WiP: Kaastaruk, skull-bearer of the Tarvax

Well, another week means another series of Razormage WiPs! Since the rest of this week is going to spent basing entries for the WAMP contest (which I can't share here, at least until it's over), this guy will have to tide everyone over until next week. I started on him Friday night, and quit working on him Sunday night, so this represents three nights of work.

Start to finish, after the break...

I primed Kaastaruk about four months ago, to demonstrate two-toned priming to some friends that I was teaching to paint. They were having trouble understanding where highlights go on a model, and it was the most effective demonstration I could come up with.

I had vague plans to use him to practice glazing, with the dual-tone sparing me from having to do a lot of layering work before that. Well, I gave it four layers of glazing, got extremely frustrated, and decided to go back to doing what I know! As a result, the two-toned priming ended up being pointless, and I probably won't do it again, unless I'm showing off.

Skintone:

In my mind, minotaurs are always the fiery red you see in old cartoons. Brown minotaur evoke too much of another large gaming company's preferred paint scheme, so I decided to stay away from browns (my first choice) and go with a more unusual take on the red minotaur I had in my mind.
The University of Texas in Austin is right up the road from me (about two hours away), and their iconic Longhorn is a trademarked color called Burnt Orange. They're the rival school of my brother's Alma Mater, so painting the model this color is going to have consequences...

After using the burnt orange I'd mixed up, I started layering orange by adding increasing quantities of yellow and pale flesh. The beer in the background is the Great Divide Oatmeal Yeti, which is fantastic.

Some more layering.

The color started to drift into a tangerine here, so I started adding more yellow and less pale flesh, to bring it back into the warmer shades.

The yellow really pops out the orange. Unfortunately, I went a little overboard on the highlighting (there's a surprise!) and the model as it stands now is almost yellow instead of orange! Ironically, it now looks like I'm going to have to go back and do some orange glazing to get my palette back to where it needs to be. For now, though, it's time to refill with a new beer and tackle another color!



I decided to go with green to complement the orange. Both are yellow-based, which will blend the two together as I highlight without having to blend one into the other (as I did with Glaun). After (what felt like a personal failure with) Aradae Mawr's purple, and the yellow creep on the orange here, I wanted to go back to a color that I know extremely well and have excellent control of, so that I can reinforce my painting confidence. I'm an Orc player through and through, and green is a color I can do anything with.


The first layer was Cayman green, and the second was 50/50 with Goblin Green. This is pretty much my standard template for mixing greens, as I'm not cutting it with any other colors for tinting.


Third layer was all goblin green. To my delight, the yellow in the orange has started getting diluted by the green contrast, so I'm more excited that it looks like the colors are going to flow together like they had in my mind.


I just powered through the next few layers, and somewhere along the line forgot that I was doing every-step-of-the-way WiP documentation. As a result, this is the last of the greens. The next few layers were 50/50 Goblin and Scorpion, Scorpion, and 50/50 Scorpion and a yellow that I can't remember. At some point in this process, I also went to bed.

You can see the completed greens in this shot, as well as the first of the brown layers and a random bug-eyed small lizard that I found when I was cleaning off my desk. The brown here is leather brown, unmixed with anything but water. The beer is Hitachino Expresso Stout, which was a lot more bitter than I'd expected it to be.



Third layer: Leather Brown and Pale Flesh. Glaun was cut with Medium Grey to transition a bit smoother, but since this guy's a lot smaller than Glaun, I've cut out two layers by skipping that step. I'm also trying to keep with the yellow notes, which Pale Flesh does better than the cooler Medium Grey. I've also switched over to an English Brown ale, Bad King John, to put myself more in the Darklands frame.


Another layer, but this time it's all Pale Flesh. I quit highlighting the wooden staff at this point, choosing instead to leave it here. Wood doesn't want to get highlighted to white, I've learned.

The final layer of brown is 50/50 Pale Flesh to Skull White. This gives the bone the final "pop" it needs to fit into my paint style.

At this point, I had a choice. I could either paint the metal bits, or I could have some fun and paint the banner. I base coated the metal. It was boring. I went to bed, and resolved to make my decision the Sunday morning. Guess what I decided?

Yep, started on the banner. I roughly doodled the Eye of Baalor icon onto the banner in very light pencil, then painted over it with SS Camo Black Brown mixed 50/50 with black. I then roughed out the eyeball with pale flesh, and the iris with increasing shades of blue. Then, I did a bunch of wet-blended freehand work that I didn't bother to document until it was finished.


Then, I not only didn't take pictures of the banner, but did the entire rest of the NMM on the model without taking a single "in progress" picture. It's black/SS Camo Black Brown, shaded up to Basalt Grey, then shaded up to Wolf Grey. There will be a least one more layer with white in it, but that turns this into a non-WiP thread, and WAMP contests and so on.

Gratuitous full frontal shot. I went with darker metal than Aradae Mawr, to contrast the brightness of the yellow/orange and the green. I think it pulls the two together effectively.

Oh, did I mention I went a bit crazy with the banner? I think it's a different take on the Eye of Baalor icon that Mierce has on their Formoraic.

Finally, a picture of just the banner itself. The blues are layered up from 50/50 Stormy Blue and SS Camo, up to 50/50 Sky Blue and White. I don't know what I was thinking about when I did the lightning bits coming off, but it's certainly something. I might come back in and pick out the details on the banner a bit more, but who am I kidding? It's not worth distracting from that eye!