Friday 11 September 2015

Moody Hammers (both called Boris)

Greetings one and all, yes, still here, just took a couple of weeks off. Back and rocking now! Today we have a couple of inadequately clad gentlemen with a serious workout habit:

they're sexy and they know it

These chaps are Heresy miniatures Big Boris's - long term readers will know these are the second and third Big Boris's I've painted after my dynamic Big Boris Barbarian - including the Job's A Good Un Boris from the kickstarter (I've got one of these coming once Andy sculpts the new Ogre with Table, sculpt man sculpt! /cheeky). The client's concept for these was something plucked from the awesome depths of the Daniverse (that part of the 40k background authored by Dan Abnett, otherwise known as the bits with actual character, soul and real human lives rather than dakka dakka dakka). Moody Hammers is the term that low-life types use to refer to hired muscle. These two are cloned moody hammers with plenty of vat grown muscle grafted on for extra threat. By the way, these models are huge, those bases are not 25mm, they're the 40mm...

too sexy for boxer shorts that's for sure, dat thong...

Frankly, there isn't a lot to say about these except skin, lots and lots of skin. So as it's been a while since I talked about it... lets talk skin, Caucasian in this case: there are, it is true, lots of problems with Citadel's paints, but the stuff that is good is very, very good. The skin paints are one of these very, very good ones. I like to start not with Bugman's Glow but with Cadian Fleshtone. I only break out the Bugman's for ruddy toned people. Once a clean coat of Cadian Fleshtone is on, a shading wash of Reikland Fleshshade gives a nice warm tone. From here, start building up the highlight levels. The highlight steps are Cadian Fleshtone, a mix of Cadian Fleshtone and Kislev Flesh, pure kislev flesh and then a little bit of Kislev Flesh mixed with Flayed One Flesh (doesn't seem to be available at the moment, substitute a little bone instead). Now. Those mixes are where the differences between a rank and file dude and something like these moody hammer characters come in. Normally there is at most six stages to skin on my figures (base, wash, base, highlight one, highlight two, edge highlight). I often skip the edge highlight. These had at lease eleven layers blended in, each step in highlighting had a 2:1, a 1:1, and then a 1:2 ratio mix rather than just a 50:50 mix. There was also another shade layer as I thinned Agrax Earthshade and darkened the deepest recesses and the face.

"They said I could be anything, so I became a meat balloon."

Of course, with all that skin area it was just crying out to be used as a canvas for some mad tattooist. Not having one available, I had a bash at it with some online reference to help. With tattoos, the main mistake people make is using a pure colour, that will always look like warpaint and will visually sit on the surface of the skin. Instead, mix some skin tone in with the tattoo colour and that knocks the colour "under" the skin surface. I can recommend starting with mid 2000's "tribal" style tattoos as you can't really get them "wrong". More complex tattoos like the ones on my sumo D&D monk are a bit more involved and need a bit more practice.

Loved these chaps, lots of fun. Can't wait to get my own one of the JAGU Boris's... sculpt man!

TTFN

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