Blackstone Fortress: Vehicle? - Chaos Ogryn

This whole project has been mapped based on the idea of painting an army. The Chaos Ogryn (along with the Ambull) are much more Monster/Vehicle than anything else in the kit... the more observant of you will notice that Chaos Ogryn is also not on the initial roster of models. Traitor Command came out part way through and I'd jumped on it, cracked it and assembled before I even knew what was happening. Suddenly I had two new models - one the perfect size to do some great skintone work - or at least that was the intent. I started working on it in a hurry and somewhere along the lines it went a little sideways:

The initial airbrushing was a lot of fun, introducing a lot different hues into the skin tone, the unhealthiness an implications of the taint of chaos. As with the other Chaos denizens of the Fortress I wanted to link them together and this chap is an Ogryn - the Astra Militarum have Ogryns - boom he's clearly a buddy of the Guardsmen. By the time I'd started texturing up the trousers, I suddenly realized that Everchosen was around the corner so I figured it was something to shoot for. Of course it is not what I was really meant to be working on but hey, that didn't stop me!

I hesitated about going into true metallics for this model. I'd avoided it for the units but given the deadline for Everchosen was less than two weeks away - I wasn't going to be able to get this much metal to a competition level within the time. I also was really struggling with what this 'power maul' should look like. My usual go-to - GW website - left me underwhelmed. The maul is fairly non-descript aside from a glowing light and stripy cord. I was painting this basically on the weekend of release so there weren't really other examples to reach for either.

 I also felt like the maul looks like it's made from an iron girder but the spikes and nubbins don't look like they've been welded on or anything which doesn't match up. If I'd had the time I may have completely resculpted this to make it look more cobbled together.

So how to get around this? Well I opted to jump on YouTube and livestream a largely unplanned OSL experiment! Having OSL with crackling lightning wrapping around it completely detracts from the actual structure of the maul.

Of course a perspex base wasn't going to play too well in a contest and I had always been taken with the idea of the lined flooring that the studio pieces of Blackstone Fortress had. I decided if I was doing this for just a single base - I should try and kick it up a notch. The result was this fairly colourful shaded basing that gave me a chance to work a little on my masking skills - something I usually work hard to avoid but you just can't get around it here:

The finished product looked ok to me. The biggest detractor, ironically, was the skin. In my efforts to introduce a sense of chaos taint - the skin shifted in a weird manner that left it looking sort of jaundiced with overly exaggerated shadows and lackluster highlights.

- Raggy, signing out