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.

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Unsurprisingly my “perfect weekend of painting” ended up not so perfect.  Due to numerous phone calls, chores and other interruptions I lost around 7 hours worth of painting time.  I also managed to balls up the application of the larger custom decals – I should have gone with my gut instinct and gloss varnished first.  I can “recover” this and the overall effect will be fine, I’m just really annoyed with myself.  I think I was trying to rush as I was a bit behind.  Oh well, not a lot that can be done now.

I didn’t get any work done on the base at all, but did manage to get gloss varnish on nearly all of the Dreadnought sub-assemblies.  I still have the head to do, but want to do the eyes first.  Sponge weathering begun this morning (before I left for work) and actually is starting to make the whole thing come together.

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Well the Dreadnought has progressed quite significantly since my last post.  Pretty much all of the main airbrush work has been completely (with the exception of a few touch ups) and I’m fully onto brush work now.  True to form this isn’t going as quickly as I would like although some of that can be attributed to the fact that this week has been a complete nightmare on actually sitting down with free time.  Despite originally planning 3 evenings work I have achieved the sum total of an hour although tomorrow I have from around 8pm and all weekend as my other half is away for the whole weekend.

As you can see from this pic, I have finally found a decent colour for the shoulder pads and knee pad.  This is actually the colour I originally wanted but somehow didn’t get.  What it has meant is that I’ve had to purchase a set of Logan Grimnar Company decals as the great wolf symbol I had in black was too dark for this much deeper colour and this transfer set has white versions of this symbol.

I also took the opportunity to purchase a pot of Balthasar Gold which is a coppery colour that looks great with a shade of brown and highlight of Runelord Brass (which I didn’t buy – doh!) comes out as a very convincing brass colour and most importantly is quite easy (which is good when time is pressing).

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During the past week I’ve managed to make some substantial progress on my entry, though not as much as I’d hoped I would as I got less done during the weekend than I’d planned (but more during last week).  The base and body have now both been finished from a modelling perspective and both have received a coat of grey primer.  The base received it’s airbrushed base colours yesterday but I took a bit of a side step when I tried to wash the lower half and all I managed to do was basically darken it when I airbrushed the wash on (and make it satin shiny).  Before I hit the sack yesterday I applied the wash again to some parts of it with a brush, which did shade it a little, but didn’t give it as much depth as I wanted.

Although I’ve a couple of jobs to do when I get in, I do have time this evening to spend on it.  My first step is to selectively apply some wash into the deepest recesses (by hand and using other colours).  Once that’s dry (a good point to do some chores ; ) I’ll re-apply the base colours with my airbrush, shade and then apply gentle highlights.  I will then drybrush the various elements and if necessary blend in using the base colour from the airbrush.  I might even treat myself to one or two of the new GW drybrush paints.

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