DreadTober is upon us!

Hey all,. I quickly mentioned it yesterday but I updated the DreadTober Page to represent this years event. It's been going on now for 4 years and this year Joel (Mordian) and I are going to be handling the updates and what not.

If you are interested in working on a Dread / Walker / MC during the Month of October and what to join in with a group of us all working on one and posting up.. please do. Greg (Greggles) and I came up with the idea 4 years ago at the Nova Open thought it would be a great to get more people talking and spark up new conversations!

So.. join us... 

https://dreadtober.blogspot.com/

and here a few banners if you want to show some DreadTober love..

Be cool or be cast out

 Some more work on this dude.. I played around here and there trying to figure other colors out but blended the metallics which I'm pretty happy with right now. The knee guards came out solid..

 I also blended out the shoulders and back spine piece thing .. it looks cool but who would really put that back there haha .. The one part I'm still figuring out is the back piece of the gun. I didn't want it to just be a fully brass/gold gun so I painted it to patch his armor and that looked terrible. So I went with bone.. terrible. I started to go purple but didn't feel like that was going to do it either so I'm going to go with more of a heat fatigue on it and I think that should be cool. Like the energy chamber is supa hot.

 The purples are almost completely done as well so there is only the piece on the gun.. a small punch on his belt and some cording on the spine thing. And the base needs to be wrapped up but either way he'll be done this week. Now I'll need to get his squad all built up. My Son's Birthday party is this weekend so more hecticness has already been added to the week.

I'm pretty happy with this guy and makes me want to get his squad done so I can get a Kill Team game in though I have no idea when that will actually happen haha..  'shrugs'

On another note... it's almost October or should I say DreadTober!!! This year I wasn't going to do it because of the amount of work it requires to put in but Joel from Mordian is going to assist in putting it together. Sorry for the late notice.. I'll be putting together more info today and will make a specific DreadTober post as well as bringing the DT Blog back online .. Get those dreads ready!

Dirty Deeds

 That right! More Sybarite! (AKA Murder  Dude 01 AKA thanks Joe for the actual name). I haven't had a ton of time to get back to the table but I did work a bit more on this guy. I started to work on some of the bone areas and a little more work on the armory green areas.. I ended up going with green for the boots, I was trying to figure out if I should go with a different color but didn't want to spread out too much and have a blast of colors. I still have to figure out the base color which I don't want to be the standard grey.. maybe a solid red contrast like Mars' surface. The untreated metallics are killing me and the next time I sit down to work on him that will be the first thing I work on.

I think the colors are popping on him and the harsh blends are looking cool but I have to go back and break some up more. It's a weird technique and takes a lot of eye balling to see what works and what doesn't but I'm having fun messing with him. Either he turns out cool or not but he's definitely going to stand out .. haha

Abstract Behavior

 Last Thursday I started working on some Dark Eldar.. at Nova I won the Kill Teams box and I figured I'd make up few Kill Teams. One good thing is I have a ton of stuff just sitting around though sadly I have to find a lot of it because most is still in boxes after the move. But now that Nova is past I'll be concentrating on getting my painting room finished up. But back to DE.. So I broke out this guy .. no clue what DE sergeants are actually called haha Head murder dude 01 sounds good to me. I was also working with a Succubus model and I only know her name because she was in a blister but sadly that blister was Finecast.. blah.. I spent WAY too much time just fixing her and attaching her butt to a base so I just moved over to this guy to actually get some painting done. So far most of the time was concentrated on the armor and loincloth .. The rest I just blocked out.

 I wanted to go with more of the rough blotchy blending which I normally don't do but figured I was just going to play around. There is still a lot more blending to do on it but sI tarted to like it and then I hated it. Now I flip flop on the model going from love to hate haha .. Another thing that I noticed that I haven't done in awhile since I've been paint the Raven Guard is that I forget to block out all the colors and just focus on a section. Then I sit back and realize oh crap.. the rest of the model is black and I have not idea how it's going to tie together. So I started to block it out and then realized that now I was just focusing on the cloth. Forcing myself to stop and actually block it all out it tough for me it appears as I then started to mess with the whip which I thankfully did stop myself and go on ...

I just noticed I did this haha.. or at least remembered that I do since I'm not in full army painting mode. I took one of Roman's classes a few years back and he pointed that out to me quite clearly.. best to get all the colors on there and then work on the model as a whole so you know where you are going and add other colors in as needed. I like the colors I'm going with so far and will be pushing forward with him, I wanted the colors to be hard contrast and rough as the Dark Eldar are the rough version of their race .. and as my other blends are very clean I want these to be choppy. Plus it will only be a small force so even if it takes some time it won't be army time so not too bad. I'm going to blend out the greens a little more and I want to add some scratching or something to the armor .. hard to explain what I am shooting for as I really don't know. I'm just going to be playing around with these guys for a bit... have some fun experimenting.

But the Raven Guard aren't forgotten, a friend is getting out of 30K and has some stuff I want so I'm trading some Malifaux stuff to him since I don't see me playing that much anytime soon. But I'll go into the Raven Guard additions when I have them in place...

Nova 2018 Aftermath

 Hey all! It was another awesome year at the Nova Open and I had so many great games and good times. It was such a hectic year it felt like and this year I was exhausted from the get go haha.. like they say .. getting old is hell!

All of the games I played were awesome.. Win or Loss.. tight or slaughter.. no matter. Just nerds being nerds and loving it. It was tiring but so fun and pretty sad to see it end but I'm already thinking about next year and what I'm going to do for it ..

Here are some pictures -- Sadly some are blurry as all hell as I kept forgetting to pop the flash.. boooo but you should probably go over to Greg's page to really look at all the awesome stuff there. It felt like I was always on the move and there wasn't much down time. The downtime I had was filled with BS'n with friends.. old and new. Thanks to all of the guys running the 30K events they were all awesome to be a part of!

This year ..

• I got in 6 games of 30K with friends... I know six isn't a lot to most but it's the most I've played all year. Plus it's with cool people with amazing armies..
• Hung out with a bunch of friends.. old and new.. I'm sure I'll see you next year if not sooner in some cases.
• Saw some awesome work! This year the painting really seemed to have jumped up in all of the divisions and it was cool to see much love put into the armies. Well done all. 
• I judged the painting competition for the 40K Trios and 40K Narrative. While tiring and a bit hectic it was also very fun. Greg and I both were judges and took it very serious, we wanted to make sure each army got the respect it was due. 
• I entered the Leviathan and Sicaran in the Capitol Palette. Sadly I didn't get to hang out at the Cap Palette cases much this year due to either playing, judging or being exhausted haha I did get to hang out in the lounge with some amazing painters though.
• My only downside this year was my lack of eating lunch haha.. I always ended up getting side tracked. 

It was a good year for me painting wise.. 

• I got Best Painted in the 30K Excruciatus event and part of the prize support was an awesome fold able gaming table from Firmeterra... the table looks awesome and I heard great things about it from people I know that have one.. go over to their site and check it out! Thanks Joe! 
• I shared Best Painted in the 30K Bromance Team game.. Splitting it with Brad and Jake who had amazing looking armies. It was originally me and Brad but after three long days of gaming I was spent. Thankfully Jake stepped in and filled out the last game! Great games and made a couple of new friends! I won a Kill Team starter box which was awesome because I was just talking to friends about all starting up a KT and now I don't have to buy it!
• The Leviathan won Bronze in the Masters division. This was the first year of the three painting levels.. Apprentice, Journeymen and Master, they also take the best of your entries in each class so the Leviathan was the chosen one as both my entries in the vehicle category. There was a lot of entries this year with the split ranks which was nice to see a lot of people enter and were very excited. The judges said this year Master class was going to be very picky so I was pretty nervous. I only shot for finalist and as long as I get there I'm pretty happy but the Leviathan pulled out a Bronze! Which was awesome.
• The Display won best lighting.
• And probably one of the biggest surprises was my army took 3rd in the Army Painter Convention wide Best Painted Army award! So many awesome armies there and coming in third was an honor!

It was an amazing Nova 2018! .. It was cool winning things here and there but the best part of the event was hanging out with friends. Most of which I only see at Nova but it doesn't matter.. it's like we were hanging out just last week.