Due to a long weekend at a LARP event (Thursday to Monday), I’ve not got as much done as if I were home, however quite a bit of progress was made early last week. All of the Dreadnought (including knees, elbows and arms) have received the base colour. The red knee pad has been base coloured, highlighted and shaded and looks pretty sweet although I’m not convinced I’ve highlighted up enough.
I have begun to paint the pipe on the base and have opted for a heavily rusted creamy colour (using salt weathering). I have been having a few issues with my airbrush as I’ve completely run out of airbrush cleaner (and Hobbycraft had none in the last time someone visited) which has resulted in a couple of really annoying spiders I need to somehow rectify. The effect I’m aiming for is like the picture on the right. This will be also quite heavily weathered into the base so shouldn’t be too over powering.
Some of the bits of metal have been painted with a rusty colour and drybrushed with silvers, this surprisingly looks pretty realistic and add a nice element of textured darkness onto the otherwise bland base.
On the assault cannon arm I had pinned on a piece of chain which I had originally intended to put trinkets and totems on. Knowing I was running out of time I decided to just use a couple of “dangly” plastic pieces (a terminator cross and wolf tail) to cover the end pins rather than a properly sculpted “rivet top”. I’ve not been overly happy with how it looked and took the decision to just scrap the idea and go with a plain shoulder instead. This needed various layers of super glue, sanding and liquid green stuff to cover the holes and marks where it had been super glued on. Looking at the end result you wouldn’t know it had ever happened and I’m much happier with this than what it would have looked like otherwise.
Another thing that I did (which didn’t work) was to apply some mud weathering pigments to a small corner on the base top. Unfortunately all this did was to basically mix into a brown paint and cover the grey up. However the principal was OK and when I reapplied grey over the top the end effect was quite good, giving a more natural depth to the base. In light of this, I’m going to give the base a coat of gloss varnish and then apply the weathering pigments. This should allow me to push the pigments around but keep the grey colour on the top.
I’m hoping that this weekend I’ll be able to purchase some more airbrush cleaner so that I can then get back onto the actual dreadnought as that needs highlighting and shading. Before then I hope to finish the pipe and perhaps get some of the other base elements painted. I do have a ruined stone element that I really out to tackle before I weather everything in.