Elite Venator Leader - The simping hunter

WOOOOOHOOOOO ! I really thought I'd end this year on a bunch of dogs but I just managed to take the time to finish this lovely model !

You might not be familiar with it and none could hold this against you as it's one of those rare confrontation models you couldn't find in any catalogue and which were only available for a limited period in certain places.

A real shame, because it's a very fine model with delicate sculpting and loads of character as you can see !

The painting on this model has been erratic at best, the weird head piece with the padded shirt and Hussar Vest along with military trousers and a Rottweiler make for a peculiar character you'll agree. Definitely not the average Joe.

I first tried a mix between serious and eye-catching wich was half-convincing to be honest :

Given the last models I posted about, you might understand what is coming next ... ^^'

I didn't really like the fact it was between 2 waters. This kind of sculpt doesn't allow that I think. To make it work, I would have had to go a bit further like my friend Jon did :

All about Jon's version here

After painting the vest, it reminded me a lot of the padded vests I had done on the venators...

...

WAIT ! Of course ! The Venators !

I've had 4 of them without a leader for some time now and only now do I realise I have a perfect leader for them !

Let me be clear, I VERY rarely paint over anything if at all. I just don't like to have multiple layers over each other and I really hesitated stripping the whole model to start afresh. Being of a lazy kind, I tried painting over first (with reluctance), then after a couple of highlights, I had to accept that it would have to be OK enough ...

You might remember from my post on the complete set that I had created a sort of ranking for the different kind of Venators :

I decided to keep the black head piece but to paint a red face on it, the idea is that a member willing to go from Primus to Centurio has to prove himself worthy and abandons the anonymity granted by his mask to wear an eye-catching head piece that will attract attention. This enables for the higher ups to determine the resolve of a given recruit. Once the battle test is passed, the recruit is then allowed to become a centurio and to wear the red mask (Yes, I'll need to male a red masked model now).

But why a silly face on the head piece ? Well, I can't hide I was a little influenced by a late read (kindly suggested and even offered by the excellent Sho3box) :

2000AD are always a treasure box if you're looking for ideas really and given that the hood looked silly from the start, I couldn't do anything else but make it look plain silly. I hop I succeeded in making the model intimidating despite the hood like the simping detective above is menacing and bad-ass despite his clown costume.

So here we are, this time I'm pretty sure it's the last model for the year ! Next post will be a little traditional recap of this past year and who knows what 2016 will be made of !