A Seraphon Carnosaur proxy thunders in (best not hide in the toilet)

It's easy to mistake a low rate of blogging with a lack of hobby time, luckily the opposite is true. Aside from a number of good games, I've also got a few rather massive projects (*cough* titans *cough*) on the burner. My lack of blathering stems from a lack of time to sit down and go on about my hobby. It doesn't helpt that my autofocus seems to prefer zany backgrounds to finished models :) Ah well, with all that useless preamble out of the way, let's get to the gravy. This week I decided to sit down each evening and paint an entire big monster start to finish. I actually managed to do it too :D Here's a Lizardmen Serpahon Carnosaur....

No! I don't know how I'm going to hit anyone with my spear from up here either!

...well actually, officially (so to speak) it's a Coldblood on Allosaurus 3D-print. Being a headstrong old fool I'll be using it however damn well I like; it's my lizard riding a lizard after all :). The print was designed by Ghamak. I've joined their Patreon a few months ago and ever since my stack of models I really, really want to print has increased exponentially (but in a good way). Earlier this year I printed and painted a proxy for my Lumineth by them as well. I like most of their designs and I especially appreciate their supported files. They print effortlessly on my setup. But enough commercial sounding happiness, I'm paying them for the privilege after all (and not the other way around <- open to offers though ;). Let's ramble on about painting. 

Where dinosaurs bald or feathered? Ah why not have the best of both worlds?

I agonized quite a bit about a color scheme, picking up this wonderful link along the way. I even leafed through ancient lizardmen battle tomes and more recent Seraphon books to figure out what the main color of a the lizardmen in an army should be, if I went on painting one after this monster. In the end I settled on bright orange for big dinosaurs (with an option to pick different color schemes for different monsters) and a pale pinkish white (with purple splotches) for the lizardmen themselves...

As you can see, I changed my mind :).

I'm quite chuffed with the colorful jungle plants. 

As much as I like getting creative with colors, I also get a bit of a kick out of going through sourcebooks and going 'hey that looks sort of like my models'. Looking at some nicely contrasted blue examples I decided to go for blue, with the stipilation it should be bright blue. I think I succeeded. The little guy on top of the big guy was airbrushed over a very white zenithal with VMC Sky Blue, adding white until it looked almost white. I painted shades in with watered down Prussian Blue and a bit of GW Drakenhof Nightshade. 

Warning: getting close to this mouth ends up with you being eaten!

After a lot of joy considering yellow/orange paint paint schemes I settled on greens for the Carnosaur. I don't really know why, but I suddenly felt like giving it a go. After that I went a bit loopy with the airbrush starting with a VMA Light Cam Green base color on top. I added random darker greens to it to get a lot of color variation on the top half of the lizard, taking care to make its face a bit brighter. Then I got started on the belly, adding a few drops of Light Cam Green to VMA Cement Grey (to make sure it would properly fit with the rest of the greens. I gave both the belly and the top a proper drybrush using lightened versions of the base colors. The mouth was painted with GW skin colors, I added a little drop of green to each of the three layers there too, just to fit in. 

Picking a very bright blue to get a lot of contrast worked :)

Looking at the results at that point I decided to a paint all the raised scales by hand with a mixture of Light Cam Green and dark green. I worked in batches, wet blending a little unmixed Light Cam Green in from the bottom and slapping a small edge highlight on top. The result was very satisfying (imho). It wasn't as much effort as it sound like and it really adds to the model. 

Remarkable Carnosaur, this Coldblood , idn'it, ay? Beautiful plumage!

I painted the feathers as well as the wood with a very light grey; drybrushing it with white. After it dried I splashed Agrax Earthshade onto the wood. It's a very effective technique to get good looking ancient wood without a lot of effort. I highlighted a few bits of plank with light grey, just to show myself I could. The feathers were colored using contrast paints Aether-whatever Blue (really GW, Snot Green I can remember, but the current line of names is straining my aging and withering brain!). I mixed the new extremely bright yellow....hang on, I'll look it up: Bad Moon Yellow from the top into the wet Blue at the bottom. It worked okay, but the lot still looked a bit like a blue-green glob, so I used Blood Angels Red contrast to pick out a few of them. This did not do the trick (I now had a blue-green glob with ugly red accents). Cursing softly I grabbed a new pot of <something> Sewer. Ordering it I assumed it would be a greenish brown, but it's a very dark brown. Ah well, it worked quite nicely to define the feather's edges without having to resort to streaking grime. 

I briefly experimented with a watered down brown wash there, it seemed wise to stop.

I could blab on a bit about the ropes (I experimented with a Stormvermin fur base, Iraqi Sand drybrush and a very light sepia wash) or the skulls and bones (I used a WW2 Vallejo color called British Uniform as a base color) but I'd rather like to finish with the base. The original design comes with a printable base, but I prefer to stay a bit more old school around basing. It's way to much fun to go completely ready made. I did use 3D-prints of jungle plants to get a bit of a jungle foor going (and to give myself an excuse to add more color to the model). I covered the ground with Vallejo Dark Earth paste. At that point I discovered (to my dismay) that my big lizards was not contrasting with the base. Slightly panicked I flocked everything that was not a jungle plant (or lizard appendage) with a mix of Ancient Railroad flock (the sort seemingly made from wood chips), Rooibos Tea leaves and Green Tea (with a dash of lemon) leaves. That fixed the problem I think. With all that said, I have another monster finished (and the need to do something about my overflowing displays has gotten even more acute).