War of the Worlds Kraken

So I am not the biggest fan of the base Kraken pose. It looks like a squat beetle, and for the life of me I'm not sure how it can propel itself across the ground on those stubby little legs. One solution was to have it bursting from the water, but I already did that when I painted my friend's Kraken a few months ago.

The Kraken I painted for my friend. He took my dang idea!

The more I thought about it, a second idea came to me. This is a machine that has long tentacles that grab up people and stuff them into cages while firing a giant death ray. Sounds an awful lot like the Tripods from the new War of the Worlds movie from a few years back with Tom Cruise.

Let's face it, those things were creepy.

So I set out to mimic this whole thing with my Kraken. I wanted it to be standing up taller, but I was trying to figure out how to do that and still have it be basically playable. Another pet peeve of mine was that there is no obvious swimming apparatus for a machine that is supposed to attack ships from under water. The legs weren't tall enough, there were no propellers or water jets, and as best I can figure out it just sits in shallow water and reaches up to grab passing ships. That simple won't due - a sea monster needs to be able to leap up from its resting place on the ocean floor and grab its unsuspecting prey!

This was attempt 1. It got me the pose I wanted, but the dowels in the back were too big and lumpy. The front legs were significantly cut and repositioned, and the tentacles reaching forward a little more, but I knew I had to do something about that leg. After some experimentation...

Behold! The mighty Klawed Kraken! You can see in the first picture I have a hapless prisoner being pulled into the side vent there, and there's a body on the ground in the second picture (both are zombie miniatures from Mantic Games). The claw leg is a combination of one of the original back legs for the Kraken, three crabjack legs (my bitz box is full and bursting with goodies), a well-placed brass pin, and a little washer-thing I found at Home Depot. It looks weird and Cryxian (at least to me), and once painted up it will tower over the table (it's a good 2-3" taller than the stock model) and stuff enemy troops into its side-vents while spraying death over its other victims.