Salamander Contemptor Dreadnought - Complete!

Burn, baby burn.

I stayed up too late last night finishing my Salamanders Contemptor. This makes for painted dreadnought number eight. I...I think I may have a problem...

This was a fun way to get back to my Salamanders for a bit. This article, courtesy Dark Future Games, was a big help in terms of modeling and posing my Salamander Contemptor. I don't think I necessarily did a great job with the dynamism, but I'm glad I forced myself to try. I'm super guilty of putting things in quite static poses. In addition, I tried out brass etch for the first time. I didn't go too crazy with the stuff, but I like the detail it adds. I particularly like the flame icon on the kneepad.

 

Painting this contemptor was fairly straightforward. It all started with black primer, followed by a basecoat of the Salamanders standby, Snot Green (using my airbrush). After that it was a matter of blocking out metallic or black areas, and painting on details. The 'silvery' areas are my usual Boltgun, Badab Wash, Boltgun drybrush, and finally a Mithril Silver edge highlight. Gold areas start with a 50/50 mix of Scorched Brown and Shining Gold. I then do a heavy-ish drybrush of Shining Gold. Wash Devlan Mud, then light drybrush and/or edge highlight with Shining Gold again. This also included all the rivets on this dude (ugh).

The multimelta and heavy flamer both show my standard scorching. After painting the metal, I drybrush Shining Gold, followed by drybrushing of Scorched Brown then Chaos Black.

Like all my dreadnoughts lately, I weathered this model using sponged-on Chaos Black, followed by stippling of Boltgun Metal. I then went the extra step on this guy and highlighted the stippling with Mithril Silver. I also highlighted all the edges- green areas got a mix of Snot Green and Golden Yellow with a drop of Menoth White Highlight. I think I didn't make the mix as bright as usual, which means the highlights are harder to see. But they're on there, and basically there was no way I was doing a 2nd layer of edge highlights on this guy. I was reaching my limit with this model already. I prefer subtle edge highlights anyway.

My base is the usual for my 40k stuff- Adeptus Battlegrey drybrush followed by a lighter drybrush of Astronomican Grey. I went too heavy with the greys though, more painting a basecoat of Adeptus then drybrushing. It'd been too long since I based a 40k model I guess. Still, it shouldn't stick out too much from the rest of the army. Also featured on the base are the rusted, half-buried remains of a Killa Kan. I spent way too much time hacking up and painting something that wound up mostly covered in snow. Oh well!  A cool model deserves a special base.

So that's it for me. Looking forward to seeing the remainder of these contemptor dreadnoughts!