I like big bones and I cannot lie....Kaladrax

The base of Kaladrax is mostly stone, so that is the one priming exception – this I left all black, with the intention of drybrushing it up.  I’ve done two main stone schemes in the past with a browner gray feel to them, based on Ghool’s recipes, but for Kaladrax, I wanted to experiment with a bluer stone to contrast better with the main model.  I also wanted to find a brownish scheme to use for the non ruined stone pieces as a base.

I ended up trying three different schemes.  The bluer rock recipe looked good right off the bat:  drybrush Citadel Dark Reaper, then Celestra Gray, and finally Ulthuan Gray.

I then tried a brown and green recipe, drybrushing P3 Thornwood Green to Traitor Green to Jack Bone.  This just didn’t hit what I was looking for in the tone; this is a variation on a swamp base from one of Ghool’s videos, but the effect was not as nice when I drybrushed it up from black.

For my third experiment, I tried just going full brown, with Umbral Umber, then Beast Hide,  and finally Hammerfall Khaki.  This combo looked good the whole way up, and seemed like a nice pairing with the bluer stone.

Using a medium sized makeup brush, I drybrushed the blue stone first to define the main focal area, then drybrushed the rest in the brown scheme…except for a few of the detail bits.  I started all of those with a drybrush of Umbral Umber for simplicity, then built up the color with some variations to separate the wood of the chest and the skulls from the rest.

For the skulls, I drybrushed up beast hide, then highlighted manually with  gun corps brown, and a mix of gun corps brown with  hammerfall khaki for final highlight.

For the wood, there’s actually almost no texture present.  So I painted in planks with battlefield brown, then added more grain with gun corps brown.

The gold, I just painted GW Retributor Armor over the umbral umber, and then gave a wash with Army Painter strong tone to finish it off.  I’ve found strong tone keeps the shiny finish.

Because the drybrushing was done with the larger makeup brush except the final color (I go back to a small drybrush there and only hit edges to restrict the color easier), this whole base was done in a couple of hours.  It really goes fast, once you get in the drybrush groove.