Crew a Week Project - Marcus Crew(s)

I quite often do the older and newer crews together if I'm yet to do either when I do these 'challenges' as it nicely kills two birds with one stone and it means that the colour schemes for both crews match should I use a mix of older and newer models.

The 'old and new' issue come up more often than you'd think as many people have soft spots for the original metal models or their alternates and use them in their crews either by preference (you see quite a lot of metal Rasputina's in plastic Rasputina crews) or by necessity (needing a fourth model when Wyrd Miniatures only do three and you don't like to use duplicates).

For the first of my newly resurrected 'Crew a Week' challenges I'm going to do both of the Marcus crew 'Starter Sets' (metal and plastic) with the addition of the metal Jackalope and the alternate version of Marcus.

As many of you are aware I don't normally use cork as a basing material for a number of reasons. Firstly I don't see the point of making something look like rock when I can get something that looks exactly like a rock...by using actual rock, Secondly it's somewhat overused locally and I'm fed up of seeing it however in this case it was the only way I could get the layered look that I wanted. That done I gave them their first layer of undercoat.

This highlighted another problem with using cork that I hadn't factored for which was that once under-coated it looked very smooth and unnatural so I added some sand. That probably seems obvious to those who use cork with any regularity and seems stupidly obvious now I think about it...next time I'll do that first, lol. I added some sand to the smooth bits and then give them a fairly light extra under-coat of white to give me a head-start with the highlighting. I'm not going to go too dark with the overall colour scheme so the lighter layer was also necessary to keep the colours a bit brighter.

I then gave the 'Beasts' a light Grey undercoat as my base colour to tie the models together and used the same colour on the rest of the two crews models in order to make them all look like they belong together

The beasts then got a Dark Tone wash followed by a drybrush of the original grey before I went back to the people and gave them some skin and hair colour.

I then did the hair, some small touches (like the feathers on several of the models) before filling in the rest of the colours and washing pretty much every area in a range of washes from 'Soft' through to 'Dark' depending on the depth of colour required. The beasts then got a bone colour on their teeth, spines and claws as well as a mix of red and white to give a fleshy colour for the insides of their mouths so they looked a bit less monochromatic.

This just left them needing basing...

...which I promptly did.

I'll do the usual individual pictures that usually accompany my 'challenge' posts at a laterdate...this is just to prove that I've done it in the given time frame, lol.

Thoughts and comments are (as usual) most welcome.