Carnival Talos Complete. Prepare the house of Cards!

Greetings o wise and humble interwebs. Hot off the painting desk I bring you the 3rd Talos for La Danse Macabre. I have literally just finished him, and got so excited I whipped out the foldio and got some pictures taken to show you all straight away :)

I recently set myself a goal to finish the 3 Talos I still had remaining to paint in time for my local club tournament and fluffaggeddon, which are both in November. I have to admit, the start of painting this guy was excruciating! There are so many recessed details that were hard to reach with a paintbrush, and even when all the base colours were applied it looked a complete dogs dinner. It was only when the highlighting stages started that a ray of light appeared and the idea in my head started to come into reality (instead of looking like a pile of shit). It has taken a douple of weeks of solid paintimg to get to this stage, but I amextremely relieved and pleased to say it has been a success! The whole process ended up being very rewarding, in spite of the early discouragements and I absolutely love the end resuly.

I wanted quite a candy feel to the scheme for this talos (don't ask me why, it just felt it would fit somehow) so I picked the pink and turquoise blue for the main armour colours, of course using the standard army red to tie it together with everything else. I decided on the orange for the feather and loin cloth later on, after the intial colours had already been applied, as I could not think of anythig that would fit when imagining the scheme on him. Luckily I have a Malifaux crew that use a very dirty orange for part of their colour palette, and after ruminating for a while I decided on this (albeit slightly brighter) for the spot colour, as it is still quite subtle compared to the more in your face vibrant colours of the pink and blue.

After all these colours were chosen and painted I cracked on with doing the skin, which I was really looking forward to. The face was particularly fun to paint, and is very successful, coming across as quite violent in expression. I tried to paint flaky skin on areas of the arm where there were raised parts sculpted (A leftover from the skaven origin of this conversion) which in the end turned out pretty well too.

The final touch was the ball. I left this till last as I really had not made up my mind on how I was going to paint it. I originally thought of doing it as a beach ball, much like the monkeys in my beast pack, but after all the colours were on and I could see the mini nearly complete I felt this would not work, the bright colours of a beach ball would just clash too much with an already bright colour scheme. After a little reflection the idea came to me that the while Talos looked like something from a pack of cards, or alice in wonderland, and I should use that as the inspiration for the pattern on it. I picked black and white as complementary colours to the rest, and picked out a fleur de lis as the pattern I would paint onto the ball, kinda going on the card inspiration still. Once this was done the model was varnished twice and then the finishing touches applied, such as glossing all the vials, adding leaves and grass to the base etc etc.

One of my favourite parts to this model, the face

Flaky skin effect

Pretty pleased with the bubbles and movement in these tubes

Feedback on this badboy is of course appreciated :). I still have another two to go, but will have a little rest and paint something else before embarking on the next.

NafNaf