Category Archives: Board Games

Shadows of Brimstone: Tentacles (Sea Edition)

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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.

Realm of Chaos – Nurgle’s Children 2018 #12: Shadows of Brimstone Burrower as Giant Chaos Spawn (Monster March ’18)

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I took a hard left turn in my participation on the Monster March painting challenge this month. When I got sick two weeks ago, I found that I was unable to paint fine details to the standard that I hold myself to, so that put the kibosh on getting the Terminator Squad I’ve been working on finished. I also found that shading all of those god-damned bones on the Reaper Bone Giant and the Dracoliche was just not gonna happen.

So I took a different road. I had ordered some extra-large bases from Reaper Miniatures, and they finally arrived in the middle of the month. Also recently, my mate Carlo had done some gluing and puttying on a few kits for me, and the Burrower from Shadows of Brimstone was one of them. It’s not an amazing model by any account, but I looked at it and the complete lack of fine, fiddly details on the model, and as I now had the large bases, I decided to try and paint the thing for Monster March.

I went with a colour scheme inspired by the Nurgle models that I’ve been painting over the last couple of months, with the idea that I could also use it as something in my Nurgle Daemon army – the Giant Chaos Spawn profile from the Forgeworld Chaos Index for 8th Edition 40k fitting the bill quite nicely. I’m sure there’s something big and gigantic I could fill in the stats for in AoS and KoW and a dozen other games as well.

The figure itself was a matter of basecoats followed by a series of drybrushes, washes, picking out of those little bumps across the whole model and some veinage on the tentacles, and stippling in various locations to try and give it at least sort of a natural look. Matt varnish on the base and body, satin on the “teeth” and gloss on the tentacles.

Paint was started last weekend (the WIP photo was last Saturday), and I’ve just done a little bit here and there when I could after work. Luckily the model is simple enough that I got the whole thing done in less than a week.

As you can see here, the model is pretty big. Giant Chaos Spawn, indeed! I have to thank Swordmaster for running this challenge. Although I failed miserably at completing the two models I wanted to finish (because I got sick!), I still managed to get motivated enough to paint a model that could have sat there unpainted for a bloody long time.

I also have another figure that I’d been working on to mount on one of the large bases. Today is the 30th of March. Let’s see if I can finish that one for Monster March as well. Will I get it done in time or will this stubborn chest infection, Assassins Creed: Origins and the newly-arrived Far Cry 5 prevent me from doing so? Tune in tomorrow and find out!