Hordebloods: Pandaren Skaldi Bonehammer

Next up, added to the ranks of the Hordebloods, is Skaldi Bonehammer the Pandaren Champion. He was lots of fun to build and paint, so I'm going to detail some of the key areas I worked on.

My apologies for the lack of updates recently. This is another period of life where my job's been wiping me out by the end of the day. Anyone want to pay me copious amounts of money to paint and / or write tutorials?
I've also written about balancing bases to prevent tipping using this model as an example. To attach him to this base, I coiled wire beneath it and it's sticking up through the wood into his feet.

I always like to show off the greenstuffing performed on a model and in this case, you can see there was plenty.

His head took some doing, then I covered most of his skin with fur and gave him a bit of a belly.

To make his hat, I coiled a strip of paper into a rounded pyramid and covered it in a thin layer of green stuff, which I streaked and made uneven to give it a straw appearance.

You can see there were a number of attempts at greenstuffing heads. The Tauren heads came together pretty quickly. Panda took a few tries, ranging from too small to too walrus, but finally I got it juuuuust right. Except for the eyes. I made a few attempts at sculpting eyes into the sockets of the Tauren heads and they just looked like Jane's cyber-punk glassed over eyes from Gibson's novels. I'll go into detailed further down on how I handled the eyes.

I wasn't sure how all the black and white of the panda would look... I was worries it might be too stark. So, I started by roughing out most of the sections that weren't black.

I followed that up with the barrel and intensifying the reds and armour greys.


You can also see in this photo the stub of green stuff sticking out of his head - that's what his hat sits on.

At first I was planning on painting his hammer the fiery oranges of the Ragnaros hammer. I'm glad I waited.

Looking at the composition of the rest of his colours, it would have been wayyy too strong. (TheWife helped me realize this.) Instead, I decided to paint it like Jade stone.

Google's a great source when looking up things like how a particular stone looks. Jade seems to come in various shades, so I went with a two-tone look on the hammer head - lighter for the large areas and darker for the strapping.

You'll also notice that after this stage, I've changed the boring brown skull belt buckle into jade as well.

I also decided to add some texture to the back of his vest. Using the Stormstout sigil, I painted it in the center, though it's a little rough. I also painted some curling decoration around the arm holes.

You can also see here that I chose to not paint the stones hanging from his vest. I decided I didn't want them taking away from his waist, and they're really not apparent anyways.

Getting out of my comfort zone some more, I painted a dragon coiled around his hat. Certainly adds a nice touch. It was important to not paint too thick because the streaks between the straw should still be visible.

I wanted the tap on his keg to look a little more modern. After painting on the Stormstout paw-print, I covered it in a bulb of gel. This added a glassed over look that you might see on a tap in a bar today.

So here's the work on his eye. The right socket wasn't important because it would be completely covered, but his left one needed work. As I mentioned above, I wasn't having luck sculpting an actual eye ball. Instead, what you can see in the top 3 photos here is how I've painted a 2-dimensional eye inside his left socket. I basically used metallic gold paint with a black dot for the eye. 

In the lower-left photo, I've added a gloss over the eye... it's close to what I want, but not quite. If you didn't have access to gel, I'd say this is a great way to paint an eye. But I have gel, which you can see dabbed into the socket in the bottom-middle photo... that's the shape of an eye! The final photo in the bottom-right shows the eye once the gel has dried and cleared up.

To seat the hat on his head, I ended up removing the little stub and making a fresh blob of greenstuff when I was ready to permanently attach it. This let me pose the hat exactly how I wanted it. Remember: Green stuff isn't glue! I still used a dab of superglue to affix his head to the greenstuff and another for the greenstuff to his hat.

And the final photo! (which is also up on DeviantArt)

I really liked how a lot of this guy turned out, so here are some high-res versions of his photos. Click to see them bigger.

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Take a look at my Step by Step page for the entire Hordebloods project. Here you will find each model broken down into links showing each step: Concept, Works in Progress, (for both modelling and painting) and Final Shots