Demogorgon. A plant monster

 More from Steven:

'Hello,

The foot knight and spaceships were actually side projects from this carnivorous plant monster. It took such a long time to paint, and I went further with the basing than ever before. I suppose this has crossed the line from figure to mini-diorama. Sarah’s niece visited recently and called it a Demogorgon – apparently it resembles a monster in the TV show Stranger Things (which I am yet to see, though it is on my to-watch list).

Front view.

The basic idea is to depict it bursting out from the jungle undergrowth to attack some unsuspecting unfortunate. Hopefully, the bright red of the head stands out from the more muted browns and greens in the background.

Side view (right).

The plants are plastic aquarium plants. There are a couple of logs on the ground done with green stuff in the same fashion as the ones on the panzergrenadier bases. I stuck some spare green stuff on a couple of pins to create the mushrooms (and to give another flash of colour). I have done the ground differently to normal to get a more jungle undergrowth effect. Instead of static grass, I used a mix of tea leaves, tarragon, rosemary and thyme to represent decaying plant matter such as leaves and small twigs/branches. I covered the whole base in thinned-down PVA glue to fix the herbs in place, gave an all-over dark brown wash and then some highlights to avoid the whole base being a single indistinct brown colour.

 

Side view (left).

The side views show the back of the head best. I went for a sharply defined, high contrast look to give an iridescent appearance. This also forms a contrast with the hopefully more subtle, naturalistic bark effect on the rest of the model. It took ages to paint, with a lot of different browns, greens, greys blended together. For wargames purposes, a brown undercoat and a couple of layers of dry-brushing would do – that was essentially my undercoat before the real work began.

These also show some areas where I dabbed brown and sand colours onto the leaves to represent dead bits of leaf. The technique was basically the same as doing weathering on tanks, and the actual idea came from looking at plants in my own back garden.

Rear view. Something which show best here is the roots at the base of the two large plants. I drilled into the base and superglued the plants in, but they were still very insecure. I moulded green stuff around the base of each plant to give it more stability, then sculpted them into the shape of roots. I think it looks better too.