The Alpha Project

Tonight I started painting the Alpha Warpwolf for a friend of mine (Sean). This is a majestic model. It makes me sad that I don't like the Alpha Troll as much. Anyway, this beasty is going to take a while, especially given my busy schedule, which I shall discuss later. So, I figured I'd use this as an opportunity to do another series of posts of the progress, but this time show alot more incremental updates. I'm not going to haul out the lightbox for every photo, so the picture quality will probably not be so hot. Plus, this photo will be one of the only ones where he isn't glued to a spray can for easy handling, so even if I wanted to use the lightbox, it would be difficult at best.

This first update isn't going to look like alot of progress. Basically, I received the Alpha fully assembled, attached to his base, and primed black. And when I say attached to his base, I mean this bad boy is going nowhere. Kudos to Sean for a kick-ass job getting him attached. He's not moving at all.

I've been mulling over what to do color-wise with this model. Sean already has some of the studio green/gold armor bits on his other Circle models, so that choice was made easy. However the fur was another issue. I decided after debating options for a couple weeks, and looking at other warpwolves on the Privateer forums and on CMON, that the studio scheme will be my base for the color. I've got a fair amount of experience with painting white, and it really does make this model stand out. We'll see how I feel about that once I start trying to shade him.

With a basic color scheme chosen, this first step was to base coat all the white skin. I'm starting with this for three reasons. First, there's alot of it, and I've found that painting all the skin on trolls first serves me well for feeling like I've made progress early on. Second, it's easier to just be sloppy when doing all the skin and then be precise later on when doing smaller bits. Third, it gives me the opportunity to review the whole surface of the model. There were a few places where the primer was rather thin, so I made sure to get some paint on there to cover up any bare metal. The irony of going with black primer (and I really love black primer) is that whenever I paint a predominantly white model like this, I always feel like there's some wasted effort going on. Tonight I tacked this single task of getting a couple of nice even coats of P3 Frostbite on all the skin and the fur transitions. This first step always takes me longer than I expect.

The next step will be to begin shading the skin, but not tonight. One thing I still need to decide on is what to do with the base. I want to really spice it up a bit, but there's limited real estate to work with.