Dreadtober Complete!

My Dark Angels Mark V dreadnought is finally finished.  Considering it's only the first week of November that's pretty good versus my lifetime hobby progress pace.  This may be the first time I completed a vehicle size project in six weeks.  It used to be that I'd paint something almost all the way to completion but stop short of the final highlights and decals.  Fortunately over the last few years my final stage highlighting abilities have improved and I have gotten the hang of decals just in the last few months.  Like a super powered dynamic duo these last elements falling into place means I'm finishing units and vehicles 100% for the first time in my gaming life which is insane considering I've been playing for almost 30 years.

"Taste the cleansing flame of eradication heretic!"

The way the dreadnought turned out makes me really happy.  I'm sure looking at it from the perspective of the current just three colors painting trend this model probably looks like a clown car's worth of different colors.  However my painting aspirations were formed during GW's famous/infamous "red period" of the 90s and I love my paint schemes with that almost comic book level of color variety.

Some elements from this view I'm particularly pleased with are: the pose of the assault cannon arm with the hanging pennant, my first use of word transfers, the tyranid corpse on the base, and the yellow highlights.  I'll elaborate on it in another post, but I use a very old space marine painting guide for my Dark Angels that was published was back WD 129.  In those days of yore the 1st Legion used colored shoulder pad rims and chest eagles to distinguish companies just like other codex chapters, just with different colors than the Codex Astartes chapters used.  Yellow was the color designated for the 4th company and in the future you will see a lot of yellow as the spot color on my marines and their vehicles.

As mentioned in one of the earlier WIP posts for Dreadtober, I really had a lot of fun painting the tyranid or genestealer remains on the base.  I never get to paint a lot of pink or purple so it was great to flex those paint color skills with colors and shades I rarely get to use.  The portion that looks wet red started out as Screamer Pink highlighted up to Fulgrim Pink and I really liked how it looked contrasted with the purple bits.  I did make a fateful choice and went over the pink with Blazing Orange ink from Army Painter.  While I think the final "wet" reddish orange looks more gory and viscera-like, I kinda miss the distinct pink it was before.

Also mentioned in an earlier update, my idea of the pennant on the upraised assault cannon evoking the idea of a knight's lance paid off the way I hoped it would.  I don't always go all in on the heavy knight imagery that has been added to the Dark Angels lore since the Gav Thorpe books, but it was cool to refer to that with something simple like the pose of the cannon mimicking the upraised lance of a knight.  It's nice when a kitbash idea looks as cool as it did in your imagination.

This picture angle makes me realize how many skulls are in such a small area on this side of the model...

The dreadnought close combat weapon is another satisfying part of the model.  I love the way the colors turned out on the fist/flamer combination, the red to yellow might not be very original but I like the vibrancy of color I achieved.  The wing/skull/sword was a small kitbash from the Dark Angels upgrades in the Ravenwing Bike Squad set but I feel it helps the dreadnought armor look more like artificer armor.

I like the way the genestealer skulls I added compliment the tyranid body parts already sculpted on the base.

Unfortunately the right side contains the real epic fail of the project.  The panel with the names of famous battles I was so excited to use did not turn out well.  It looks worse in the picture, in reality you can almost read the letters.  Earlier in the project I had the panel light red and then went over it with Nuln Oil Gloss, the letters were pretty visible as sen in an earlier post.  Tried a couple more coats of Nuln Oil to try and make the letters more crisp but it only made them cloudier.  I want to use those panels on my as yet built venerable dreadnought, but I may have to put that project off until next Dreatober so I can figure out how to do those panels right.

In the good news column on this side, the banner transfers worked out great, "Mors" on the yellow portion wraps around to "Infernum" on the flipped yellow section unseen here.  According to the Internet it makes a poor Latin "death chasm" but bastardized Latin is a 40K tradition.  I used the current 4th company transfer on this shoulder with a Gothic yellow one to indicate the first dreadnought attached to the 4th company mixing the new company designation with the old style denoted by color.  The yellow had to be painted over the black number transfer because the black blended with the underlying design but I think it turned out okay.

The back got a few brass highlights but it's been done for a few weeks now.  With the whole model painted I feel like my converted rough sculpted back piece blends in relatively well, especially from tabletop distances.

I threw in an overhead view for the top down detail.  One of my favorite early WD issues when I was a teen was 117.  It carried a large article about Eldar and Orks in Adeptus Titanicus and Space Marine 1st edition games.  There was a side bar that captured my imagination about Rhino unit designations that were painted on the top hatches of the personnel compartments.  There was one of the earliest breakdowns I've seen of the different symbols the first founding chapters wold use to tell their Assault, Tactical, and Devastator squads apart.  I'm sure from a practical standpoint it was a visual reference to help players see the difference between the loads of identical Rhinos that came in the original Space Marine Box set.  In narrative it was so Titans and yet as seen aerial assets (this was pre Thunderhawk days) could make visual unit identifications be tween friend and foe if the voxcasters were down or jammed.

This idea has always made its way into my unit paint schemes real or conceptual and my newfound success with transfers is making this possible.  Another yellow one for the 1st Dreadnought, 4th company as well as a chapter icon on the opposite shoulder.  With all the Ravenwing flyers and speeders on a Dark Angels battlefield I thought these markers for those zooming by above would come in handy.

Thanks for following along with my Dreadtober progress that also served as the genesis of this blog.  Completing this project has been very inspiring to me personally, the ideas I've had since Nova about approaching my hobby in a more organized fashion are already showing results.  Plus now I have this great blog to spin stories about the hobby that no one is reading.  Thank you to Joel at Mordian 7th blog for coordinating the project every year and allowing me to participate this year for the first time.

I'll close with a picture of my two completed 1st Legion dreadnoughts.

Battle Brothers!