Dark Angels Saturnine Praetor

Once again I have to start with a statement that it has been some time since I last posted. It is not that I have not been working with hobby stuff, it is just that I have not finished anything really, what I am doing on the opus takes forever. Perhaps I need to start posting more WIP stuff.

Well it is October and time for DreadTober (sort of missed the first update), but this post is not about DreadTober but my warm up, a First legion Saturnine Praetor. As I noticed it was once again time to do some dreadnought stuff, and I had mostly been building things for Opus over summer so I decided that I needed to get the rust out of my fingers before the challenge. To do this I decided to build the Saturnine Praetor out of the box and paint it up for the Dark Angels. Well it did not last long before I decided to go for the "extra allt" option and just disregard any rules and just go for what I thought looked cool, and what I wanted to try painting. This sadly meant that the build became more complicated than I would have liked and it took longer time. The original model is bad enough to get posed right, add in some extra parts and things will no longer line up properly. This really came back to bite me as I paint things in subassemblies, and some of the mismatches were not obvious until I stated to put everything together, which meant I need to cut into already pained parts and reglue them... So the model is not as clean as I would have liked for a character model.

Apart from the somewhat messy build I am quite happy with the painting. I did once again use the sponging technique on the armour, cloak/tabard and the Watcher in the dark. This is a really powerful technique that gives a similar result that you could get with an airbrush when it comes to shades and blending. I will try to use this on the dread for the DreadTober challenge and see how it works on larger models. The metal parts were given the same standard treatment that I usually do to get a rusted look. I also tried my hand at some free hand on the cloak and armour panels, with some varied success. I really need to get better at freehand. I kept the over all colour scheme close to what I already did for the first squad of Saturnine terminators so there where no great challenges, just getting back in the sadel so to say.

Well, now that this model is out of the way I will start with the Deredeo dreadnought for the DreadTober challange.