PAINTING BABOONS

Army Lists st

Above & below. The face is highlighted with Matt Black mixed with Leather Brown, eyes are Desert Yellow.

Below. Extra fur added, using Greenstuff putty.

MANDRILLS The mandrill is an African monkey, closely related to the

baboon and about the weirdest looking primate on the planet.

They are now found in southern Cameroon, Gabon, Equatorial

Guinea, and Congo. Mandrills mostly live in tropical

rainforests and forest-savannah mosaics and they live in

groups called hordes! They are a bit out of the right

geographical location, but I thought their range might have

been larger in the past than now. The mandrill is perhaps the most colourful primate, having

olive green or dark grey pelage with yellow and black bands

and a white belly. Its hairless face has an elongated muzzle

with distinctive characteristics such as a red stripe down the

middle and protruding blue ridges on the sides. It also has red

nostrils and lips, a yellow beard and white tuffs. The areas

around the genitals and the anus are multi-coloured, red, pink,

blue, scarlet, and purple!

Initially I thought it would just be a matter of painting the

baboons in a mandrill colour scheme, but after looking in to it a

bit more I realised the mandrill is quite different from your

standard baboon. Mostly they have a bigger mane and hardly

any tail (a point which I missed initially); this makes them quite

distinctive, even before the outlandish face make up! CONVERSION Not too tricky, I added some extra fur in appropriate places,

using Greenstuff modelling putty. As you can see I forgot the

remove the tails, which I should have done at this stage. Once

the putty had cured I undercoated them as I had the normal

baboons. It was at this stage I realised that they needed to lose

those tails! When the undercoat was dry I remove most of the tails, leaving

just a stump and re-undercoated the tail area.