Salamanders Space Marine

A one-off project and a study in rendering materials. This is a little one-off experiment in a non-conventional depiction of a Space Marine. Pics and process below the jump.

Well, it's been a while. I've had little time or space for hobby due to a very drawn-out house move. So I'm breaking in my new hobby space by finally painting a kitbash that's been in my to-do pile for a while.

This Salamander was really inspired by the way certain materials and objects are rendered in Fromsoft games (the studio behind Dark Souls, Elden Ring and so on). I'm thinking of the in-game objects, weapons and armors that are made up of weathered and burnt leather and metal - the stuff where you can see really gnarly textures, bristles, scales and so on. The idea came together in a Salamanders space marine, whose armour looks like it's coated in charred, almost melted, dragon-skin.

I kitbashed the model together from a spare Space Marine Lieutenant I had sitting around (one of the ones that came in a starter set). All of the texture is green stuff. Since this was an experiment in texture, I played around with the texturing as much as I could. I stretched out thin sheets of green stuff and worked the surface with both crimped metal tubes (a technique described by the great monster sculptor Trish Carden), and a tea strainer (which is basically a fine metal sieve). I teased out the green stuff over the helmet into a distorted snout. The pauldrons are non-standard ones from Space Wolves Wulfen, with the wolf-fang ornaments left in place as snaggling dragon spines. In stretching out the green stuff, I left the rough tears and edges in place, to keep it looking like melted leather.

And then, kitbashing over, it sat on my desk for a long while.

As a one-off, it was a good candidate for a project to break in my new hobby space, and the painting was good fun. I like material studies maybe better than detail painting, and this model was one big material study.

I'd already decided to use different types of black paint, and distinguish the details through texture, weathering, gloss and matt. The metal was to be tarnished silver. I experimented with putting in some blue and brown hues, but quickly covered these up with more black (which looked better). The process was mostly layering, layering and more layering, to get the most gnarly mix of textures I oculd.

I also used one of my favourite techniques - applying ground pencil graphite as a pigment. By mixing it with matt medium, you can get horrid clumps of dark metallic texture that work great in specific cases like this one.

The glow of the plasma pistol and the eyes was done with the same warm orange - I didn't want to overdo this and turn it into a "lava guy", since that was not really the idea I was going for. Really, the silver on the model is the main spot colour in this scheme.

The actual last detail to be added was the lizard on the shield. I'd shaved this off of the Blood Bowl Amazons token when I used two of those for an ornamental cannon in Mori. The lizards are so cool, I'd kept them aside and suddenly remembered them by the time this model was almost finished painting. It works perfectly as altnernative Salamanders iconography.

More new stuff soon!
Hek