Space Marine Painting Competition - paint in progress

I haven't had as much time to dedicate to my miniature hobby as I'd like over the last couple of weeks, what with spring cleaning the house, my roleplay group gathering twice a week at my place, entertaining the kids over their Easter holidays and various other day to day shenanigans.

But luckily my local comic store Narrow Escape Comics is holding a painting competition as part of the 30th anniversary of the creation of Space Marines. Games Workshop provided a load of push-fit miniatures for the competition.

We're allowed to pick up and enter as many entries as we wish, so I picked up a couple of miniatures to play around with. It's given me a little project to work on when I have a few minutes to spare from my other duties as a semi-functional human adult.

I decided either to have a go at painting chapters I've not done before and that looked interesting or come up with my own scheme. I used this pictoral guide to known Imperial Space Marine Chapters on deviantart to give me some ideas and went for two listed on there.

The Guardians of Celeres - Dark green, white pauldrons, silver aquila.

The Angels Revenant - Cobalt blue, white pauldrons, gold aquila.

I chose two pretty similar colour schemes in the end. But I thought it would be a nice little challenge to paint the white differently on both miniatures to make it a little different.

I also chose two different golds for both schemes that I thought contrasted well with their main colours. I'd also been wanting an opportunity to use my Winsor & Newton inks, which I think has worked pretty well overall,

This little project has also given me a chance to practice my freehand for the tactical symbol above and the Chapter symbol below.

You can see that I've thrown some basic colour and wash onto the bases too at this point. I'm still wondering where to go with these miniatures before I enter them. I've got a few details to finish some blending and highlights to do and the freehand on the other to complete. I'm thinking of possibly using some weathering powder on the bases and around the lower boots at the end.

Also during my spare moments I've managed to get some construction done on my Assassinorum: Execution Force miniatures for my Board Game Project which I mentioned in my last post. I'll post a proper update on that later.

I'll be back when I've done a little more on either project.

Take care.