The New Wave Serpent

Sometimes I just wish I'd keep my big cake-hole shut. Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while might remember my big rant about the new Games Workshop Wave Serpent a few months back in which I stated, with great clarity, that I wasn't convinced I liked it. I'm a fan of the Forgeworld model (and own two of them already. Other Wave Serpent-related thoughts can be found at the above link, but I never thought I'd actually get the Games Workshop model.

Well, I did.

It turns out those spines on the wings are actually very sturdy (who knew?), but it does seem rather like GW took a Falcon, slapped a couple of Eldary doo-dads on it, and put it on the shelf. The thing is, neccessity is the mother of impulse buying, so I picked up the GW one and got to work on making it bee-yootiful (or an approximation thereof).

There are a few points of note that I will share, but first I'll offer a few photos of the (mostly) finished product: Here's one, another, and yet one more.

It was intended to carry a squad of Fire Dragons based on this paint scheme (which is why you see some ice blue in the Serpent's color scheme). Like most of the tanks I paint, I started on this one with no real idea of what I was going to do with it or how. This sometimes ends up yielding some really great "Eureka"-type results (like this, where I almost completely improvised), but this wasn't going so well. To keep it short, I based it in black (as I knew my red was running low), and then coated it in my "Deimhinn Sinn Red" mix.

I don't know why, but it looked like crap.

So then I tried to spice it up by spraying it with red primer but, as I suspected, I was out and only managed to spackle it. It looked way, way worse and I tried to cover it up with more DS red, thus screwing it up even more. At this point, I was starting to lose hope and then began to sort of drybrush/mottle it with Blazing Orange and Sunburst Yellow. Finally, in one last desperate attempt to make something nice of it, and washed it generously in red ink. Suddenly... it looked awesome. I released a "phew" of relief that I hadn't destroyed this beautiful tank and then went on to finish it.

I black-lined the panels (sloppily, mind you) and then looked for interesting things to write on it to make it look mysterious and unique. I looked up "sanskrit" on Google Image Search and found a copy of The Lord's Prayer in Sanskrit and copied a bit of it right next to the cockpit.

The question of the turret is always a tricky one for me because I never use the turret assemblies that come with the model. I was also lacking twin-linked Scatter Lasers (which I needed for the tournament) and ended up making a couple out of parts from the Wave Serpent, a couple extra bitz and a toothpick. It looked really nice, but the magnet made the profile a bit high, so I mounted it under the body. I'll take more photos once I get it properly painted up.

In the end, I did not fall in love with the GW Wave Serpent the way I did with the Forgeworld version, but... the colors turned out really nice and I do sort of like the spines along the edge.

I don't, however, see myself buying any more Wave Serpents for a very, very long time.