Reaper Miniatures Creature of Blood Reef - 77189

I dug into my bones pile to find some sea creatures and these guys turned out to be a bunch of fun to base and paint.  As they're supposed to be down in the bottom of the sea I moved away from my normal rock/stone basing and made something a bit more fitting - I thought about painting the sides blue but decided against it.  They'll be put to good use soon in our current D&D campaign as the party travels up and down the Sword Coast.  I'm sure they'll be guarding a sunken ship broken against the reef.

It's been awhile since I used my Reaper Paints - they're so nice - just amazing.  I went that direction as I wanted to base these in an old Reaper color called Clouded Sea - just a fantastic blue/green which I figured would do these guys justice.  The Reaper paint is just beautiful to use - silky smooth off the brush and dries to a flat.

Another point about this - I'm not a fan of drybrushing but I want to get these on the table quickly.  So this is a "classic" basecoat, drybrush, wash, pick out the details - although I did spend a bit of extra time layering up some red to orange color on the fin.  I figured the opposite of blue/green on the color theory is red/orange.

Painting Instructions for Creature of Blood Reef (Reaper Paints)...

Step 1: Use Clouded Sea on everything but fin and claws
Step 2: Use mix of Creamy Ivory and Clouded Sea (60/40 - 3 drops to 2) - drybrush entire model
Step 3: Heavily water down Spruce Green and wash the entire model
Step 4: Use Rusty Red on the fin and claws
Step 5: Use Burning Orange on the fin and claws as initial highlights
Step 6: Use Fireball Orange on the fin as final highlights
Step 7: Use Solid Black on the eye socket
Step 8: Use Burning Orange as eyeballs
Step 9: Use Griffon Tan on base
Step 10: Drybrush Desert Tan on base
Step 11: Use Creamy Ivory and the stippling technique on the base (stippling is like drybrushing but instead of dragging across you dab onto the model with a down/up technique to put little dots onto the model)
Step 12: Use watered down Umber Wash (Vallejo) on base

Kickstarter paint total: 138 + 5 Creatures of Blood Reef = 143