"To the Victor the Spoils" - Brokk Grungsson (Complete)

Brokk Grungsson strives on,

 hungry for ever-more success and recognition

 – his natural aeronautical abilities

 and aggressive nature mean these successes

 are rarely far from his grasp.

- Games Workshop

Good to have you again on The Art of Caesura!

I hope you're enjoying the winter festivities wherever you may be!

I built up today's model quite a bit in last week's post, but I really am proud of how this guy turned out. I'll keep my prattling to a minimum this week because I took about a million pictures (and if each one is worth a thousand words, then jeez, this is going to take a while!)

First some artsy shots...

This was a fantastic model to paint! I knew I wanted to make him special, and I thought the base was a fun way for him to really stand out! I've never been a fan of flying bases - I think they break the immersion - so having him battling a sea-monster seemed like a good alternative. If you want to check out the construction of the base, voilà! 

Even though you're only seeing him now, I actually painted him before the Hellmouth and so I knew I wanted to paint the Hellmouth glistening organic tones to contrast (but not detract) from the metallics of Brokk. 

I magnetized his head (and with his stout dwarf-neck this was really easy), because his head is so iconic (the top hat, the moustache-blasters) so that in the future, if they release rules for a generic balloon-boss, I could pop a different head on.

As you can see, I used the same colour-scheme as my Arkanauts (they were the test run!), but like the Knight Incantor, I used a lot more of the copper tones to make him look more important. 

I think the base did a nice job of creating a sense of negative space; there's the big organic sea-monster, the big metal dwarf, and in between a spindly tentacle holding him up. From these angles (the pictures above and below) you really get a sense of him flying.

But the Hellmouth has had his own post, lets take a closer look at Brokk. 

As you could see from last week's post, I painted him in sub-assemblies. I left his dirigible off and also the roll-bars that go across his chest. I had also magnetized his head so it was easier to paint around his neck padding. 

There are SO many great details here: all the tiny rivets, hatches, aether-tubing, he has a good luck charm (rune) on his right hip (that I washed with Druchii Violet to make it look mystical) and a compass on his left hip, there are two dials on the protective bar across his chest, and even little joy sticks in each hand with triggers (that I painted red) to control his weapons. 

But I think my favourite element to paint was the dirigible!

When I was painting this, there actually weren't a ton of Brokk's painted in the Barak Mhornar colour scheme, so I didn't have much to use as reference. It was hard to decide what colours to paint the many layers of his dirigible. The answer came to me when I was looking again at the Arkanauts for inspiration. The "deepest" layer for them is their environmental suits (cream coloured), next layer out is their deep blue armour, and finally the coppery details. So I followed the same order here, with the deepest layer being cream. 

While it has many details (the gauges and aether-bobbles that you can see above) there are also large swathes of flat surface. I felt a bit of weathering would go a long way to break up some of the larger areas. 

I tried to make even the weathering tell a bit of a story. Take the big linear ding on the cream area, I tried to make it look like the projectile had hit the cream coloured metal and grazed it down to the bare metal. It then carried on to ding the blue metal behind it, but against the thicker blue metal had only scuffed the paint (the lighter scrapes in the blue metal that continue the trajectory). 

For the exhaust pipe (in the pic above) I just used some Typhus Corrosion on the out-take. 

Below is a better look at his iconic top hat (complete with chimney!) and the little gauges on his handlebars. 

I noticed that most people have painted his aethermatic saw bare metal. I chose to paint the housing the same as the armour to maybe imply that it's like one of those colourful ceramic blades that are impossible not to cut yourself with!

I always find it more difficult to photograph models with lots of metallics (and those with lots of gloss...and large models). It's hard not to get a lot of reflection that kind of kills the highlighting. I tried a few pictures with my wife's phone, and used diffusers (white paper bags!) on my lights. 

Wow, what a trek! But we made it! I hope you enjoyed him. He's one of the single models that I have lavished the most attention on and I'm pretty happy with how he turned out. Let me know what you think!

See you next week on The Art of Caesurea!

Watching: Peaky Blinders

Next Week:

Festive merriment!