Recently I got myself a set of the new Speed Paints 2.0 by Army Painter and I must say I'm incredibly impressed with them. One of my most difficult challenges as a painter are big models as I don't use an airbrush, but the Speed Paints and the slapchop method suddenly made painting big models so accessible that I found myself tackling several of this projects in quick succession.
The first one was a comission for a friend. A Monster Hunter enemy called Pukei-Pukei. I made some research on the beast before tackling the project and tried to stay as true as I could to the official arts. I managed to get a quite nice variety of greens, browns and yellows on the boss, and complemented it with a colorful face. And still all of this took less than 2 hours. The speed paints made this a breeze and the results were still stunning.
I decided to add some extra stuff on the base and try a water base with resin, as I had the materials but never actually had a base as big where I could try it out. In the end the result was pretty nice and my friends loved it.
The Pukei-Pukei was the test model that allowed me to tackle the massive monsters of the Tag Raid kickstarter next. I started with the Sturworm as my first project. A distant relative of the Arrakis worm, with an extra set of precious metals embedded on it's carapace.
As it's a tunnelling beast, I wanted all the plates to look like rock while the exposed skin was to be of a worm-like pink, with an extra disgusting mouth and some glowing stones to represent the T-Bezoar minerals embedded on it.
This is the biggest "miniature" I've painted to date, and it dwarfs pretty much any other infantry miniature next to it.
After my success with the Pukei-Pukei, my friend came back to me with a new project. A Barroth from the same Monster Hunter game. This project was way easier as I had already nailed the rock tones from the Sturworm, so my only real difficulty here was how to make the model interesting and not looking monochrome. A pinch of orange on some key areas of the model added depth to it's color scheme, making it look more like a videogame boss and still maintaining the feel that it was proper skin tone for his habitat.
I also got to mess around with the base a bit. My references made it look like a desert beast, but my friend insisted to have mud on the base as it was relevant for his enemy attack kit, so added some cracked mud effect for good measure. Also added some dry tea leaves that looked like branches and dry vegetation to give it a more realistic feel.
Overall, this was also a pretty satisfying job.
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