Here’s my final entry for the Monster March painting challenge being run by Swordmaster over at Path of an Outcast. As I noted yesterday when I posted up the giant Burrower, I had to shelve the idea of getting that Dracoliche and Bone Giant finished this month when I got sick, and so turned to a pair of models that didn’t need quite as much finesse to paint. The first was of course the Borrower, that I shared a couple of days ago. That one was painted start-to-finish, by virtue of being a rather simple model.

This one, while equally a big bastard, is actually a lot more complex. Or to put it another way, allows for more of a complex paint job, while still keeping it rather simple. You could easily get away with a straightforward spray black/grey and drybrush the hell out of the thing, and end up with a decent looking model. I tried that initially, but it didn’t do it for me. Or more precisely, I didn’t think it was appropriate for this model – for me, anyway. More on that a little later.

I originally picked this thing up several years ago with a thought to using it in Kings of War, using a “Giant” Profile or some such and running it alongside my Orcs. As such, I’d planned to give it a square base and so forth. I actually started to paint it in December, with a thought to using it as a personal “Stretch Goal” for Painting Decembuary, but given how December turned out, it didn’t get finished, and then just sat around for a couple of months, occasionally having a bit more done to it before I put it aside again. I had it based on a large oval base at one point, as I think that’s how the reissued version from Forge World comes, but I wasn’t entirely sure at the time, and so ordered a bunch of large bases from Reaper. When they arrived in April, I wrenched him off the oval and glued him down to the large circle, and it slowly took shape from there.

On not wanting to keep the paint simple, I have a rationale – See, this model is a great big expensive chunk of Forge World resin. If I’m going to (yeah, foolishly) pay that sort of money for a single model, then I want to make sure I’m really doing it justice. There are a whole lot of glyphs carved onto the model. Some of the original studio paintjobs pretty much ignore them, but the current Forge World paintjob overdoes the colourfulness of the model, if not the glyphs. With this in mind, I painted them with thinned-down transparent paints from Warcolors, and finished them later by drybrushing my top-layer stone colour over them to make them stand out a little less and give them an old, worn look.

After all of the rock painting was done, it was time to sort out the sculpted-on moss. I really hate sculpted-on moss. It tends to look shitty if painted. (The moss on the new Forge World studio example is positively glowing). So you’re left with pretending that it’s stone and ignoring it, painting it green and trying to ignore how bad it looks, or trying to do something with it by covering it – which is what I’ve done before and attempted again here. I’m not 100% sure if it’s the right choice, but it looks better to me than the other two options (that happened to be stages on the path to this.) Now he looks a bit like Moss Man from Masters of the Universe. So… hrm. So yeah, I wish they would skip the sculpted-on moss.

The plan was to post this guy up yesterday, but it was close to midnight when I got the last of the flock onto him, as it took several applications. The stuff then had to dry, and, well, you get the idea. Easier to let it dry properly and then post him up in the morning. In the end, thanks to this painting challenge, I’ve gotten motivated enough to finally finish this model, giving me a second large beastie worthy of the moniker “Monster March”. There aren’t really any easy 40k stats for him (maybe a Greater Daemon without wings or spells?) but he’ll be usable in both Kings of War and Age of Sigmar. Right when I get around to playing either of them again.