Well despite my best efforts and spending many hours and late nights, I didn’t even make first cut. Although I knew my model would never take home a demon I’m a little annoyed that I didn’t even get a green sticker. It didn’t help that the stewards were telling people there wasn’t an early entry queue (which there was) so by the time I got in and handed my mini over, it got put on the top shelf of the cabinet which meant that anyone under 6ft tall would really have only seen the underside of the base – which wasn’t at the same level as the main painting. I think what has annoyed me more though is that the couple of entries in the finalist cabinet I saw when I collected mine didn’t have any kind of narrative to them at all. In fact the entry that took the third was a standard Space Wolf Dreadnought that was painted well but not what I would have called spectacularly – the gold demon was taken by a tank that in all honesty was just very well weathered using pigments and such like. Although it’s not easy to achieve it’s also not difficult and from the big screen, I didn’t feel it warranted the top prize.
That said, I had a thoroughly enjoyable day and managed to pick up all of the things that I wanted – including the Horus Heresy Book One (which despite being £70 is a gorgeous creation). I’ve also been inspired to get back into “proper painting” once more. My two projects this year (Stormlord and Contemptor Dreadnought) I’ve really enjoyed doing, but the projects consisted of 40% modelling, 20% airbrushing, 30% weathering and 10% actual painting with a brush. I hand painted all of the bone items on the Contemptor and shocked myself with how quickly I actually managed to get them done, the same for the Genestealer head and various metal elements.
This week I need to collect all of my modelling bits and bobs back together. I have paints on my paint station, dining table, coffee table, sofa, computer desk and modelling desk. I’ve got sculpting tools and green stuff in three different places and my modelling desk is covered in weathering pigment and GW snow. Oh and I’ve a box with more GW snow in from when I did the base of my Contemptor… Once that’s done and I’ve given the house a bit of a spring clean (and done my tax return).
One thing I do need to do this week is to properly wash all of my brushes and see if any need replacing. I’m really, really bad at looking after my good quality brushes and noticed that the one I tend to use the most wasn’t maintaining it’s point on Saturday. I’ve just purchased a bar of Masters Brush Soap which hopefully will arrive this week so I can properly clean and condition them. I also need to mark (using a band of masking tape) what brushes are my “Knackered Brushes”, “Wash Brushes” and “Decent Brushes”. Washes are a pain as they soak into the ferrule and in time mank up the bristles so it makes sense to put some brushes aside for just doing that. Knackered brushes will be used for things like applying PVA and such like.
I’ve decided that as my next project I’m going to assemble the Chaos Lord from the Dark Vengeance boxed set and paint him up. I saw a lovely paint job yesterday where his armour is painted a deep purple and highlighted up to a pastel colour (using new GW colours). It also has some lovely fire transitions and although the armour edging is done in NMM I’ll do it in regular metallics. I’m not going to do a fancy base, airbrushing, weathering or any other time consuming techniques. Just bog standard painting using brushes, water and paint 🙂 I’ve just done a small order for 12 of the new Citadel paints so that I can actually paint him up – fingers crossed they arrive fairly quickly. The only exception I may make is to attempt doing NMM on the Chaos Star on the cloak – there are reference images on the GW site so I don’t need to try and figure out how to paint it 😉