I mean, you knew this one was coming next – surely! Yep, that’s right – we have the blue X-rated version of Chewbacca in both his Survivor and Zombie version from the Marvel Zombies X-Men and Kickstarter Extras sets.
The fur on these sculpts is certainly more accentated when compared to the Crisis protocol version – this allows for both easier painting but unfortunately makes the model look more “noisy” and less visually clear in these photos. This isn’t helped by the sculptor’s (or designer’s) choice of giving us the bespectacled version of Beast – so more crap interfering the readability of his face.
There was a bit of extra messing around on the bases, since there are a number of sculpted books, pages and flasks scattered about, so it took a little more care than the usual rubble.
For the books and pages, I just used some text-strip decals that I got from a KS ages ago. While they’re obviously set up to be useful in 40k, they’re a pretty handy thing to have in your back pocket for this sort of occasion. Trying to add in text lines would of course be doable, but more time than I’d like to spend – and getting row after row of them to be straight would be a nightmare.
That aside, they’re really a pretty solid pair of sculpts that weren’t too bad at all to get painted. I may go back to both beasts and darken just the front of their Wolverine-style hairline to be more in line with the comics (as noted by Faust in the last post) but otherwise, they’re done and I’m good with ’em!
Azazel's Bitz Box. 
Excellent work on both mate, and really like the difference in fur colour between the survivor version and zombie, easy to spot on the table.
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Thanks Dave. I added a bit of green into the blue on the zombie version to represent a discolouration. Maybe he also fell in a pool of hair dye!?!
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Another sexy Beast, and a stanky-manky Beast! Lovely job on both mate 🫶
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It’s like Ray Winstone and Ben Kingsley all over again!
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Ah, Poor Hank, alas we knew thee well! 😉 Nice work! I really like the colors you used for Zombie beast. The darkish fur makes the wounds pop even more, giving an interesting mix of colors. Kinda makes me want to try out a bluish-grey and pink/red color scheme on some mini’s outfit someday.
So, the fur on the other mini…I’ve often lamented when the sculptor doesn’t include some sort of fur or texture on a furry mini. But here I see how it can actually make things worse. Your last one where you painted the fur actually looks better to me…but that could be from the ‘2d comic image’ in my mind and the difference when that gets translated to 3D. But I’m honestly thinking I prefer how (GW) sometimes renders fur and that’s the mostly smooth parts with some end spiky pieces. You can then paint in the texture but still have some more prominent parts to help establish it as fur. If any of that makes sense.
I think only that era of Beast had the dark parts in his hair. I’m pretty sure when you get into the later eras, they dropped that. X-men Pro, Kuribo, can probably point that out! ;D
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Thanks Faust. There’s a fair bit of exposed skin where (presumably) the fur has fallen out, so I painted those greyish with a purple tinge, and then added in the pustules and gore.
With fur on humanoids there is (in my mind) a big difference between Chewbacca-style fur and something more akin to horse hair, or even the shorter hair we see on a lot of cats and dogs. That’s how I envision my typical-GW-Broo-Style Beastmen/Minotaurs to be – covered in short fur rather than conveniently having fur-pants and a bit of a mane – which is why I typically paint them in shades of brown and grey.
Just that hint of texture in my opinion would work best for a character like Beast, but instead we’ve gotten a sculptor that gave him the Chewbacca treatment on this pair!
“My” mental version of Beast does have just the “front” of his hair a darker shade, much like the way they drew Wolverine’s hair – that period of time from Classic X-Men through the 80’s run of X-factor. I’ll probably bring them back inside and hit them with a subtle wash to add that in.
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Very nice work on both of these, mate! I really like the zombie one. He looks quite evil indeed and not too far off from Dark Beast! I agree that the sculpted fur probably doesn’t actually benefit you as the painter as well. That isn’t to say these look bad, they’re just a little harder to visually “scan” if you know what I mean.
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Thanks mate! So there’s both heel-turn Beast and also Dark Beast?!? I’m so glad I read the comics when I did, and just as glad that I stopped and never came back in a lot of ways! 😮
The sculpted fur would be fine, if it wasn’t so deep. Funny, usually the issue with a lot of figures is is with shallow details!
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It is ironic on the fur sculpting to be sure.
X-Men have quite possibly the most convoluted universe and cast of characters compared to any other comic book. There are TONS of characters and many of them change from faces to heels and back again (not unlike wrestling!). To make matters worse, there are a lot of alternate future/time travel storylines and sometimes characters from other storylines join the contemporary one. I think that Dark Beast comes from a dark future where the world goes bad and that’s why he’s the way he is. He’s almost like a twisted clone of Beast that lives alongside Beast in some of the comics. Hopefully I explained that well enough and whether all of this detail and rich character histories is good or bad is up to you to decide 🙂
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Very nice! :-) I think I like the zombie version most!
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Thanks John – we ran into the Beast version in a game last night. he’s got some speed on him, but we sorted him out in short order. Zombie Hulk on the other hand… 😮
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