Gokufan's Celestial Genesis: Uzeon

Time for my second Celestial Genesis project, this time it’s Uzeon, Wing of the Cryptick Mist. He’s a sort of flying serpent/bird/dragon/shrimp thing, with lots of different components and textures. I knew I wanted to paint him as soon as I saw him.

He seems to be a member of Zhurong’s faction: the Guardians of Mt. BuZhou. Their faction is the most mechanical of the Celestial factions, pre-human post-humans if you will. Uzeon himself is also covered in crystallizations and armor plates. He should be big contrast to my previous Celestial, the humanoid and organic Twilight.

You can see renders of the scultpure on Alex Oz’s artstation here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/OyqOXK

Since my first project on Twilight was maybe a little bit waaaay too wordy, I’ve decided to divide this one up in a more structured way. I’ve built the figure in 5 different subassemblies:

• Lower body and tail
• Upper body
• Left arm and elbow orb
• Right arm and elbow orb
• Head, left jowl, and right jowl

I’m also, of course doing this intro post, and will likely do another on basing.

Since I didn’t take any pictures of assembly, I’ll write about it here briefly: This guy  was quite easy to clean and assemble. The quality of the cast is great, very few mold lines or flash. The connection points are chunky and well keyed, to the point that pinning is probably totally unnecessary (for assembly anyway, I pinned him to attach the subassemblies to corks for painting). Big Child continues to be the most impressive caster I’ve bought minis from. My one gripe is that he’s a “flying” mini and comes with no flight stand.

I’m very into the fluff of the range, what little of it there is, so I’ll go into a bit of detail here. Feel free to skip the last part of this update if you don’t care!

Uzeon, like all of the Celestials, is based on a figure from Chinese mythology. He appears to be based on the Azure Dragon Qinglong, guardian of the east. So his faction corresponds to the Four Symbols, with Zhurong being the vermilion bird of the south, and the north and west being currently unaccounted for.

His lore blurb explicitly calls out some enmity between Uzeon and G’gong, which seems fitting since G’gong is based on another draconic figure, Gonggong. Uzeon seeks to preserve the status quo to keep the Celestial safe from their enemy, the Sea of Consciousness, while G’gong seeks to burn down the status quo to gather the power to destroy the Sea of Consciousness.

There’s not a whole lot more to say at this point! The setting is still pretty nascent. It does apparently take place in the distant past of the universe the recently released Deep Madness. Deep Madness, which looks like a quality product but isn’t really my jam, is currently in the middle of a reprint campaign on kickstarter (as of 11/8/2018), so maybe check it out if this interests you.