4 years of 40k painting in review, Part 4

Welcome back to part 4 as we go into the painting challenges of painting up my first vehicles for my army. I had a total of three dreadnoughts but only fully completed 1 of them in time for the event. The other two where base coated and underway to get detailed. As I never used all three again I never finished them up. Something to do when I go back to edge highlight this army in the future. This was my first time using any forgeworld item, having purchased some direct from forgeworld since then I am pretty sure I got recasts off ebay but they worked and I could afford them so I guess good enough. I wanted to stick with the same color scheme as the purifiers for these vehicles, first mistake. Looking back on these some two years later I really should have done the standard color scheme with the vehicles. Metallic would have looked much better than flat black everywhere. that said the details did come out well. I think edge highlighting the models and applying a thinned out gloss coat to create the enameled effect may int he end greatly improve them.

I hated painting these to be honest all the large flat areas where a nightmare to paint with brushes without leaving brush strokes on the model. To combat this I used a lot of color primers with masking tape to try and avoid it. The white and red seen on the rhinos for example was done using some krylon white and red paint with some blue tape masking. the color is a more varnished/shinney than I really wanted but hand brushing over them gave me bad streaks. (I had yet to discover the wonderful GW basecoat red paint). I picked out all the details I could but in the end I was and am not real happy with these vehicles.

On the plus side being so disheartened with the results did drive me to a future hobby painting tool, my airbrush, and goaded me on to learn to use it beyond just making my own cheap color primers. 

A large difference from this event over our local monthlies is the scoring and various awards. Instead of simply having a best general and best sport as is our norm for the monthly, the Standish Standoff had instead 4 core trophies for the tournament along with an individual painting competition occurring simultaneously with the tournament. Scoring for the tournament itself consisted of game points (roughly 30% the points), army paint score (25%), and sportsman score (50%ish) and a pub quiz (about 5%). A much larger focus on hobby. With 6 painting categories to enter in, most the awards had nothing to do with game performance. We had a Best Overall, Best General, Best Painted Army, and Best Sport along with the painting competition for individual entries. 

Unlike any other previous organized game event I had participated in up to this point I pretty much played the exact same army to the event points for around 6 months prior to the event. I understood my army inside and out and really got to focus on playing better with this force rather than constantly rolling thru different forces on a bi-weekly to monthly bases like I did with Malifaux, and to a lesser extent Confrontation and AT-43 before that.