Khadorian Wardog

While waiting for some parts I needed for the finishing touches on my current "main" hobby project, I looked through my queue of backed up projects for something that I could finished quickly. I had assembled, primed and sprayed the war dog red at the same time as some of my warjacks, so I figured it wouldn't take too long to finish him off. I actually underestimated the fiddly-ness of his armour, but still he didn't take too much work. I called him Marmaduke, simply because that's the dog he most reminds me of (and because Lassie was too obvious).

I'm not particularly fond of the model - nothing at all wrong with it, it has some nice details and a dynamic pose, it just doesn't hold any particular appeal to me - so I pretty much put in the bare minimum of work. I basically just painted the basecoat colours and then slapped on some quickshade. I generally feel metals look OK with just a shade and no highlights, and quickshade can work very well for organic forms like his body (although I guess it came out a little flat in this case). All the armour was edged with bronze so I didn't need to highlight the red. I did edge-highlight the leather straps, though.

The only really interesting thing for me was the mouth; I didn't have any suitable colour for it, so I tried mixing Fulgrim Pink (one of the citadel edge paints) with Elf Flesh. With a little experimentation I ended up with a colour that I thought was pretty much perfect. You couldn't see it very well once the shade had darkened the inside of his mouth, but if you look close you can see his tongue is a rather nice shade of pink. Speaking of, after varnishing I brushed a little citadel water effects onto his eyes, nose and mouth, to make him look a little "slobbery" - a dog's nose, especially, is supposed to be wet (unfortunately I did it after taking the pictures, though I'm not sure it would have been obvious in photos anyway). I should probably just use gloss varnish next time; it would be hardier, although I don't think it looks quite as wet.

I did get a couple of spots of crackling on the purity seal. I varnished it on a cold night, which could be the problem. The other possible culprit is that I held the model quite far from the can a couple of times, which I actually feel is slightly more likely to be the problem as I noticed what I was doing early on and then noticed the crackling; I don't think I got any more after I started holding it closer to the can. 

You will notice that I went ahead and put some snow on his base. I finally decided that the PP recessed bases just don't work in plain black and need something to fill them, so my Khador army is going to have simple snow bases - I've already gone back and added it to the warjacks. Unfortunately this has complicated my life considerably as not only is there more work and expense incurred, there's a whole lot more decision-making involved in every model now - not only does it have to look good on it's own, it has to work with it's base, and I also have to consider it's relationship with every other model in my collection. You may laugh, but this is the kind of thing that can really bother me and I can get very obsessive about, which is exactly why I made the decision to have clean black bases all those years ago - the model would stand on it's own and yet look consistent with any model I put it next to, either on the gaming table or display shelf. Damned Privateer Press, I can pretty much promise my productivity is going to drop even further from now on.