Reaper Bones Purple Worm (Only its not purple)

Continuing my new obsession with Reaper's Bones line I decided to paint one without primer just to see how bad it would be.  Well i'm really pleased to tell you that its not, at all.   Not even a little bit.

Now a lot of people have painted this model and I can completely understand why.  Not only is it a beautifully detailed yet simple model, it lends itself to lots of different colour schemes.  Added to that it only costs £2 ($3) at the Reaper store.  

So as usual I did a bit of inspiration searching on the web and looked at all kinds of natural critters to get an idea of what I wanted to try.  My first thought was to do a translucent white/pink look like a real world intestinal worm but that grossed me out so much i'm not even going to put the picture up here.  I looked at Earthworms, Millipedes, Sandworms from Dune and Final Fantasy, the Sarlacc from Return of the Jedi and caterpillars but in the end I chose to go with the sandy version.

Now my idea was to paint the figure as if it relies on natural camouflage to blend in with just its mouth poking out of the earth and when something comes past....whoosh out it comes and strikes.  One of the things that that forced me to do was use a limited colour palette and for the base to tie in with the model.  I usually go for some contrast between the base and the model to help it 'pop' but in this case that wouldn't work so I went with a very dark red mouth and rather clean and bright teeth.

I also used some natural basing materials to help tie it in using the same colours.  During the summer I picked some wild grasses while on a walk and dried them out on the window sill, they work really well but are fragile so I only tend to use them on display bases.

About halfway through painting this model I realised how well it was going and i'm very happy with the end result.  In fact this model has made me feel like i'm less of an amateur than I thought.