Some of the first few figures that I finished this year, as part of my recent drive of

“This fricking thing is almost finished and has been for a year or more – just get it done!”

Reaper Bones 77171: Stone Golem and Harlequin Zombie “Buster Rotvessel”

First up is the Reaper Stone Golem, who I decided to paint in a Sandstone kind of scheme, ostensibly for the Egyptian-themed contingent of Marouda’s Undead army. Originally, the plan was to have the bronze/gold armour pieces as part of the magical mechanism keeping the golem animated/enslaved (pick one!) and to additionally feature chipped and worn paint on his skirt in the traditional blue/yellow scheme everyone uses for Egyptians based on Tutankhamen’s Death Mask. The thing was that I was never entirely happy with the idea, so the figure just sat in almost-finished limbo for over a year. So recently, I decided to just bloody finish it. I used the same Citadel Technical Nihilakh Oxide over white for the eyes as I did on the Bronze Bull, though this one was finished a week or two earlier. (And this was used as one of the examples for Marouda to choose the Bull’s eye style from.) I see I’ve missed some overflow below the belt line on it’s skirt. Probably from when I’d planned to paint the skirt. I’ll have to go back and touch that up. Maybe.

Rear view. Just look at that arse-crack! That’s an arse-crack for the ages!

The second figure in this update is the old Harlequin Miniatures Zombie. Somewhat of a classic figure in many ways, mostly due to his distinctive “exploded” torso. I picked up this figure in a single blister many, many years ago. Long enough to qualify him as an “Oldhammer” figure? Maybe just on the fringes, since it would likely have been into the mid-90s, when GW stalwarts like Kev Adams and others had started to move on from the company. This guy seems to have a name “Buster Rotvessel” (see what they did there?) and apparently had a whole unit to back him up back in the day. Sadly he no longer appears to be available from Black Tree Design, who currently own the old Harlequin sculpts. Still, I’m sure he’s relatively easily available on eBay and from other sources. Still, the silly name they gave him makes me keep thinking of Busta Rhymes. And giggling. 😛

Not a perfect figure by any means, his ham-hands and the tree-trunk handles on his weapons are both somewhat ridiculous, and indicative of the WHFB4-era’s aesthetics that he’s very much a part of (despite not being an actual Citadel figure) but his obese, corpulent, exploded physique add a lot of extra character to the model overall. He’d been sitting around in various stages of partially painted for several years (5?) before I finally pulled my finger out and finished highlighting the skin and picked out the exposed bone. A week later when I was blooding up some Zombivors, he got finished up with the same batch.