So here’s a set of models that I’ve wanted to paint for a couple of years. Ever since the Wave 1 of Shadows of Brimstone arrived on my doorstep, including the extra “red sprues”. The red sprues were a couple of duplicate sprues of the monsters from the core boxes, in red plastic rather then the boxed-set grey as a bonus for Kickstarter backers. I initially wanted to paint them up to represent water-bourne tentacles, so I could use them for Lord of the Rings as The Watcher in the Water or other similar creatures, except… the bloody things have stones all around them. I really couldn’t be bothered sawing them down, and so the project sat idle, every so often I’d remember it, then get annoyed again.

Sometime in the last couple of weeks I had the idea of painting them finally. I still didn’t know how I’d get around the rocks, but I thought “fuck it” and just glued them down to weighted 32mm Citadel bases anyway. The Shadows bases are nicer in some ways, but they won’t take washers quite as well, so I went with the GW ones. I knew I wanted to figure out a way to make them fit as sea bases, but I also didn’t care if they were perfect or not anymore.

Took them outside, spray primed black, then dark green. I still didn’t know exactly what I was going to do, but I knew I wanted sea monster colours, and not purples or red. Once I got them inside again I painted the bases and rocks in a dark sea blue-turquoise (Vallejo Panzer Aces: 309 Periscopes). I then had a thought and dropped some white into my palette with the turquoise and got one of my drybrushes. I then just started dabbing.

Not Like That.

Anyway, it seemed to work, so I added more white, and so on until I had an actually decent-looking mottled pattern that looked like churned water. Next up I played around with a wash of sea green on the tentacles, and then drybrushed the sucker-sides and the back-sides in slightly different shades of green, then a wash/glaze of a mix of P3 Turquioise Ink, Coellia Greenshade and some Liquitex Gloss Medium to thin it down and hold it all together. After drying, a nice hard coat of gloss spray varnish, and then I decided to take a gamble and use a sculpting tool to dab on (yep, again) a bunch of Vallejo Water Effects. Which naturally took 2 days to cure to the point of these photos. I’m not super excited about the yellowing. I’ll see how they look in a week or so, then I’ll decide whether to leave them or try drybrushing a little white on the tips.