Mind of Keifus: Bane (Kraken), Jade Falcon, Iota Galaxy

Lately, I've felt really ho hum about my painting and wanted to get back to some of the work where I spent several hours on one project. Those are the works that I'm truly proud of, and much of this post was because of the posting of my reseen Wolverine in a recent post. I remember fondly the work that went into that project and wanted to get that same feeling here. This Bane (Kraken) project really brought those feelings back, and a build out of the Iota Galaxy units I have was convenient.

Okay, so for the obvious stuff. The miniature had the feet removed from the base, no easy feat, but because the miniature's feet are so big, not as hard as some of the more delicate efforts here, like the Fire Moth (Dasher) project. The waist was increased in height in order to allow for the posing, which has some minor bends. The base is a 2" hex base, simply because of the size of the miniature. I used Sculpty to make a large, 'mech sized puddle. It was also shaped to have natural bumps that would later be painted as rocks.

Then painting. I didn't relying overly on dry brushing, which is okay, but definitely not as precise or as "blended" for the highlights as I would like. In this case, I used a wet brushing technique almost exclusively. Wet brushing is kind of like painting with water colors, and is definitely not a technique the impatient should use. In essence, you are adding layers of thin paint to allow you to blend it along the contours and panel lines in the miniature. Those layers build up as you paint, allowing a lot of control on blending colors. The green is a kelly green with a yellowish green to highlight. The original, dark green base coat was allowed to peek through in the middle of any panel or flat space. The highlights are also quite subtle, which is challenging to photograph. This same technique is used on the bone white, which can be seen more in the lower leg, as opposed to the head where the white reflects so much light as to wash out the highlights. Detail work on the missile tubes include highlighting the red and yellow at the corners. A simple dry brush of silver was used for the gun barrels.

For the base, it was a simple painting effort. More natural looking effects can be achieved largely by painting with the two objectives of random and various complementing shades of color. Following this, you might have five to ten different shades of brown for a base like this one. A few places have rocks. Lastly, a blue tinted water effect, which you can find at any hobby store, was used for the puddle. I was in such a hurry to take pictures, I didn't even let the water effect dry! Water effects take about 24 hours to dry completely, and it shrinks, becoming more translucent. There's some painting effects in the puddle that will be obvious once it dries completely. A few grass tufts and there you have it.