This is it—the final 24 hours to preorder the Hearthgut Hooch Hauler and get your free Black Anchor hooch hugger (read: koozie) to keep your own hauls of hooch cool.

Tuesday is your last day to preorder, so click here to get your reserved model and hooch hugger now!

And to wrap up this preorder, Studio Painter Brendan Roy walks us through some final thoughts on painting the Hooch Hauler with some retrospective photos to sweeten the experience!

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The Hooch Hauler is a gorgeous model that is probably the best of the line when it comes to the opportunity to paint wood. If you enjoy painting planks or are even just looking to get better at it, then look no further, as the Hearthgut has the answer.

How it all begins! The Hooch Hauler is a huge kit with 53 total pieces, 47 of them being unique. Compare this to the War Wagon at 34 total pieces and only 27 unique…they don’t even compare!

Haulers of hooch, assemble!

It’s bigger than that…

Still bigger…

NOW we’re getting there!

The Hooch Hauler is big enough to move mountains!

The devils are in the details!

Size DOES matter…

The easiest way to start painting the wood is to apply Gun Corps Brown as a basecoat all over the wood and leather of the model—use whatever method you prefer (I recommend either drybrushing or an airbrush here). Once you have a good foundation, you can move on to the highlighting. You can drybrush, airbrush, or paint thin grain lines using Rucksack Tan for your first highlight layer and then apply your brightest highlights with Menoth White Base.

TIP: In the studio, we often highlight after our shading. This helps give the model more “pop” for contrast, but here I want to highlight first for two primary reasons:

1) The majority of the model is wood, so we don’t want it to have too much pop. Wood doesn’t typically react to light that way, and there’s just so much of it that I wouldn’t want it to be distracting.

2) The wood grain is sculpted into the model, so our shading will fill in those cracks, giving us further definition with little effort.

Since the Northkin come from cold lands, we want to keep the palette on the cool side of things, so we’ll use Battlefield Brown as our first shade. You can then apply a deeper shade by mixing in some Exile Blue and Thamar Black to darken up the Battlefield Brown a bit. And finally, if you darken the mix even further with Thamar Black, you can apply dark lines between the wood planks and edges for separation and contrast between elements on the model.

In the end, the hooch you take is equal to the hooch you make!

Get the Hearthgut Hooch Hauler (and free hooch hugger!) today before the preorder window closes tomorrow. Both your hooch and your gut will thank you.