dry now, and his wings seem to have held their corrected shape. There's going to be a lot of Bone Shadow in my future. The good thing is that this is the Hell Point of this mini, and you get it over with right away.

 

But for the present most of the action is on the base. Drybrushing continues! For an expedient technique, though, it's taking a while. I decided to take a shot of the first stage here, because there have been some questions recently about drybrushing. So here it shows that the first pass is actually very, very light - and that the final result is built up. It's 2-3 passes usually, sometimes more. Drybrushing has a reputation for being a crude technique, but you can actually do some pretty subtle stuff with it if you experiment beyond mashing the brush onto the model.

 

So a light touch and multiple passes may give a nicer result.

 

 

That leads me to the next bit. Some of the stuff on this base is very distinct, like nice big blocks of stone. And some... a bit less so. As I toured the model, I saw lots of this lumpy, pitted bits:

 

 

And here:

 

 

And here:

 

 

 

I don't especially know what those are supposed to be. They kind of look like ruined stone, but the pitting makes it look odd. Like it's the opposite of how a gravel/detritus pile should look. If you look here on the head:

 

 

You see stuff that looks more like ruined stone small bits. But, interestingly, it looks like some vines there. They run down the sides of the head, too. There's also some tiny lumps that vaguely look like little itty bitty skulls, but they don't have enough definition to make it worth painting them differently.

 

But those viney bits... they kind of look like the weird lumps all over the ground don't they? So I've decided that whatever is above this vignette has been crumbling downwards over time, and has formed soil. So my plan is to do something with all the pitted bits to make it look like vegetation. Not sure what exactly yet, but something.

 

 

Once the drybrushing is finished, things should get more interesting on this basework. It's possible the base may actually turn out nicer than Kaladrax himself!

 

Also, you can totally see mold lines I missed. Consider this a community service - now you'll know where to look for them if you want to get rid of them. Some of them hide very well!

 

[falstius]

The pockmarked stone makes me think of Lava rock. Maybe the ancient dragon blasted the temple to the God With a Big Head to molten slag which solidified like that.

[MonkeySloth]

Kally's base looks great painted up. I really wish I got multiple of him at the KS price so I could use one to just make gaming terrain.

[Corporea]

I saw one of these painted up in the inspiration gallery and I think those things on top are skulls. Also, perhaps Reaper will include kally's base in the next kickstarter...!!!!

 

oh, almost forgot:

 

(Chariots of Fire Theme) Go Buglips! Go!

[MonkeySloth]

Reaper has the things on top of the stone head painted up as vegetation.

 

[buglips*the*goblin]

 

 

The results of the last couple of hours.

 

So I finished the drybrushing, and then I took the base drybrush colour (pro paint stone grey), threw a ton of master series linen white into it, and then drybrushed edges and some random spots with that. So that's partially a highlight, partially just something to break up the colours.

 

Then I mixed some coat d'arms Hairy Brown and Black Ink into a wash which I liberally spread all over the pock-rocks. I didn't have quite enough mixed to do it all, so I'll get the rest on a second pass. That's my soil, and since greens will go on top of it I wanted it to be nice and dark so it went into the background. The green is the important part.

 

I adhere to the theory of miniature painting that all painting comes down to two opposite but complementary goals:

 

1. Accentuate

2. Disguise

 

So basically, any mini has nice parts and not so nice parts. Some may have, for example, excess plastic between a leg and a scabbard (or a cloak). Some might have weird little nooks, or undefined bits. But along with this, they have really nicely detailed bits.

 

So for a mini to look good, you have to show off the tasty bits and hide away the other bits. For Kaladrax's base here, the stone with that neato face if the "show-off" bit I want to attract attention. And the loosely-defined ground detritus is the part I want to hide away with browns and greens and not very interesting stuff to look at because LOOK AT THE HEAD!

 

 

 

 

Now it was time to finish off the stone.

 

So the very first thing I did was take some coat d'arms black and thin the heck out of it. Like 8-10 to 1 water to paint. Very thin. Then I took a reaper 5/0 brush, loaded it, and drained most of it off on a piece of paper towel. With what remained on the brush I very quickly did all the nooks, crannies, and corners - doing multiple passes where I wanted it darker. This shadowing followed the rough idea of putting shadow where moisture could be expected to collect, which also happens to be most of the shady zones anyway.

 

Still not done!

 

Next I took some master series brown liner, and thinned it the same. With this I went around all the stone, adding random streaks and blobs to introduce some discoloration.

 

Still not done!

 

After that, I did the same process again - this time using master series Highland Moss.

 

This doesn't really show very well under the glare of the desk light in the photos, but I can assure you it was totally worth taking the time to do. Now the stone is finished, and looks properly aged.

 

 

The idea of the pock-rock being volcanic also occured to me, but the base seemed to say more "damp environment" to me, and volcanic rock might throw off that effect. So it'll become vegetation.

[Carnacki the Ghost Finder]

Amazing progress so far. You've invented extreme miniature painting. You realize that once you achieve this, you'll have to top yourself for the next one.

 

Painting in free-fall?

[buglips*the*goblin]

 

 

Finished washing the pock-rocks, and then I started in on the "moss". I used a damp Reaper 0 kolinksy, and the first layer of dampbrushing was 50/50 old reaper pro paint Elven Green (very dark) with MSP Highland Moss (not so dark). Then on top of this I added a layer of Highland Moss 50/50 with old Reaper Pro Paint "Moss" - which is a rather startling green.

 

I then went around to find and mark all the skulls.

 

So it looks like the disguise will work. The detritus didn't look like much of anything anyways, but at least now it looks like a something sort of. I'll add a top highlight of Highland Moss mixed with some bright yellow at the end, see if that gives it a bit of oompah. But overall the base is turning out exactly like I wanted.

 

The rest of my time was spent basecoating bones. Except his head was ready for the next phase, so I gave it a real thick wash of thinned coat d'arms black. I used this in particular because I found my reliable go-to, Brown Liner, has an alarming tendency under heavy thinning to turn whitish. The CDA won't do that, so it was the better choice.

 

I didn't take a picture of that because I had to create a jig to hold the head while it dried and I feared knocking it over. In fact, I dared not breathe around it, so here I am posting an update.

 

 

[Darsc Zacal]

Amazing progress so far. You've invented extreme miniature painting. You realize that once you achieve this, you'll have to top yourself for the next one.

 

Painting in free-fall?

Buglips will toss a mini up in the air, and then paint it before it hits the ground.

[buglips*the*goblin]

Amazing progress so far. You've invented extreme miniature painting. You realize that once you achieve this, you'll have to top yourself for the next one.

 

Painting in free-fall?

 

 

I guess if there's an objective to this WIP, aside from getting me a sweet painted dracolich, it's to show that no matter how big or scary a project seems if you just attack it full-on you'll find it isn't really so bad. Also, like OneBoot said, so far nobody's really given Big K a deep hands-on going over. Even the gallery pic Martin did is pretty tiny. So there might be some stuff to discover that can save other people time and energy when they go to do theirs.

 

You learn by doing. This stone technique I'm using looks good, but it's new to me. I discovered it when I did my not-so-great Well of Chaos. It was the only bit that turned out right. I never would have found it if I hadn't just gone ahead and did it to see what would happen.

 

Don't be afraid to screw up. Even on the big guys. There's plenty of time for me to run into disaster on Kaladrax yet!

[vulture]

go buglips, go! really cool project idea, can't wait to see how it turns out. Fortunately I wont have to wait long.

[Dibbler]

0.0! Mad Goblin!

 

Which is interesting to watch! :)