The Mauler Extreme

No witty title today. This guy has taken a long time. He's not fabulous, but he's done.

Things I learned while working on him:

• With a really large model, simpler is better. Trying to mix my own shades got me in some trouble when I didn't mix enough to finish all the areas I wanted to work on.
  
  
• Large heavy models are hard to handle. I fully assembled this guy to avoid having join points show up as much, but this guy is a beast. Seriously, he was just awkward to hold while painting.
• Future floor wax is great and all, but too much of it makes things shiny (duh). I went back to using just water to thin paints for this model. I used entirely P3's for paints and the P3's already have a somewhat satin finish. Lots of Future was just making it too shiny.
• Matt medium rules.

Bleh

Up until late this evening, the eMauler was looking pretty lame. Kinda in that in-between phase before it starts to take shape. The attached pic is from this morning before I got another 3 hours of painting in this evening. Unfortunately I'm sorely behind on my posts here. At this stage the skin shading is mostly done, but there isn't alot of color or contrast on the model to help give it more character so it seems pretty flat.

It's late, so I'll have to post my results from Saturday's Primetime tournament tomorrow.

Green skin?!?!

I started painting the eMauler last night. I started painting his skin green. After about 10 minutes of laying paint on him I set him down, took a couple steps back and said to myself "Ack! He looks like the Incredible Hulk!" Now normally I wouldn't mind that so much, but for some reason it completely put me off. I'm going to go with blue like I did for the regular Mauler. Since this guy is so huge, I'm going to work all the stuff below the waist first so that I can get him attached to the base to make him easier to work with.

Minor Progress

I finished the eMauler's base this evening. Turned out the eMauler himself needed another coat of primer, so he's drying instead of getting painted. Tomorrow night hopefully. In the mean time, here's a link to an eMauler's from CMON:

http://www.coolminiornot.com/index/whatm/Privateer%20Press/id/151741

I'm still thinking of going with the dark blue scheme, but I'm also thinking perhaps green/grey instead. Too sleepy to decide now though.

eMauler Assembled

Just a quick update. I snapped a couple pics this morning of the assembled eMauler before I primed him just to note where all the greenstuff work ended up. There wasn't really a bunch of sculpting to do, just filling in gaps and some bonding work. Still though, it gave me alot of practice with smoothing greenstuff which I sorely needed. The two pins in his feet are just temporary for now while I primed him. The bugger is so heavy that when I set him in the block of wood that holds pinned models, the pins started bending over. No matter, he's primed and drying at home and if I can sneak out of work at a reasonable hour tonight (which would be a miracle) I can start getting some work done on him.

I haven't really thought alot about color schemes at this point, but I'm heavily favoring either a dark blue (like the first mauler), or a medium green. I'm not very fond of the pale blue studio colors myself, and I love the look of red spines. There was a really badass eMauler on CMON but their site seems to be down right now so I don't have a link. The highlight of it for me was that the whole model was painted to draw the attention to the face, and the mauler's eyes were painted like gems.

Extreeeeeme!!!

My Dire Troll Mauler Extreme showed up today, and he is huge! Here's a pic of the 12 pieces, including the sculpted base. There's alot of trimming and cleaning to do. I also want to handle all the joins with greenstuff as best I can, which will require me to expand my skillset.