88110 Slaughterpit Zombie Gnoll

So here’s the last of the three in my backlog. No more new painting until I’m back at my table at the end of August. This one has so many planes and surfaces that it’s actually very hard to photograph well. Not for the first time do I wish I had a proper camera and light box for these photos. Regardless, this will have to do for now:

I confess I had a lot of anxiety about starting this one. The assembly process was not the worst in the Chainmail line (looking at you, Zombie Troglodytes), but with four separate pieces, one of which is the entire upper end of the figure, it looked intimidating.

I needn’t have worried. I put down a layer of milliput at the join between the head and torso. The result was a little rough, but I decided to make this a seam where the corpse was stitched together. I kind of think the sculptor was inviting this interpretation because the chainmail on the head piece doesn’t really match the torso chainmail. The right hand comes attached to the head, an artifact of the casting process. Most painters leave it as is, which I think looks bad. It was a cinch to clip it off and bend the arm upward into a more natural pose.

The whole figure has a real John Carpenter/body horror feel to it which I love. The extra head emerging from the stomach is a nice touch. To get the feel of raw flesh, I painted the base layer of skin in a Reaper fair skin which I washed with two applications of Reykland Fleshshade. On that I built up to the gnoll’s brown skin with many many diluted glazes of mahogany brown. I tried to keep the glaze out of crevices and off edges–basically the opposite of what you’d do if you were washing to shade. The result is a sort of raw, blistered look that works really well, I think.

Fur patches are Reaper blackened brown, and I used blood red to highlight wounds and suture points. The faces in particular gave a lot of opportunities to play around with tones and overlapping surfaces. That decaying mouth looks amazing.

I’d like to go back and weather the sword with some rust effects, but I didn’t have my pigments with me when I painted this. After I sprayed on a couple of coats of lacquer, I finished the wounds with Nurgle’s Rot. That looks awesome too, I think.

In the end, this is a very nice, creatively sculpted and fun to paint piece. The end of Ahmut’s Legion is in sight!