Giant Green Gojira

Here he is at last, the King of the Kaiju; Godzilla Terra Khan!

Terra Khan was definitely my favourite Monsterpocalypse model so far. I think the sculpt is great; I like that he seems (to me eyes at least) to draw some inspiration from the 1998 American Godzilla as well as the more obvious Modern/Classic original. Personally I always liked the '98 design as it felt much more agile thatn the original. It looked like it could run, crouch, climb, burrow, and even leap, while the original - limited of course by originally being a rubber suit - didn't look like it could do much more than waddle around. Terra Khan feels to me like a happy medium.

I had original thought to paint him to look like Godzilla, but when I actually came around to start planning my paints I realised that Godzilla's colour scheme is kind of really boring. At least for a miniature; he's just dark grey. That's really it. Top to bottom, head to toe, Godzilla is just a basic dark grey. I did not think I could make that look good, especially since Terra Khan's sculpt has a lot of detail that kind of wants to stand out a bit. Also it would not fit very well with the Terrasaurs I had already painted.

I tried to compromise by painting him in just one dark green (applying three brightness levels as a zenithal highlight), but it looked really boring. So I gave up and incorporated some more greens; a yellowish tone for his belly (in keeping with the rest of my Terrasaurs), and a brighter, more blue-ish shade along the back as a reference to the way Godzilla's back spikes are sometimes shown to glow when he uses his "nuclear breath". Plus of course similar details colours as his smaller brethren. And yeah, I think it looks good, while still not feeling too big a departure from Godzilla himself. So yeah, I'm pretty happy with how he turned out!

He was a bit of work to put together; because of the complex skin texture I had to be careful when removing mold lines as I would not be able to sculpt back detail easily. I did have to scratch up a couple of areas with the back of my hobby knife to try to maintain some degree of continuity with the surrounding texture. With all four limbs and the lower jaw as separate parts, there were some gaps. They might have looked OK without filling, but I felt it was safer to fill them. Which I did with Vallejo 70.400 Plastic Putty. This was a lot more work than I had hoped; it might have just been easier to use greenstuff. But it worked out in the end.

And with him done I now have a minimum force of Terrasaurs to go alongside my minimum force of GUARD, meaning I now have enough models to actually play a minimum sized game! Which hopefully I will do! Someday, when the world goes back to normal (if such a concept even makes sense).

Terra Khan:
I basecoated the whole model with Vallejo 72.728 Game Air Dark Green, then applied a zenithal highlight over the whole model with Green Stuff World 1797 Acrylic Color Forest Green airbrushed down from almost directly above.

I then airbrushed Vallejo 72.729 Game Air Sick Green onto the belly, makind sure to fully cover the plate scales but deliberately going past them to create a soft transition to the main colour. I then airbrushed Citadel Layer Moot Green onto the scales from about an angle down onto the front on the chest and belly, to try to get a bit of zenithal highlighting going on. Finally I airbrushed Vallejo 72.026 Game Colour Jade Green onto the back scales, with Scalecolor SFG-22 Fantasy & Games Surfer Orc Flesh airbrushed onto the center/tips.

The model is quite "three dimensional" (especially the tail), so it was a little hard to get the paint where I wanted it without spraying past onto other areas, and I did have to do some cleanup, but I did manage to do it all with the airbrush. And with that the airbrushing was done and it was time to move on to the brush work.

I painted the eye sockets with the same Dark Green as I had been feeling that the solid black I was using on the previous Terrasaurs was too much. I filled this in with Vallejo 72.005 Game Color Moon Yellow, followed by a dot of Vallejo 70.950 Model Color Black.

While the zenithal highlighting had created some contrast and the washes would create more, I thought it was still worth doing some drybrushing. I drybrushed the dark green areas in a top-down motion using Citadel Layer Warpstone Glow; this subtly brightened the tops of scales and helped the skin texture to pop a bit more. I drybrushed the entire belly with the Moot Green, then mixed Moot Green with Citadel Edge Gauss Blaster Green to drybrush over just the "zenithal highlighted" areas. Again this really brought out the texture.

When painting the Bellowers I felt that my claws and teeth were too bright, so I tried to paint them much darker this time. I used a basecoat of Formula P3 Menoth White Base, then I thinned Formula P3 Menoth White Highlight with a lot of Formula P3 Mixing Medium to create a glaze that I used to build up to a brighter highlight at the tips. I then applied a wash of Citadel Shade Seraphim Sepia to further darken them. Similarly the inside of the mouth (painted before the teeth) was the usual Formula P3 Ryn Flesh, but shaded with Citadel Washes Ogryn Flesh to make it darker than usual.

With the details done I applied a very generous amount of Army Painter Quickshade Dark Tone wash/varnish, and then I spent a while carefully removing it as it settled, to make sure it didn't pool in places I didn't want it. The shade did a greate job of bringing out the skin texture, and coupled with the previous washes on the mouth and claws brought those brighter areas down nicely.

When that had fully dried, I went over the back scales with a heavy drybrush of the Jade Green, significantly reducing the effect of the wash. I considered just painting it straight on to completely cover the wash, but decided I did want a little bit of the shading to come through for contrast. I then drybrushed the Surfer Orc Flesh back into the centers/tips, and finally brought the colour up to a very bright highlight on the very tips using a drybrush of the Gauss Blaster Green.


The Terrasaurs have been a learning experience in airbrushing. When working on Terra Khan there were a couple of things that I tried that didn't work. While painting the original green coat I actually tried to highlight up to Warpstone Glow, but decided it was too bright and darkened the model down again with the darker two greens before moving on. I also initially experimented with tinting the belly with Badger Minitaire D6-170 Ghost Tint Yellow as a more subtle way to give the belly that yellow tone rather than using different greens, but this looked terrible so I went over it with the Sick Green.

Overall the novelty of using an airbrush to do most of the work on a model this big was a lot of fun, and seeing him come together so quickly was very satisfying. Hopefully I'll slowly get bolder and more skilled with the airbrush as I try to use it more.