It’s been a good couple of months now since I’ve gotten a Journeys in ME model painted, so in July I did that thing where you make yourself finish this model or that – I did it a few times actually, and the most recent one of those was this War Oliphaunt.

I originally started painting it for one of the Monster Month challenges, but as with most painting month challenges, I bit off a bit more than I could finish. This model had a bit of an issue in terms of “what the hell is *that*? for some of the details, and so it took just knuckling down and slapping paint on the thing to get it done. There’s a fair bit of drybrushing on the Oliphant skin, since I didn’t have any interest in trying to neatly blend something this size – and besides, Elephant (and presumably, Oliphant) skin is dry and rough looking, anyway!

I was at one point planning to paint an Eye of Sauron on the blanket underneath the Howdah, but as one side of the beast features that whole area compressed between the straps, I decided to leave it be. Similarly, I considered adding Peter Jackson-esque war paint on the skin, but left it off when I realised I could keep this piece pretty generic despite the fact that it’s supposed to be immense in scale – look at the logs supporting the howdah, and the size of the howdah – it’s almost like a person would be smaller than one of those tassels!

It’s not an amazing model, but it’s a very decent model for a boardgame, and given that context I’m happy with the paint job I gave it in the end. Very much a case of “good enough” and one I was satisfied to round out my July models with!

Here you can see the size of the thing when alongside our friend Berkeley. It’s actually a size that could pass for a regular Elephant with something weird happening to it’s ears – so while it’s not exactly War Mammoh sized for games like the Warhams of Kings of War, I could potentially use it for similar in Dragon Rampant or the like. And now that this model is finally painted, I can start on something else for Journeys. Hm… should I start on a rabble of Orcs or another pair of heroic Adventurers?

Next post – July’s Round-Up!