Painting Competition Entry

My FLGS is holding a painting competition in conjunction with a tournament today.  Unfortunately, I can't attend the tournament because today is my anniversary and we have plans.  I was still able to enter the painting competition.

The rules were that you had to buy a model/unit from the store.  The minimum was $25, which eliminated most of the smaller characters.  The judging will be done by the tournament attendees today.  I bought all of my seekers from the store, but only submitted one box, because that's all I was able to complete.  I'm extremely pleased with how they turned out.

I ended up using the instrument and standard from the Daemonettes box, rather than the one from the seekers box for two reasons.  First, the magnet I used for the instrument stood out a little for the seeker so it wouldn't lie flush with the model.  Second, the seeker standard is mostly bare and would need some freehand work, which is not a skill I posses.  I also plan on using the center head for a herald at some point, but she'll count as a heartseeker for now.  Some of the heads and arms are mixes from the seeker and daemonette box.  I did this primarily to avoid repeating the same arm poses and the same heads.  I aim to have unique heads in each squad of 20, which is easy enough to do.  I think there are around 25-30 distinct Slaanesh heads between the heralds, seekers, daemonettes, and chariots, not to mention easy, minor conversion work that can be done (swap a top-knot to a different head, etc).

The process I went through is pretty involved.  The riders are painted separately from the mounts.  The process I used is the same as the daemonettes, with only minor differences.  I did take more care with highlights than I would normally in a troop choice (that wasn't going to be submitted for a painting competition).  I started with a single mount and worked through a process.  Luckily it took me less tries than the daemonettes, since I have my color palette down.

The bases are from Tabletop-art and I was worried that they wouldn't arrive on time.  I ended up making some bases using the agrellan earth.  I had bad luck with it when I tried earlier, but really globbed it on this time.  I think I could maybe get 12 seeker bases using a bottle.  The effect was nice, but I wanted to use the bases I envisioned so thankfully my order arrived Wednesday night and I was able to get them primed and painted that evening.  They really are stunning and make the unit stand out.  the duller colors of the base make the vivid red and purples stand out.

Overall, I'm very proud of them.  For a unit with no conversions, I feel like I did solid work.  I do recall reading that painting competitions are often won by the best conversion, rather than strictly painting.  The scheme is unique and different from the 'eavy  metal team's vision.

I'll follow up with the results and a full write up of how I painted them with much better pictures.