Painted Rancor Monster for Star Wars Legion

Ok, so firstly, this isn’t an official Star Wars Legion model, it’s 3D printed.   I got the idea for painting it from a Reddit post showing some community rules.

Base Coating

The base coat was done with lots and lots of stippling using a couple of large Artis Opus dry brushes.  Any round dry brush would do, or you could use make-up brushes,

I used a few different colours to mix the appearance of the skin so it was a bit patchy.  This is very easy to do with stippling – the most important thing to remember is to always use a ‘wet’ brush so that the coats of paint are a little transparent. This helps the different colours blend together.

Adding Shading and Shadows

Once I was happy with the base coating I applied a number of layers of washes, concentrating a little more in the shadows like under the arms.  The washes wet blend together to a certain degree, but you need to be careful not to leave dark stained patches as they are hard to undo (Ctrl+Z doesn’t work, apparently 😆). 

Adding Highlights

I couldn’t do much in the way of highlighting once I’d added the washes as I was afraid of buggering up what was already looking pretty good.  Getting the right highlight colours to match the underlying skin colours as they blended from area to area would have been very time consuming and difficult, so I thought, fuck-it, it’s good enough 😃 

Adding Details 

Inside the mouth was painted primarily with GW’s Bugman’s Glow. The claws and horns were painted with a base of Vallejo Model Colour Ivory  (I love this colour), and then shaded with many thin coats of various darkish washes, and then highlighted again with layers of various off-whites. 

Making the Base

My GF made a circular base for out of polymer clay, on to which I added a bunch of polymer clay fragments to look like broken up flagstones. I then painted these up in stone colours, wet blending in a bit of green and brown here and there to mix up the colours slightly. 

After some dry-brushing and the addition of a few tufts and leaves and wot-not it was done!