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!