Dreadtober WIP 1

First post in the Dreadtober challenge. In my last posts I had the dread soaking in its washing up liquid, making sure that all the release agents are gone form the resin before I start painting. First thing after the soak is a good wash off in the shower, making sure that I do not replace the release agent with dish soap. Once washed I laid out all the parts on a towel to make sure that everything came out of the soak and wash and that nothing was missing. I left if do try like this over night. Then I started with cutting all the parts of from their supports and cleaning up mold lines and ports. This is a bit fiddly, especially the ports, as these can be sitting in some really trick places to access. Once that was done I needed to figure out how the model comes together...  as the model has been hanging around the do to pile for some time the instructions seams to have gone missing. There are a lot of parts in this model, in contrast to the GW equivalents. This makes it a bit fiddly to assemble but it also gives you great poasabillity.

When I was waiting for the pieces to dry after the rinse and wash I decide that I would do a scenic base. I usually do not do that, but lately I have sort of gotten used to the idea (as I am not gaming with the models the problem I have with the models dragging around scenery all over the battlefield is not so big  anymore). I really did not have a great idea of what it should look lite so I grabbed some random stuff from the bits boxes and glued them to the base. I went for a low wall at the front of the base that the dreadnought could rest on foot on, but the rest is more or less filler.

So I had a scenic base which means I needed to build the dread to fit the base and still look coll. I went for a classic hero pointing towards something while resting his legs on something pose. This meant that I first needed to build the back leg to get the height of the pelvis before I could build the bent leg. Once I knew what the height should be I pinned the front foot to the base at the appropriate place and built the rest of the leg to line up whit the straight led. The legs where then attached to the pelvis which determined where the back leg ended up on the base. Once this was set I also pinned the back leg to the base. In this way I can remove the Dread from the base for separate painting but it will still go back in the right position.

The arms was I bit tricky as they consist of so many parts and I needed a log of dry fitting before I knew in what order to assemble them and at what angles (in the end it truned out the I just built both of them more or less straight with out bends or twists). I also heated one of the fingers on the left hand so that I could make it point forward instead of beaning in a half grip position.

Once I was happy with the parts I broke it down into sub parts for painting. After spraying the pieces with a black hobby paint from the local hardware store I painted all the pieces with a watered down abaddon black to make sure there were no places where the light resin shines through. I also painted on some browns and oranges where I will have white metal. This helps give life to the metal and make it look more natural. Then it is just drybrushing, I started with a bronze color, covering the whole model. Then I went over the joints etc with three shades of silver metal. After this stage all the pieces was washed under a faucet with maximum flow to remove any paint dust from the drybrushing. This prevents frosting, especially with the amount of drybrushing required for this model..

And that is about as far as I got on the first day of this challenge. Next step will be to go back over all the silver metal with washes and inks to give it even more depth before drybrushing again. We will see when that gets done.