DreadTober 2026 Completed

 

Hi folks,

It has been a busy month on all fronts. Hobby-wise I have been chipping away at this DreadTober project whenever I get a spare minute. That left me with about 50% complete with 5 days to go, which was not going to be fast enough! Sooo, I bit the bullet and went hard at it yesterday. 

The main inspiration for this project was the classic Epic 40K box art by John Blanche (below). In particular, I have always been fascinated by the character with the underslung plasma gun, power sword and "snow leopard's" pelt.

To reflect the artwork I used a more modern Venerable Dreadnought plasma cannon arm. It didn't look right having a full red barrel for the weapon; I think my brain has been wired to see that yellow multi melta on the Furioso for too many years. As a compromise, I painted the exterior barrel yellow but retained the white flames on the red armoured parts.

The left arm is from the Bjorn the Fell-handed kit. I ordered it off eBay a while ago because I needed the lightning claw part for my Moriar the Chosen project. Thankfully, I had some spare plastic lightning claw parts from a Blood Angels Dreadnought sprue I bought for my Grey Knights Dreadnought project (I am beginning to see a pattern here...). I rebuilt the lightning claw and then worked on the wolf pelt to make it look less lupine. That involve clipping away the muzzle and giving it a snow leopard pelt paint job, which I think sells the idea pretty well.

The decals were nerve-wracking to put on, as I only had one of each. The blood drop/2 decal was 30 years old and very difficult to float off the backing paper. I was so scared that I going to split the thing and have to piece it together on the model. To be honest, my Plan B was to just free-hand it. A layer of matt varnish and a new Dreadnought is born: Felix the Red-handed!

We have a couple more days until the October deadline for DreadTober, so if you are reading this early, I wish you all the bet in completing your project. It has been a bumper year in 2026 with a bunch of new challengers joining and working on some amazing projects. It has also been wonderful to see the veterans returning for another year; it makes the whole thing worthwhile.

See you across the table,

Marc