Assaulting Imperial Assault

This bad boy had been sat on my shelf, staring at me, for several years.  It’s too big to fit back in the box with all the other miniatures and it just kept glaring at me. With the contrast paints having helped to massively speed up some of the other models I got myself to a point where I had effectively painted everything up to and including the Jabba’s Realm expansion (I have been painting the boxed expansions in chronological order for the want of any better plan). With the exception of the Rancor of course. So I decided to change that.

Firstly I watched the fantastic tutorial video by Sorastro

I then decided that I didn’t really fancy doing all that wet blending so I instead used an airbrush. Using the same colours that are in the tutorial I airbrushed the entire model in Rhinox Hide then applied the next two layers as zenithol highlights, the first was sprayed from a roughly 90 degree angle and the next from 45 degrees.  This created much the same effect as the wet blending and I followed it up with a global wash of thinned Aggrax Earth.

I also realised that before I did the wash I should have painted the spines and mouth, so I did this and washed them separately with the same Aggrax Earth.  Following this I pretty much followed the tutorial, applying a dark green wash to the top shoulders and a red-brown wash to the face and hands.

The next step was to highlight the spines and add a few highlights to the skin, especially the face and the tips of some of the humps along it’s spine (they could be vertibrae but I don’t know). I also added some salive to the mouth using impact adhesive and also some mucous to the nose using Nurgles Rot.

At this stage, because I was going to be working on the base, I gave the model a matt varnish using Testors Dullcoat.  This was to protect the model from the handling required to work on the base.  Unfortunately, unlike the wise Sorastro, I had already glued the model to the base because I couldn’t get it to stay on the base due to the pegs having to be cut and sanded in order to get it to fit.  The model has been played with so fixing it onto the base became necessary and the eventual basing process wasn’t considered at the time. So I was a bit more limited in what I could achieve without risking getting texture paint all over the model.  However that being said, I don’t think that the results are too bad; the base still has a nice swampy look to it.

And with that the model was finished.  Considering that some of the Imperial Assault models are very hit and miss, which is to be expected given that it isn’t primarily a miniatures game, the Rancor is actually a very good model with some really nice detail.