A little while back John was in the studio with his latest painting project, the new Forgeworld Cursed Ettin and I was suitably impressed and intrigued. This was something rather different from John: a monstrous figure. Okay, possibly a poor choice of words as John is rather gifted at making monstrous out of even human sized figures but this was on a much larger scale and on a figure with a rather different sculpting style...
The Cursed Ettin model is a figure sculpted by the enormously talented Edgar Skomorowski who slaves away in the Warhammer Forge section of Forgeworld. He tends towards a more sculptural style than the very graphic rendering employed by the sculptors in the Design Studio. The Ettin has an incredible level of texture in it's skin, rather like an Elephant's, which John saw as rather a challenge. His normal painting style is to paint texture on rather as he would in 2d and he uses paint rather thicker than most mini painters. Both of these factors needed weighing up in painting the Ettin.
The skin started with a basecoat of mostly white with a little orange and snakebite leather added. John followed this with a wash of nut brown ink to pick up the incredible textural detail. The skin was then re-highlighted adding yet more white to build the contrast and then more shading painted into the recesses with the ink mixed with a little black. Then repeated extra shadows with a mix of orange and black ink moving towards orange dominated washes. John leaves the top off his orange ink so it thickens, becoming redder with time. He notes that he doesn't have any red colours of any description. An interesting aside given the rich reds in his work but it reinforces that sometimes getting the effect you want doesn't come via the obvious route and that John has decades of experience to draw upon to achieve the effects he desires in either 2d or 3d.
The bionic eye is a ball bearing with no colour added and he added black washes to the eye sockets. John tends to leave the eyes allowing the sculpture to define them and isn't a fan of the goggle eyed look.
A fairly limited palette of materials and a lot of Snakebite Leather used. For me this one is all about the rendering of the flesh and it's vibrancy speaks for itself. Like all of John's work, it's a vivid slap around the face which demands an opinion. And here's the whole beast...
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