SHOWCASE: Kingdom Death: Painting the Watcher
It was imperative to do a minimal assembly on this guy. All those streamers and other bits were bound to get in the way during painting. After priming it with Model Master Gray Primer I pick out three different sections of cloth with three different colors. These were P3’s Beast Hide, Battledress Green, and a pale blue color mixed from Exile Blue, Cygnar Blue Highlight, and Hammerfall Khaki.
Then I shade the cloth. The Battledress Green was shaded with Exile Blue, the Beast Hide was shaded with Coal Black, and the blue was shaded with Umbral Umber.
Here’s a look at what’s going on in the back.
The blue is highlighted by mixing in some Menoth White Highlight.
Here’s the blue area on the back.
The back again.
The Battledress Green is also highlighted with Rucksack tan followed by Menoth White Highlight.
The back.
Now that the cloth has been worked out I move onto some of the lighting effects from the lanterns. I start it off pretty rough with a basecoat of Menoth White Highlight with some Rucksack tan and Cygnus yellow mixed in.
I blend the glow out into the surrounding fabric while mixing in a little more Rucksack Tan and also some Heartfire. I’m not ready to call this area done yet, but I want to see how the area looks with all its lanterns place before I finish it all up.
And here are those lanterns. I start off the metal areas with Bloodtracker Brown while the lanterns’ interiors are painted with Menoth White Base.
I add some Rucksack tan to the Bloodtracker Brown to highlight it up adding some Menoth White Base anywhere that I want a really strong highlight. At this point I’m ready to attach these lanterns to the body and do the final touches there.
Really it’s all just about cleaning up at this point. I just blend everything in a bit more smoothly on the lanterns and the cloak.
At this point I finally got to move on to the crazy face-scarf, which is one of the things I’d been looking forward to since the beginning. I wanted to do something really weird for these guys. While I started out with GW’s Hawk Turquoise washed over Bubonic Brown, the turquoise quickly got painted over. I ended up primarily using P3’s Coal Black with the Bubonic Brown instead. Here it is early in the process; right after the first layers of color were put down.
And here it is after some more blending was done. Some Menoth White Highlight was added to lighten things up in certain areas.
And here’s one last shot of the scarf. I also started painting the scarf itself with Umbral Umber highlighted with Gun Corps Brown. It’s almost finished, but once again I want to attach this piece to the body before I do the final touches.
So I glue it on and do the final blending.
Finally it was time to do the vines. I had originally wanted these to match the scarf-faces, and started them off in the same way. But I wanted to try for something weirder, so I washed them with some thinned down Bloodstone, and began to highlight them with a pale turquoise color I mixed up with Thrall Flesh and a little bit of Ordic Olive and Exile Blue.
Well… it wasn’t working out so well. After being repeatedly unsatisfied with the results I was getting, I just washed it all with P3 Green Ink mixed with GW’s Agrax Earth. I ended up liking the color enough to just leave it that way.
I highlighted it with some Bubonic Brown – again mixed with some retarder. That’s the reason why it’s so translucent.
Then I mix some of P3’s Frostbite with the Bubonic Brown for a final highlight. I go back with some more Coal Black to pick out some of the shadows that had gotten painted over.
I basecoated it with Hammerfall Khaki, and washed it with Agrax Earth. I wanted to avoid a boring gray stone appearance, so I mixed in a lot of color shading with Coal Black and Bloodstone and adding Hammerfall Khaki and Menoth White Base to the highlights.
After finally gluing the watcher in place, I have to add some final OSL highlighting from some of the lanterns to really tie the mini and the base together. But after that, I think he’s finally done.
