From the depths of the painting queue, Cthulhu rises!

Hi All,

  Well I finished that huge Cthulhu model last night so I thought I'd share my painting "notebook" of the process.

  I started with a plan.

I decided to use this picture as a reference and ran it through the adobe color custom palette thing to get an idea of the colors. I ended up skipping on the purples and blues, but that was mostly a time issue. Also I've done purple tentacles a couple of times already.

So here he is dry fit with Abdul Goldberg for scale. Next were some shennanigans with various putties.

I used a 50/50 mix of green stuff and milliput yellow until it got unworkable. I then tried to finish it up with Tamiya.

DO NOT use Tamiya putty on bones. It is worthless.

After chipping off the worst of the flaky Tamiya I just used straight up green stuff to salvage the mess.

Spray paint.

Brush on more paint because the spray paint feels tacky and leaves a powdery residue on your hands when you pick it up.

Slather it in a black ink wash to preshade and further try to seal things down.

I got the idea to do all the belly, under arm inner leg stuff the lightest color.

I wanted to transition but the edges were super hard. One issue with craft paint is that some are super viscous. Getting them to flow but also cover was a constant battle. Each color probably got 3 coats.

In the thumbnail i thought this might show the stippling of the transition layer, but it just seems to be a different angle of the last shot.

Decide that you're going to need a beer to get this @#$&ing thing finished. (Four Peaks Hop Knot for scale) Decide that three beers was maybe one too many to efficiently paint.

This picture shows the transition stippling on the belly and a little on the spine. Start stippling Zinc on the head, hate it and then go for it with charcoal all over using a size 2 brush.

Paint in the veins and eyes, then dry brush the gray parts. Then slather the whole thing in "grunge" wash. (4 parts Raw Umber, 2 parts Burnt Umber, 1 part Black ink) This batch of was is a little dark and I accidentally let it pool in weird places, but I think it got the look of being dredged from the depths.

One more shot to try and show the spots etc. I need to take some "studio" shots of these latest figures. After I varnish them of course.

Anyway, thanks for looking. If you have one of these bad boys I'd love to see how you paint him. Who knows he may even make it to Oldhammer weekend.