The Original King

With Godzilla Terra Khan complete, the natural choice for my next monster was of course King Kondo. Once again I was faced with painting a monster who's cinematic inspiration has a very plain and mostly black colour scheme that would look quite boring if translated directly to miniature form. So, using photos of gorillas for reference, I tried to find a balance between realism, visual interest, and the cinematic source.

He went together quite easily, being mainly a two-piece model (OK, the chains were seperate so technically it was four pieces). One of his arms was a separate piece, and while it would probably have been fine to just glue it in place and be done, I felt it would look more natural with some additional fur sculpted over the seam. I also found his feet were quite flat/thin, and I didn't like the and they stood him at, so I bulked up his soles and changed the angle a bit. That required some additional fur as well.

King Kondo
I primed using Vallejo 73.660 Gloss Black Surface Primer. I then established a zenithal highlight on the skin by airbrushing Vallejo 70.862 Model Color Black Grey followed by Vallejo 70.992 Model Color Neutral Grey. I wanted the veins to not just be the exact same skin colour (but lighter), so I mixed some Black Grey with Formula P3 Menoth White Highlight to get a slightly warmer medium grey. Similarly for the scars I wanted to use the skin colour combined with a flesh colour, a sort of greyish pink... which I have hard time visualising. I tried to mix something like that up using Black Grey with Formula P3 Ryn Flesh, but it wasn't pink/red enough so I added some Citadel Colour Base Mephiston Red. This gave me a dark desaturated purple colour, which I decided was good enough.

I basecoated the fur in Green Stuff World 1831 Acrylic Color Choco Brown. I drybrushed all over with Citadel Layer Skrag Brown, then I drybrushed surfaces facing generally upwards with Formula P3 Rucksack Tan, and finally I lightly drybrushed the surfaces pointing directly upwards in Formula P3 Jack Bone.

I filled in the eye sockets with Vallejo 70.950 Model Color Black, then filled them in with Formula P3 Menoth White Highlight. I went back in and painted a large dot of the Black. I saw in photos that gorillas often had amber eyes, I figured a bright saturated red would be close enough and would stand out more so I carefully placed a smaller dot of Citadel Colour Base Mephiston Red on top. I did have to very carefully touch up the black outline afterwards.

I filled the mouth with Formula P3 Ryn Flesh, then picked out the teeth in Formula P3 Menoth White Highlight. For the nails I took the mix of Black Grey and Ryn Flesh I had been trying to use for the scars and added Menoth White Base. I don't think the Ryn Flesh actually contributed noticeably to the final colour. I added more Menoth White Base to the mix for the tips of the nails.

I basecoated the manacles and chains in Citadel Base Leadbeltcher. I drybrushed Citadel Colour Chainmail along the upper halves, then Vallejo 72.052 Game Colour Silver along the upper parts. This didn't create as much contrast as I had hoped, so I went over the topmost bits with a drybrush of Scalecolor SC-66 Metal N' Alchemy Speed Metal. I then glazed a mix of Leadbeltcher and Vallejo 71.073 Model Air Metallic Black with a lot of Formula P3 Mixing Medium and water along the lower parts, followed with a glaze of just the Metallic Black with Mixing Medium and water on the very lowerst parts.

With this all done, I slopped on a generous amount of The Army Painter Quickshade Dip Dark Tone, spreading it and preventing pooling with a brush. After this dried I found it had pooled too much on the tongue, so I went over the tongue again with Ryn Flesh, then carefully shaded it with a little bit of Citadel Shade Seraphim Sepia. I also touched up the Menoth White Highlight on the teeth.

I had been counting on the dark brown dip to tie the skin and fur together, but I wasn't satisfied with the result; the fur was too bright and saturated and the skin was not warm enough. So I lightly glazed over the skin with Seraphim Sepia, Mixing Medium and water (maybe around a 2:2:1 ration) to try to just give it a bit of warmth. Then I washed the fur with a mix of Citadel Shade Nuln Oil, Mixing Medium and water (again around a 2:2:1 ratio); alowing the wash to pool rairly heavily in the recesses of the fur. The glaze over the skin wasn't terribly even but it did add some subtle warmth, and the wash over the fur knocked down the colour saturation a bit and brought the shadows to a darker and more neutral black. All together the difference was subtle and yet to my eyes tied the fur and skin together much better, vastly improving the overall effect of the paintjob.

After the Quickshade the skin is still quite cool and the fur is warm and bright.

After a couple of washes the skin has a touch more warm tones, and the fur is darker and cooler (at least in the shadows), so they look more natural together. Unfortunately the fur doesn't look quite as good anymore.

Lately I've come to the conclusion that the kind of edge-highlighting I like doing on things like armour plates at 35mm doesn't feel as good to me on these smaller scale models; I feel stuff like zenithal highlights feels better here, though I'm not sure how far to push the contrasts.

While I was using similar "quick painting" techniques to my Terrasaurs, with mainly airbrushing, washes and drybrushes rather than manually painted highlights and shading, I faced slightly different challanges compared to Terra Khan. Colour selection was the big thing here, as I needed to try to be more realistic. As a result I ended up mixing a lot more paint in an attempt to get subtle colour variations.

I think the end result could be better if I was willing to do more manual work, but to be honest the sculpt didn't really grab me the way some other Monpoc monsters have. Still, I'm happy with the final piece; I think it looks good and is actually much closer to King Kong than my Khan is to Godzilla. So that's something.

Guilt-Free CNC!

I've had a lot of ideas for things to do with my CNC router. But I've been reluctant to do much with it as it's quite noisy, and I don't want to disturb the neighbors. What I needed was an enclosure that would drop the decibels down to a civilised level. For a while I was trying to come up with a design that would not only hold the router, but also a vacuum connected to the dust boot so the machine could run clean and it would all be nice and quiet.

But that was a very ambitious idea; too ambitious, and to be honest just not really neccessary: a simpler enclosure would contain the dust and I could just vacuum it up after each job was done. So I finally settled on a more realistic plan: a simple wooden frame with acrylic walls. A yoga mat along the base would provide a seal and reduce noise being transmitted through the table, and I could pass the cables through a cut in the mat and under the enclosure so I wouldn't need any special sockets or anything. It took me far longer than it should have (it's been a weird year...), but that's exactly what I (eventually) made:

Cutting the acrylic was a job. Originally I tried various cutting bits on my dremel tool, but none of them worked all that well and I actually broke a dremel tool in the process. In the end I used a hobby scriber that I modified to be able to cut deeply enough to get through the thick acrylic; I found this cut much more cleanly than any of the power tools, and it was easier to get a straight cut with it.

With the acrylic cut to shape I could start work on the frame. But for some reason the wood I bought for the frame was warped. I don't think I bought it that way; it seems to have happened in the time I left it sitting around? Which to be fair was quite a long time, but it still surprised me. Well, I did the best I could and figured it wasn't the end of the world if the sides of the box were not 100% straight.

Once everything was cut and drilled and ready to be assembled, I... ran out of screws. I had bought a pack of 125 wood screws, which seemed a strange number but proved to be a couple of dozen screws short. And wouldn't you know it, when I went back for another pack they only had a slightly different type of screw (in a different colour), and only in packs of 250. While it strangely bothers me to have two different colours of screw, I didn't want to put the project on hold for something so silly.

When putting it all together I found the easiest way of dealing with the enclosure was to leave the side of the table empty, and simply tip the enclosure onto it's side to gain access to the router. However this meant the control box and laptop couldn't sit there, so I had to put the control box underneath the table. Which was a little fiddly as the cables were a little short and didn't give me much leeway. But I managed to make it work.

Finally it was time to cut something. Crossing my fingers, I started it up. And wouldn't you know it, it worked! The noise was a lot lower than before, low enough that I doubt my neighbors can hear it now.

And the fruits of my labour:

Only one small mistake (the grooves in the base aren't long enough), and it's my fault, not the machine's! The new straight-flute bit seems to be cutting well enough, and I've made a lot of improvements to my GCode-writing scripts, so... yeah, I'm feeling pretty happy today.