Making It Your Own: A Tale of Building a Maw Krusha Part 2: The Megaboss

Today I'm going to talk about how I built the Orruk Megaboss. That green skinned, axe wielding, black and brass armored gent chained to the back of the Maw Krusha. 

Built and painted in roughly a day, I wanted to (as is the recurring theme of this project) do something different. I was browsing through a myriad of photos of Maw Krushas from other painters and noticed that the Megaboss usually had yellow, red, or some other garish colored armor. Now, there's nothing wrong with this mind you. Miniature painting is art, and artists are free to express themselves accordingly. 

However, looking at the beaten, jagged armor and weapons of the Megaboss, I thought to myself: this dude doesn't have the time or patience to paint his armor bright yellow. 

So I painted the armor black and brass. Brass is slightly less saturated and shiny than gold while still allows the miniature to stand out. I cobbled together the model from a hodge podge of parts from the default Megaboss and the named one, Godrak the Fist of Gork. I used Godrak's head, weapon, and some ornaments. The rest, like the jaw armor and the totem on his back, was from the vanilla Megaboss. This allows me the opportunity to use either warscroll choice when I play a game. That is, that one happy day when this pandemic is a memory. 

Now, let's talk about his weapons. In the one day I built and painted this thing I spent the most time on the weapons. Namely his Halberd in his right hand. 

Let me point out that this thing? Didn't look like this when I started. It looked like a weird jagged spear on a rickety staff. I figured that of you're a big, bad Megaboss, the weapon should be something that would make the other guy shit his pants with just one look at the thing. 

So I kitbashed some parts from various weapon options from the model kit. For the uninitiated, kit bashing is when you combine different parts and glue them together to make something else entirely. 

I took a huge axe head, some of its haft, chopped off a dagger blade, sliced off a horn and cobbled it together to look like a mean poleaxe. I smoothed out the seam lines when it was glued together with several coats of matt varnish. That did the trick. 

I was pretty happy with the end result. Not only does the Megaboss stand out among a sea of its kind, but it looks damn good. 

There was a few times though when I thought I ruined the model because I cut up the weapon and modified it so many times. However, as Brent from Goobertown hobbies mentioned before... You have to keep pushing through, trust the process and paint (in this case kit bash) bravely. I paraphrased some of that. 

In part 3, I'll discuss the process of how the color scheme of the Maw Krusha itself came to be. Till next week!