A strong pivot into gargants

 The run-up to AoS 3.0 was meant to be an opportunity for me to finish off my OBR army, and take things easy while I waited to get hold of some of the new Stormcast models. Instead, I started a whole new army project. There are two reasons for this:

 - I played Sons of Behemat in a Tabletop Simulator game and had fun smashing things

 - I got AoS 3.0 FOMO.

AoS 3.0 has lots of new rules for monsters, and my existing AoS armies aren't big on monsters. I also got a bit demotivated for my OBR because the list I was building towards was based around a big unit of 15 Kavalos Deathriders, which seems unlikely to be viable competitively in the new edition. So I've made the decision to pause that project temporarily until all the new edition points and FAQs are out, and I can rethink what models I need to finish that army off. Instead, I've started a Sons of Behemat force. They'll let me play with all the new AoS 3 toys, should be pretty quick to paint, and will be a fun army to push around on the tabletop.

My plan is to paint six mancrusher gargants, and probably one of each mega gargant. That gives me a few different list options, and hopefully won't take too long to get painted up. So far I've painted three mancrushers.

Theme and paint scheme

I want to use this project to practice undershading, by which I mean sketching out the dark and light areas in black, grey and white first, and then adding colour in thin layers over the top. I'll use Contrast paints for the colours, and then do some minor highlights on top of that. I've not used this style of painting much at all before, so it'll be a bit of an experiment, but I think it'll be fun. I'm very much aiming for a decent tabletop standard, so it doesn't matter if they aren't perfect.

Lore

I haven't gone deep on lore for this project, but my general concept is that my gargants live in the realm of Ghur, and hunt monsters. They believe that their strength comes from their bellies, and to make themselves stronger they hunt and eat monsters, and also paint pictures of monsters on their bellies. I decided to use a cave art style of art for this, because I thought it would work well on the big areas of bare skin on the gargant models, and that it would be fun trying to sketch recognisable AoS models in a cave art style.

I haven't named my gargants yet, I'm waiting for inspiration to strike.

Painting progress so far

I'm enjoying painting these so far. I'm happy with the standard I've achieved, and I've got three of them painted in about a week and a half, which is pretty good going. The undershading approach is working well, I'm still figuring out exactly which bits should be light and which should be shadow, and if you look at them closely there are definitely some inconsistencies, but I think the overall effect works pretty well. I'm also learning which Contrast paints work best: Fyreslayer Flesh for the skin tones has been a big win, and the dark blues and greens are also good. I've definitely not figured out how to do metals well yet, but there isn't much metal on them so I've been able to get away with painting it grey.

I tried reposing the legs on one of the gargants as the kit is monopose apart from the arms. I don't have a lot of experience with conversions and it was pretty nerveracking cutting up quite an expensive kit. I think it came out ok, the pose probably isn't the most natural, but gargants look a bit weird at the best of times.

The cave art has been fun. The ones I've painted so far are a Stonehorn, a Stardrake, and a Stegadon. The Stardrake is my favourite. I've started sketching out some plans for other cave art monsters, but some of them are easier than others - the Great Unclean One has me stumped so far.

What's next?

I want to get the mancrushers finished or mostly finished before I move onto the mega gargants. I've not decided yet which mega gargant to paint first, the Warstomper is my favourite of the kits, but maybe I should save him for last to keep me motivated. I'll be interested to see how well the undershading approach scales up to the megagargants, which have a higher level of detail than the mancrushers do. I think they'll take a fair bit longer to paint, but hopefully it'll be fun working on them.