Float like a terradon, sting like a well-crafted simile.

Zevaboa, Skink Priest & Warrior-Poet

This week I’m returning to my long-running Seraphon project with Zevaboa, skink priest & warrior-poet, equipped with a star-stone staff and mystical cloak of feathers.

Painting & Modelling

This is one of those projects that seemed like a good idea at the time! I spotted this model on the shelves in Warhammer World when I was up there for Golden Demon, and bought it on a whim since it’s ‘Direct Only’ and not normally available in stores. Plus I thought it might be a fun model to enter into the Shattered Brush painting contest. Of course it’s no secret that Finecast can be tricky to work with, but I feel like I got there in the end.

The LED staff follows the basic principles of my Simple LED Muzzle Flare Tutorial, with a few minor difference. The LED used is an ‘Ultra Nano’ 3V blue LED from Small Scale Lights, connected in series with its supplied 10Ω resistor. The circuit is powered by a single 3V CR2032 coin cell battery and switch hidden in the base. As you can see from the ‘work in progress’ pictures above, the LED emerges from the neck of the staff, while the wires run through a 1mm hole that I carefully drilled through the shaft of the staff. The wires then pass down through the torso, right leg, and then into the base.

I carefully drilled and cut the original Finecast ‘star-stone’ out of the head of the staff before inserting the LED. Once the tip of the staff had been undercoated and painted I began replacing the ‘star-stone’ with my own version made from acrylic gel. This gel can take a few hours to dry, so I had to build up the spherical shape in layers over a number of days. When the final application of gel had dried, I applied a shade of Drakenhof Nightshade and then a glaze of (the now discontinued) Guilliman Blue. If you’re interested in a more detailed explanation of working with the gel, then I have a further explanation of how you can achieve similar effects in my Simple LED Muzzle Flare Tutorial.

For the paint scheme, I used my standard Seraphon recipe found in my post about the Terradon Alpha, but with a few more layers of fine highlights, since this is a hero model and I’m entering it into a contest. The only part that gave me pause was the lining of the cloak. On the stock model the lining is red, but I didn’t want to copy that as it would be too similar to the skink’s skin. I did briefly consider a ‘flayed human flesh’ effect, but in the end settled on ‘terradon skin’. This was partially so I didn’t have to extend the purposely limited palette for my Seraphon project, and also because it fit thematically with the flight-granting abilites of the cloak of feathers.

That’s it for this week, I hope you enjoyed revisting my slow-burn Seraphon project. If you’re a fan of the Seraphon then you may like to check out the other models in this army project. As always, thanks very much for reading, and please don’t forget you can also follow my work on social media at Twitter, Mastodon and Instagram.