Long time no post my friends – While I’d have liked to have enough time to post and keep the blog updated, the truth is that time is a Zero-Sum proposition and I’ve both been busy and not particularly motivated to blog – largely because of the time it takes when there’s so much else to do! At one point I’d even worked out how to do the “catch-up” posts in relative order of completion and monthly round-ups and so forth, but given that even that idea was going on a month ago, I’m just throwing that level of organisation out of the window and will just be posting models I’ve painted in the interim. Maybe I’ll do a “three month round-up” or some such later on. We’ll see.

Anyway, without further hurfblurf, here’s a pair of models. Crocosaur was 95% painted back in May for the Monster MayHem challenge, but with just a bit left to do. I wanted to finish the Abominape in the same timeframe as well to post them together, and when that wasn’t going to happen the whole thing fell off until recently.

I decided to follow the Gorilla-themed paintjob on the Abominape, so he was started with a spray of black, and then successive soft-drybrush layers of differently toned greys on both the skin and furred areas. After this I went in and did some blending over the drybrush to highlight aspects like the musculature and face while sticking with successive drybrushing on the fur.

I washed the entirety of the model’s exposed skin in thinned black wash in order to bring the dry-looking aspects of the grey back down and blend all the work in together, and then also added in some glazes of thinned purple to the musculature for the general zombie look and to add a bit of subtle interest to what could easily be a very boring and monochrome model. Towards the end I also drybrushed some buff onto the fingers and knuckles of both hands because gorillas are knuckle-walkers.

Neither of these models actually came with bases, so I went into my stockpile of Reaper bases and found appropriately sized ones, as I really do prefer based models. Since these models are from Undead or Alive, which is Wild-West-Desert-Themed, I went with the cracked desert look. If (when!) we end up doing  Zombicide-Mash-Up games down the road, we’ll just have to live with the basing on this model being incogruent with whatever tiles they’re standing on. You know, like 90% of themed-base 40k, AoS and Warhammer Fantasy armies are!

Glowing green eyes and a red-spattered mouth make for a nice facial focus, and hopefully a pretty intimidating savage visage! As with many of these Zombicide beasts, both the Abominape and Crocosaur come from the talented hands of Jason Hendricks. You can see the Abominape here, and the Crocosaur here.

As mentioned earlier, the Crocosaur was mostly-painted months earlier, but it kinda got stuck when I developed a mental painting block. It looked good, but was done in the “clean” style. Do I take the chance and add dried dust weathering to the entire model, risking it all. In the end I did it, and I think it still looks good, but in a different way. It does look less “sharp” and a lot “softer” now. Does it look better? I’m not entirely convinced, but in the end I’m still pretty satisfied with the model. 

I mentioned earlier that I added bases to these models. I could have given them round bases, but I decided to give them both oblong bases instead – this was essentially to minimise the footprint of the models on the tiles (while still giving them bases). The round ones would have looked just as good, but would have had a much larger footprint. In the end both of these models overhang their bases, but I feel they do so in a reasonable way given the size of the models.

With a green hide, the Crocosaur obviously needed a red tone to it’s eyes. I went with the red-yellow look to add a bit more depth. This pair of models also marked the first time I tried out the UHU-Glue method of adding stringy gore to models. Finding the stuff wasn’t straightforward, but I eventually located it on Amazon and ordered it a few months ago. The method wasn’t hard at all, and turned out (I think) rather well. How well it holds up for gaming models is yet to be seen, though!

Finally, we get the scale shot – as both you and Berkeley can see, these are some large opponents! I haven’t yet read the rules for these two, and I’m not too sure I want to…