Hernandez the navigator

The wonderful Oldhammer forum continues to blurt great little projects for folks to join in with and I've managed to get a figure painted for the latest one just before the deadline.

The Oldhammer Legacy Challenge is in it's second year and this year takes the form of rag tag crew of space pirates. The jist is that you each paint and donate a figure fitting the theme and send it to Axiom who is the curator of these things. The crew are gathered and photographed but left unbased. The reason for this is that one of the lucky contributors has the chance to win the whole crew and will therefore be bale to base them as they see fit (what a weird bunch we are that it's the non-consistency of basing that would up set us!)

My contribution is a Navigator based on the Hernando Jurkantz cahracter from the Book of the Astronomican  who is is described as having translucent skin. My character takes this a little farther and Hernandez actually has transparent skin. Thankfully he also has a full body suit so I only needed to attempt to paint a skinless face.

He's based on a Cobalt 1 figure which, if you don't know, were designed by the father of Space marines himself Bob Naismith (they are still available through Black Hat Miniatures ). This guy had his head snipped off and replaced with an old GW plastic zombie head. This needed a bit of greenstuffing to give him two more eyes (the original head only had one and I'm sure you all know a navigator has a third in his forehead, you might just be able to make out Hernandez's but it's shut so who knows!)

Once the greenstuff was done it was a case of lovely bright space suit (to match the colour theme of the crew) and then attempt his face.

I used this image as a guide (it's a halloween mask for all you squeemish types) and used that work out the basic contours of the face where the bone and cartilage are showing through. If he was truly skinless then the top of the skull would be bone but I figured since it's only transparent there would be plenty of blood flow over the top of the scalp. So there you go. All done. Time to get him into a padded space capsule and send him off to meet up with the rest of the crew. Adios!