Hey.

Hey you.

Come closer. I want to talk to you. I want to give you a secret. To let you taste on your tongue a single sentence that promises the power to topple skyscrapers. Syllables of divinity that offer you the means to slam demigods into that previously toppled skyscraper and the one next to it.

Monkeys in mechs.

Imagine I’m dropping a mic right now.

Now that I’ve made Stage Managers everywhere cry, let me roll the tape back a bit to explain myself.

See, I’m the type of person that likes to put together a list that’s narratively and visually cohesive. To field an army that’s painted and modeled in such a way as to make each unit look like they belong next to one another with my head cannon firing away. Building a list for Monsterpocalypse can pose a problem for a player like me.

While each Faction has an internal cohesion, using the same design language and shapes within the confines of their Faction models, their external cohesion among their Agenda can be spotty. So, when I approached MonPoc, I agonized over my list. I wanted a strong, solid group of units and monsters, but everything I did wasn’t quite clicking with me on that higher level. That joy of playing something that I felt a true connection with.

It was clear I was going to have to get creative.

So, I took a look at my lists, and something stood out to me. I had an Ape in every list. While that’s unsurprising news to me—my very first possession was a stuffed silverback gorilla that I still have to this day—it was enlightening. If every list has an Ape, then why not just theme my list around them?

So. Monkeys in mechs.

With excitement lit in me once again, I picked up my Defender X that I had been neglecting. I had my mission. My divine spark.

And a rattle can.

Let me start off by getting it out of the way: I’m not a studio painter, a prize winner, or anything of the sort. I’m just a guy that thinks monkeys are cool.

So, we get our primed Defender X and immediately decide that we have a plan for later on and cover it all in a base coat of Cold Steel.

Once I’ve got that prep work done, I start looking at a color scheme. In my imagination, this Defender X is old. Very old. A military prototype that had been abandoned and forgotten within the jungle before being repurposed and retrofitted by the Empire of the Apes.

As such, of course we need a green of some sort—a remnant of the old school of thought in military paint schemes from before they realized that they might as well make it whatever color they want, since they’re not hiding the fifteen-story robot any time soon.

Since this is going to be the main color for the paint job, I pick out a pair of similar colors: Thornwood Green and Battledress Green. My plan is to start dark at the feet and slowly mix the two together to bring the brighter colors out near his face, the focal point of the model. Since I’ve got green, I might as well throw in Skorne Red for some prototype markings down the line. Then, G.U.A.R.D. units always have those orange accents, so I pull out Khador Red Highlight. Finally, I grab Sulphuric Yellow and my yellow ink. Because. Well. Apes.

With my analogous scheme in hand—sorry, Eldritch, I promise I’ll use you one day—I start in on the green.

I’m not terribly careful at this point, as I plan on dirtying this thing up something fierce later. Throughout my process, you’ll see stray marks as I test colors against one another and play with various techniques.

At this point, I was thinking of my Destroyers. What could I do with them? I’ve got a lot of Martians, so I could model mind-control devices on mundane units for that pulpy ’50s feel. Or, I could build a list around Gallamaxus and zombify a Planet Eater. Some tentacles can make anything chthonic.

My daydreaming is interrupted when I’ve made everything proper and green. Next up, I put the first layer of orange and a yolky yellow where I plan on putting it all later.

I also start to dirty the silver. In preparation of this, I’d been sourcing a bunch of pictures of rusted-out planes and other aluminum surfaces. Their particular style of tarnishing I tried to emulate on the jetpack fuselage by taking Orgoth Bronze, painting a thin layer on the silver, then wiping it away a couple moments later. What was left ended up giving the metal the look I was searching for.

It’s a start, but it’s nowhere filthy enough to be believable as a found wreck. We’ll get dirty soon, I promise. First, we need markings. Nothing screams ‘military prototype’ to me more than danger triangles.

So I freehand some danger triangles.

Once the markings are there, the preliminaries are finished.

Then, I do the most stressful thing that I’ve done to a painted model: I got out the sandpaper. I’d done this on larger costume pieces before, so I knew that it would work, but the thought of sanding off the paint that I had done up until this point was—well, let’s say that anguish wouldn’t begin to describe my feelings if I screwed it up.

Out comes the 220 grit sandpaper and the Radiant Platinum. I make a small pool of the metallic, dip the sandpaper in, then get to work. Light brushes along the edges of the model carve small scratches and grooves into the resin, leaving behind the silver in the newly created canyons.

Even when it was actively working, I still hated it.

After buffing basically the entire model, I immediately threw it into a pit of Muddy Wash.

I wasn’t kidding.

Then, I left it overnight to dry. Because look at it.

When I get back to it, I’ve got a muddy, tarnished, scratched mess of a Defender X. It’s wonderful. Using the same colors and some Menoth White Highlight and Thamar Black, I do some highlighting and shading.

So I’ve got this nice, dirty Defender X. Is it really reading as “Monkey in Mech,” though? I don’t think so. So, what can I add? What is going to make this paint job unique and read really “Empire of the Apes?” Well, I had already been painting my units as old-timey aviators, so why not nose art?

Nah, too human.

Why not graffiti?

Also too human.

. . . Ape graffiti.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

What was I going to put on him, though? And when I’ve gotten that, where?

It was time to crowdsource. I brought him into the office and asked around. Taking elements from all the suggestions, I started work again on my masterpiece.

We’re freehanding some graffiti, friends.

Tanner suggested the banana on his chest, while Andy had a stroke of brilliance in his ‘Ook Ook’ shoulders.

Tanner and Riley both offered the gorilla primitive that I had come up with to be placed on the back of the fuselage.

Then, I needed something to balance it out. So, my fiancee suggested that I tag it with some initials. Who else would be tagging this machine other than General Hondo? So, we put his initials up on here.

Now it’s tagged. It’s dirty. It’s a beauty in its absurdity. However, I’ve got one more thing for it. It’s not jungle-y enough. Years ago, I grabbed some vine-like moss with the thought of, “Hey, I might use this sooner or later. Surely I’ll do something jungle-y, right?”

It only took two years, but I finally found a use for them.

With a final set of gluing and wrapping, my Gorilla X is ready. Ready to stand shoulder to shoulder with King Kondo and protect the city in the Monsterpocalypse.