Spartan Update 7 - two down, two to go.

Finally, it's finished. I have completed my knight and met the challenge we all set ourselves - to have our model painted by 19th of March. Well, I actually missed the deadline as I managed to finish it on 20th March but who cares, it's actually finished.

My last post left me with a base colour - Hawk turquoise over Incubi darkness and not much else. After looking through my available paints and asking my wife for her suggestions I settled on a dark red with a bronze trim and as you can see from the finished pictures above they go nicely together. I also dry brushed the Hawk Turquoise with the Skink Blue Dry Paint

Colour scheme idea I sent to the rest of the

dads for their thoughts.

From here it was just a case of taking my time and making sure the whole model was painted to the same standard. There is a lot to paint and without the aid of an air brush this stage took most of my time. As a dad of young twins I don't really have all that much time to spare, especially not in great chunks. I tend to have about 30 - 45mins free at a time which doesn't actually let you get much painting done, as you start to get in to it you have to stop and put everything away (or little people try to play with the cool looking robot!). This really made me struggle to get through this stage as it is very time consuming and you often feel like you haven't actually made any progress. To combat this I tried to follow James' advice from this post (link) to plan out my work and set achievable goals.

 Once I was happy with the model I wanted to try weathering...

Now, I don't usually do any sort of weathering (beyond a bit of an occasional wash and dry brush) as I quite like the clean look. However, I thought that as this is a big, good looking, model I wanted to do my best to make it one of my centre piece models and weathering was the way to do that. My first attempt didn't really work:


The markings were too deliberate and didn't have that 'natural' look I wanted. Though to be fair, the blue wasn't quite as obvious in real life.

I painted over these and decided to go with the sponge technique. Most of you probably know what this is but if you don't it is really quite a simple and easy way to weather models, you use a sponge to apply your weathering colours, lead belcher and Scorched Brownfor me, to the model . I had never used this technique before so I can attest to it being easy and effective even for first timers.



After a quick test on the leg I was happy with the result and gave the whole model a go over. I tried not to over do it (quick tip: it's always easier to add more than to take some away so go light at first and add more later if you want) and I was happy with the result. In fact, I was so happy I might go over some of my existing models and add some weathering.

That left just the base which was given a good coating of Agrellan Earth technical paint, washed with Agrax Earth Shade and dry brushed with Terminatus Stone Dry Paint. The few bits on the base were picked out and weathered appropriately (with my trusty sponge of course!) and I was done.





I have no idea how many hours I spent on this model, from putting it together, magnetising it and painting it but I am sure it has been quite a few! But now with the finished model standing before me I am more than satisfied with the outcome and am happy to admit that I enjoyed every minute of it.