Dreadtober: Base Completed

Hi folks,

I may have said something silly and gun-ho when Dreadtober started, something like "It's on like Donkey Kong."

"A phrase to denote that it's time to throw down or compete at a high level; something is about to go down. The use of the comical video game character Donkey Kong provides comic relief but the phrase itself has greater or more significance than simply its on."

Urban Dictionary 

 

Joe from Broken Paintbrush, who is running Dreadtober this year, suggested that I should put barrels on the base: challenge accepted!

I started with some barrels from a very old scatter terrain sprue. I cut them to size with a razor saw, so that they would not distract people too much from the Dreadnought, and undercoated the whole base black. the barrels were then painted Leadbelchers with a Caliban Green stripe. Iron oxide weathering was applied using a number of orange, purple and brown mixtures applied by stippling with an old beaten up brush. 

 

Around the barrels I applied the new Astrogranite Debris textured paint from Citadel. I was a bit skeptical when I bought it, thinking "surely it is cheaper to just make your own texture paints", but I don't know how I would achieve the consistency of this product. When you scoop it out with the brush it deposits soft clumps of texture that are well suspended in paint ("wet"). The clumps were easily broken down and manipulated with a damp brush, though care had to be taken not to brush the clumps against stuff that was already painted.

After application, the Astrogranite looked very flat colour-wise and I was a bit worried about how it would stand up to a round of drybrushing. To make it look how I wanted it, I planned to give it a black wash and two lighter shades of grey in highlights.

When dry, the Astrogranite was nice and hard, I dry-brushed it fairly vigorously just to test it out and none of it was removed by the action of the paintbrush. After it was thoroughly dry I added dried soil from the backyard to the rest of the base using PVA, followed by some clumps of static grass.

To finish it off I added a laser-cut fern (follow the link for a tutorial) and a Dark Angels decal on the barrel. This is a sneaky way of adding some more Dark Angels flavour to the project. The original Deathwatch Techmarine model, which inspired this project, has a Dark Angels green shoulder pad to signify his allegiance to that Chapter (...Legion). I decided this would look rubbish on a Dreadnought, so I have had to slip other little hints that he was originally from the Dark Angels Chapter around the project.  Here are some shots with the WIP Dreadnought to give you an idea of how it all looks together.

As so often happens when I take a photo of a project, I can see a little dab of grey that had spilled onto the side of the base, where it should be black. Curses! That's tomorrow Marc's problem :o)

See you across the table,

M4cr0