I made a lot of progress on the SAW yesterday. The legs are all pinned (which took ages to do!) and are now ready for painting. I’m tossing up whether to glue the legs to the pelvis prior to painting or not. Each “hip” ball joint has two pins inserted from the outside so if I paint first it means I will then need to putty up the holes and patch up the paint in those spots once I do assemble them…

I didn’t get a shot of the final pose (which has the front legs facing forward more) but here’s one of the test poses:

Anyway I also got the foot to base mounting points sorted, which meant that I could finally do the initial sand/gravel layer:

As is the sand coating is a bit ordinary. It’s a mix of sand, small rocks, plaster, PVA glue and water. I tried “patting” down the mixture after application but it still left a far too uneven effect (I know a degree of unevenness is good, but this is a bit false looking). Then I remembered I had this groundwork article saved, which recommends the use of acrylic gel medium. So I’m going to do a second, thinner coat over the top of the current groundwork, which should even things out a bit. I’m thinking I might pick up a tube of this texture gel rather than muck around with the plaster/PVA recipe again. I didn’t tint the first coat although the dirt I’ve used is probably pretty close to the kind of colour I want anyway!

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