Workbench Update: Building the Watcher in the Water

Good morning gamers,

So Christmas was wonderful - got some Galadhrim Warriors from Centaur to paint up, started painting some new Hobbits for the Quest of the Ringbearer missions, and got some flocking and flowers from my kids. Life is great.

One other addition I got was the Watcher in the Water (got a discount from Rythbryt) - and so during naptimes during the past few weeks, I've been slowly putting this guy together. Today I figured I'd show you how it's been coming along!

The first step was getting everything off the sprue - and if you've never built this model, this was a pain! The Watcher's tentacles have small pegs attached to them in order to insert them into the neck piece . . . and these pegs ALL have flashing around them to bind them to the sprue. As a result, only four of the eight tentacles made it off the sprue with their pegs (which I felt was pretty good).

Rythbryt told me ahead of time that the legs and tentatcles are all tagged with numbers (Roman numerals for the tentacles and "regular numbers" for the legs) - this was a great tip, because I needed to keep track of where I needed everything to go. In my pursuit of getting everything off the sprue, some of these tags got removed before the gluing began, so I'm not 100% sure I got the tentacles in the right places, but the legs are spot on. :)

I glued all of the legs and tentacles where I wanted them (which was a pain for the tentacles that didn't have their pegs in them because they'd keep slipping) - here's what I had:

Two halves make a whole . . . lot of time pass . . .

And THIS is when I called an audible and sent a note to Centaur and Rythbryt with my progress. 

The head and tentacles are the parts of the Watcher in the Water that we all know and love from the Fellowship of the Ring movie - that scene is really cool and exciting! The back half of the Watcher is GW's imagination of what the Watcher would have looked like if it had come completely out of the water for more than a split second. 

I personally thought (from the movie) that the Watcher would be all-octopus/squid instead of a mix between an octopus/squid and a lobster/grasshopper. So, I asked the guys about what they thought about me making my own scene on the base that looked more like this:

"Who messed with my lake house?"

With their agreement that it could be cool (for the record, Rythbryt likes the model in its original form), I decided to get out my spackle paste and get to work on sculpting a new base. I put the rocks where I wanted the Watcher to emerge and spackled everything else for the water. One large hump was placed behind the rocks to be the Watcher's body:

The view from behind - large monster emerging from the water . . .

With a wet finger, I smoothed the spackle over and started to paint - 50/50 mix of craft paint and water for this to both bind the spackle better and to let the pigment from the paint sink into the spackle a bit. The model got a base-coating of black:

Base coats applied, time for some detail highlights!

The scene from the movie happens at night, so I figured it would be cool if I kept to that theme and try my hand at "object source lighting" (or OSL). If you're curious about how to do this, check out videos from Scott the Miniac and Squidmar Miniatures on YouTube - there's other videos out there too, but their videos are particularly great. Scott's video does OSL without an airbrush, so that was very informative for what I'm doing (because . . . you know . . . I don't have the luxury of an airbrush).

I decided I wanted the model to remain mostly black, but I would dry-brush the model with grey (the rocks, dead Dwarves, and the Watcher) where the moonlight would be shining - the rest was left black. The great thing about a brief dry-brushing is that you'll only catch the bits of the model that stick out the most. So long as you always dry-brush in the same direction, you'll only catch highlights that are facing where your light source is located! Special dry-brushing care was given to the face, as that's where we want the eye of the viewer to go to first:

"What do you mean I'm going gray? I was born gray!"

I then mixed together the same grey I used for the dry-brush and the light blue that we're using for the moonlight to make the first OSL layer - the same spots we painted in grey before were painted with the initial grey dry-brush. The result looked pretty good, though a bit bright:

"The moonlight shows us for what we really are" - wait, wrong movie . . .

We also needed a silver dry-brushing for the weapons and armor on the Dwarves - as well as some silver/black splotches that were added to the Dwarf Ranger cloaks to match my Dwarf Rangers. Similarly, I did a mix of black and brown paint for the wooden bits of the Dwarf axes:

Painting dead Dwarves always makes me sad . . .

With all of the dry-brushing in, it was time to darken it with my home-made black wash - it subdued the colors quite a bit:

Shade me . . .

I finally did some highlights with light blue paint where I wanted special attention to be seen (mostly the face and some of the tentacles) - they turned out pretty well, I think. I also did some highlights on the Dwarves (grey on the cloaks, gold on the Herald, and white on the bones - all of which got another wash for balance):

"Into the mines!"

I did find when I glued the head on that I need to whack on more spackle near the head to fill in a gap (spackle compresses with water), but I can do that later. On the whole, I'm really pleased with how it turned out. The thing I'm most excited about is that the original model (like some of the Uruk-Hai Warriors with pikes) has many of his tentacles thrust out in front of him, which makes it hard to charge models head-on. 

So what am I doing with the other half of the Watcher in the Water? Well, for now I'm saving him for a future project (maybe I'll green-stuff a head/tentacles for him for my son, who really likes the Watcher). Hope you enjoyed this little tutorial - it's a gorgeous model and whether you redo it as I have or make it as directed, you'll have a great centerpiece for your army of Goblins!

The primary purpose of building the Watcher is so I can play through the Quest of the Ringbearer scenarios, so I'll be putting up posts every now and again with statuses on terrain pieces and models for how that's coming along. Until next time, happy hobbying!