More Shadows of Brimstone today! I’m making a bit more of a concerted effort to at least get all the models from the inital two core sets painted, so we can, you know, play the fucking game. Especially since regardless of the models’ quality, the game does have pretty great feedback and reviews for a Warhammer Quest (original)-styled miniatures/RPG/boardgame campaign hybrid game. First there’s the Sand Kraken, which isn’t actually one of the Core Set monsters, but comes from one of the “Season One” expansions. At one point I planned to paint this one up as The Watcher In The Dark, but I’ve gotten some other suitable candidates since then, so it got to be the Sand Kraken again, and actually got based and painted thanks to Monster MAYhem, over at Dead Dick’s Tavern and Temporary Lodging giving me the motivation.

The model’s a pretty simple one, with rather soft details. I added both slate shards and cat litter to enhance the large, soft-sculpted “rocks” that aree part of the, erm, sculpt. I also used liquid greenstuff to make them a little less smooth, which worked okay to make them a tiny bit more textured. Otherwise, the base was done in my usual style for cracked desert bases, using GW cracked texture paint and then painting over the lot of it. The actual Kraken was done with a few different layers of contrasts, both straight out of the bottle as well as thinned, and then drybrushing with Vallejo Bonewhite to finish it off with a slightly different “desert dweller” skintone than the actual desert base it’s bursting out of…

Oh, and the eye was done with black that had the tiniest bit of Citadel’s Incubi Darkness mixed in, and then gloss varnish after everything else was done. No painted highlights, as I wanted it the eyes to be a deep, dark, shiny black. One that could be either an animal operating purely on instinct or an unfathomable malignant intelligence. And also a fairly strong focal point in what’s an otherwise simple and unimpressive sculpt.

The Desert Tentacles were painted in much the same way as the Sand Kraken. I don’t know how they relate in game (if at all) because I still haven’t played, but they certainly feel thematically linked – the tentacles could easily be the appendages of the Sand Kraken, after all. Suckers on tentacles that come out of the ground in the desert is a bit of an …uhhh, okay? for me, but I gave the sucker-sides of them a wash with thinned purple to both distinguish them from the opposite sides, as well as link them back to the Kraken a little more strongly. Bases were the same deal as the Sand Kraken.

And here they are together. I feel like they work well as a visual set…

And a couple of “in the field” shots for fun, showing the scale of these models in a situation where the Sand Kraken and its many tentacles surprise a mob of Orks by appearing out of the ground from within their battleline.