The King In Yellow

You know when a great time to start on a painters entry for ReaperCon? The Friday before, giving you less than 7 days to actually work on it....

Last year Reaper released 4 faction minis for their Dreadmere campaign at ReaperCon. The Cthon faction (Cthulhu-esk weirdos) miniature was the Disciple of Cthon, aka the Crimson Herald. However, when I first saw it, my immediate thought was "The King In Yellow."



Cleaning up the mini was pretty easy. There weren't a lot of mold lines to deal with, however on the top of the staff and the worm coming out of it there was a bit of mold slippage that was just more than files could take care of. I cleaned it up as best I could, but short of trying to carve out the issues and greenstuff it back into shape, I'd just have to hide it.













After priming with Reaper's brush on primer, I went at the robes, starting with Pumpkin Orange, and moving up through Hearth Fire, Lantern Yellow, Candlelight Yellow, Canary Yellow, and then up to Bone and Linen White. Somewhere in the process, probably around the time I'd worked up to Lantern Yellow it also got a wash of sepia.



The tentacles and arms were primarily a blend of Dragon Green, Nightsky Indigo, and Vampiric Shadow messily mixed in a variety of ways. A wet pallet would have been really useful for this...



The mask, skulls, blades, and pages of the book were all based on Dirty Bone, brought up to linen white. The gem (eye?) and the book cover were based with Crimson Splatter. The details on the book cover were done with Dragon Gold, as was the dot on the gem.



The top of the staff started as a fairly normal looking eyeball, but it wasn't working. It was neither convincing as an eye, or effective at hiding the mold line that ran right across it, so I repainted it with green where the white of the eye would be, and a yellow iris.



At just under 24 hours from when the figure needed to be turned in, this is what it looked like:



Pretty nice... Not amazing, but really solid work. I talked to a couple of the artists, and Kuro Cleanbrush strongly suggested the base needed more. I knew that throwing down some flock, or sand wouldn't cut it, but there wasn't a whole lot of time or space on the base to do a whole scenic thing... so Kuro suggested I sculpt some more tentacles to completely cover the base.

So I did.





I then left it alone overnight to cure. The next morning I got right to it. By the afternoon I was ready to glue the arm on. Then I tried to remove the figure from the cork... and apparently I'd used too much glue, and couldn't get it. With minutes counting down, I pulled out my hobby saw, and cut it off. Unfortunately in the process I bumped the arm off. Trying desperately not to panic, I glued it back on, touched up a bit of paint, including giving some of the shadows on the arm a glaze of pumpkin orange to bring down the shadows (they didn't quite match the rest of the robe).





After all of that, I finally got it turned in with 30 minutes till the deadline.



I once again earned a solid bronze. One of my judges said that he wanted to go silver, but the rest of the figure just didn't quite make it up to the level of the robes. So, better than last year, at least in review, if not in actual score.



Major thanks go to Ian (Kuro Cleanbrush), Matbar, Klarg1, and Tish for all their help in getting my King in Yellow as good as it is, whether from their technical suggestions and critiques, to providing a drop of paint or glue, to their general enthusiastic support.

Even bigger thanks to my bride for her understanding as ReaperCon approached and I got a little crazy getting ready.


Current Music: Sucker Punch soundtrack