"Devourer from Below" - Dread Maw

With their circular mouths,

studded with rows of sickle-shaped teeth,

Dread Maws can seize and devour a fully armoured man

in seconds.

- Forge World

Welcome back to the post-birthday glow on The Art of Caesura!

If you didn't get a chance to join us for The Art of Caesura's 3rd birthday last week, I urge you to now. I always have great fun looking back over the past year: the goals, the models...and then ahead to the future!

At the end of last week's post, the special birthday "miniature" was revealed to be the dreaded DREAD MAW!!

I have been quietly resisting building and painting Blackstone Fortress for the past couple weeks while I ferrited away on this guy. And what a great model it is!

There is just so much detail on this big miniature. You can see the veins pulsating out of his body and the chitinous plates and skin and scale texture is excellent! And that's without even mentioning the carefully sculpted (and carefully painted!) millions of teeth in his eponymous maw.

Before I go into detail with the painting of this monster, a brief word about construction. Unfortunately, when I got this guy, some of the teeth on this guy were damaged (or missing). I only had 1 (and a half) of the 4 smaller fangs behind his large lower fangs. Sculpting the other three out of milliput only took a few minutes total, but they were a bit fiddly to attach. 

Also, his two upper fangs are bent in. To be honest, I actually thought it was supposed to be that way (otherwise I'm sure I could easily have heated them with a hairdryer and bent them back). But it's only now that I look at the Forge World website that I see that they're supposed to be straight! I thought that, like some snakes, they were supposed to be curled in:

Anyway, building and painting models is what the hobby is about for me, so if anything, those minor imperfections in the model only added to my hobby ;).

The only other point about construction is that I decided to put his frill-horns (tusks?) on "upside down" rather than flared out because I like the more stream-lined look it gives him. And, like the Hellmouth before him, I changed him from a sub-terranian, to a sub-marine terror - and for that you can check out my wave base tutorial.

My colour scheme was relatively straight forward. I copied the Hellmouth almost identically, starting his chitinous scales with Ushabti Bone then Agrax Earthshade then dry-brushed layers of Ushabti with more and more white mixed in until there was a light pure white drybrush. On his face, where the scales are smaller, I layered the same paints rather than dry-brushing them. 

His skin started as a 50:50 mix of Doombull Brown and Evil Sunz Scarlett. I then, gave all the skin a wash of Druchii Violet before dry-brushing the skin up using increasing amounts of Evil Sunz. Once I was using pure Evil Sunz, I then started to add Yriel Yellow.

For the skin of his body, the last dry-brushed layer was 50:50 Evil Sunz Scarlett and Yriel Yellow. But on the face (especially around the mouth) I continued with several more layers adding more and more Yriel Yellow. Finally I used a 00 brush to put a small highlight of pure yellow around his lips and nose. 

Like the chitinous scales, the frill-tusks started as Ushabti, washed with Agrax, but then washed with multiple layers of Nuln Oil, working heavier layers in towards where the horns join his body. 

Then for the mouth! Again like the Hellmouth, I was looking for a nice bright fleshy look. I started with Bugman's Glow then Druchii Violet, then Bugman's Glow adding more and more Cadian Fleshtone and then adding Scale 75's Pale Flesh.

The millions of horrible rasping teeth (no, I didn't actually count them!) were then picked out with Abbadon Black and highlighted once with Incubi Darkness. 

The last things I painted were his eyes, and they were easily accomplished with a white undercoat washed with diluted (with Lahmian Medium) Drakenhoff Nightshade - to give them more depth - and completed with the Red gemstone paint (the name of which I can never remember...Spiritstone Red - that's it!) - just like I did the (much smaller) eyes of The Witch.

I finished by coating him in gloss varnish to represent him just having burst out of the water, and I let the varnish pool in his mouth (as you can see in the image above) to look like saliva.

So there we are, this year's birthday miniature - the Dread Maw! I hope you enjoyed him, see you next week on The Art of Caesura!

Reading: Under the Banner of Heaven - Jon Krakauer

Watching: Silence of the Lambs

Gaming: Vermintide II

Next Week:

Hide your haggis...