Space Marine Painting Competition - Completed

A few posts back I showed my work in progress entries for the painting competition. I didn't get straight back to it as intended due to other things getting in he way, but I completed the paint-jobs and took them to the store to enter them.

Here's my thoughts on how they turned out:

I think he two different whites turned out quite well on pauldrons of the miniatures. The Guardian of Celeres on the left started from a pale grey base colour, the Angel Revenant on the right started from a bone base colour.

I wanted the bases to set them apart a little too, so one got a very light, dry dusty base using weathering powders. And the other got a wet muddy base by mixing weathering powders with a little gloss varnish.

I had a lot of fun with the freehand, it's something I haven't done very often in the past. The Guardian of Celeres chapter symbol on the left was challenging to get the lines straight, but turned out okay, the Angel Revenent symbol you saw in the last post just got another lighter highlight to finish.

I liked how the tactical symbols turned out. A lot neater than I was expecting, the numerals too. I think this has given me a little more confidence to try and freehand the squad symbols on any future marines I paint for my own collection.

While I was finishing off the two marines from the last post my two youngest children wanted to paint with me. So I gave them a Space Marine figure and they sat painting an entry each too. The one on the left was painted by my son Caine aged 6, the one on the right by Rhiannon aged 8. They enjoyed it quite a lot and want to know when they can have some models and paint with me again.

And since I'd already pretty much finished my two entries and the kids wanted me to paint with them I grabbed another spare marine and started again. I decided this one was purely for fun. I undercoated it solid white and decided I was going to see what I could do using only the Winsor & Newton inks.

I love how the ink dries receding from the edges of the armour leaving natural highlights. And it was a simple matter to use a cotton bud to gently rub away ink from the highest raised points to strengthen highlights too.

And because I was being quick and just having some fun with this one I decided to skip trying to paint the freehand on and grabbed a fine-line pen and started to quickly doodle the details on the pads.

Pen drawing is something else I haven't done very much of in the past on miniatures, I like how the pen drawn freehand has a similar organic feel as painting freehand symbols, but is a bit easier to apply. I may experiment with this again in future, with some of the coloured fine-liner pens I have in my art supplies,

With him taking on a very definite Blanchitsu quality in my eyes I decided a dusty orange wasteland look for his base was the only logical thing to do. I really liked the overall glossy finish too.

So there we have it. I finished my two original entries and ended up with a thrid I just splashed some colour onto while painting with my children. And truth be told I think I had a lot more fun with that third marine than the two I was trying to paint carefully. Just being able to let loose and have fun pushing colour around was great.

I think it turned out really well for a miniature that was painted almost entirely from start to finish using only inks (I did have to use a touch of metallic paint to finish some small details). I like the look of it so much that I'm considering painting up a squad of Space Marines in the same scheme.

I think I may use that technique and look on the Space Marine Terminators in my Space Hulk boxed set too for my board game project when I finally get around to painting that set.

All in all, it was a nice, fun little project to get my creative juices going again. Now I can start on some of the other things I need to work on.

Let me know what you think in the comments below and I'll be back with updates of my other projects soon.

Until then, take care.