First off, a big congratulations to Mathieu Fontaine, AKA akaranseth, and the rest of Team Montreal with their Golden Demon entries at Games Day Toronto! Mathieu's got pictures of his entries posted on his blog - two Silver Demons in the 40K Single Figure and Vehicle categories and a very much-deserved Gold in the 40K Monster category for his Khornate Terminator Lord on a Juggernaut. I've been following the progress on the Terminator Lord and Juggernaut for some time over in the Bolter & Chainsword's Works in Progress Forum (and to a lesser extent on the Team Canada forum site) and it's a beautiful piece. As an aside, that's actually the first time I've seen (or noticed in color) the back end of the fairly new Forge World Nurgle Blight Drone, and I have to say I'm much more impressed with the model now than I was initially - of course, it no doubt helps that Mathieu painted his excellently.
For nigh the past 4 months, there's been a 40K-centered painting competition going on over at the RelicNews Painting & Modeling Forum. I'm entered in several categories - squad, single figure, and vehicle - and all in the upper level painting tier. (Well, don't tell any of them... but due to being out of work coupled with financial worries, the birth of our son with gastric reflux in February, and me now being a stay-at-home dad out of necessity's sake - although that's not bad in and of itself - I've had very little time for painting and there's likely a snowball's chance of my completing any of my projects in time for the upcoming deadline of the 27th here. Did I mention they're all essentially converted, some extensively?)
Ah well... I do plan on following through with all the stuff I was going to enter, and I figger the quickest piece to work on is one of the Forge World Vraksian Renegade Psykers:
I'm not adjusting the figure any - I like him just fine. I ideally plan on using the color scheme I worked out for a corrupted Imperial Guard force based on "The Shriven," from Dan Abnett's first Gaunt's Ghosts novel. The IG force didn't quite pan out (yet), but this psyker's going to see completion if I have to explode people's heads with my mind to do it. Oh yeah, and his base is in the process of conversion with a concept I'm not quite sure if I'll be able to pull off - those are the most fun, though, aren't they? It also involves "explosions!" (This sort of thing happens fairly often when I get a sudden inspiration. I couldn't just stop with the original "simple" plan of painting up Gandalf with object source lighting from his staff, for example, when I decided to enter the Golden Demons for the first time in Chicago in 2007 - I ended up with him converted and standing with staff held aloft and on an angle at the end of a counterbalanced 15" bridge span so as to resemble the "confronting the Balrog" scene from The Fellowship of the Ring.)
So far as bases go, I recently received some test resin bases for "review" as it were, from a friend. (He's in the end stages of developing a line of self-cast custom basing for sale, but it's not "official" yet, so I'll just say that the stuff I received is all good, well-detailed, and that I would be perfectly happy using them for some of my display pieces.) Now, until this point I'd never actually used pre-sculpted decorative bases standalone as I'm generally used to adding my own texture and scenery, but I have to say I was definitely impressed with the crispness in appearance of the details and the overall busy-but-minimalist style - 2 different styles, actually.
I did a bit of customization to it, at least from the standpoint of fitting it to a 25mm GW slottabase slightly offset, but the original resin basing is exactly the theme I'm aiming for with a Chaos Warband I've got in progress, The Disciples of the Four - I'm aiming for urban ruins and debris with the occasional odd patch of cracked asphalt and broken, cratered ground. Eventually I'd like a full scenic army display tray with metal insets for magnetized bases and all the fixin's... but my (short term) goal, at least with these guys, is to actually finish a legitimate 500 point playable force. In the 3-odd years since getting back into painting, I've done a lot of army "test" figures, but always seem to end up going overboard and putting more work and detail into them than I really should if I want to actually end up with a playable force some time in the next century. Anyways, the long and the short of it is that I am now a definite fan of these resin bases and can't wait to put the rest of my sample ones to use! Here's a picture of the base so far:
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