Sunday, April 19, 2015

IPMS Best of the West Results

This weekend I made the trip up to Las Vegas to enter some of my work in the International Plastic Modelers' Society (IPMS) Best of the West competition. My primary entry was the recently completed Imperial Knight Titan which I had built specifically for entry into this competition.



In addition to the Knight I brought a Space Wolf Drop Pod and a Space Wolf Rhino.



Upon arriving at the venue I saw first hand just how tough the competition was. There were many entries into the Sci-Fi category including a scratch built scale model of the time machine from H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine". I am proud to say that my Titan took home 3rd place. The time machine took first, as well as fan favorite, and a highly detailed pod racer took 2nd place.


Sunday, April 5, 2015

Imperial Knight Titan

In anticipation of the IPMS Best of the West model show I wanted to do something big so I picked up an Imperial Knight Titan. I figured that it would not only make a great contest entry, I could use it in my Imperial Army when playing 40k.

This model is a great one. It is incredibly detailed although it was lacking one major component, it didn't have a cockpit. I decided to create one from scratch and I detailed my process in an earlier post which can be found here.

I completed the cockpit in its entirety before beginning any of the paint work on the remainder of the model. The endoskeleton came first. I primed it black and dry brushed it in metallics working from dark to light. Brass details were painted accordingly and the exhausts received a heat treatment. Light metallics were added to the pistons, a few additional details were painted and the entire skeleton received a gloss coat, followed by a burnt umber oil wash followed by dullcote. After that I detailed the joints and pistons with some AK Interactive fuel stain to give that greasy look.



The heat effect was achieved by airbrushing progressive layers of Tamiya clear colors in blue, yellow, and red.

I debated for quite a while on the color pattern and house of the knight. I chose a deep yellow and blue with red accents. The yellow was achieved with army painter yellow and red. The blue was a mix of Games Workshop regal blue and white. Both colors were airbrushed over grey primer in progressively lighter coats. I learned that in the future it is best to mix far more of a color than you need. Trying to mix a color again after the fact is hard as hell. I had to strip and repaint a couple of pieces twice as I got the color right.

After all the painting was finished a gloss coat was applied and decals laid down. Micro Set and Micro Sol make a world of difference in the appearance of decals. After the decals I used the sponge technique to apply chipping effects to the painted areas. Another gloss coat was laid down and everything received a wash of burnt umber followed by black wash on the rivets and other details.










I added rings and chains to all the loops.


For the base I chose to make a small drainage culvert along with some battle debri. The corrugated pipe is cable wrap, the wheel is a resin cast of one from my Venator kit, the debri is a piece of a Leman Russ sponson and the Chaos Space Marine is from some bits I had and the Space Wolf Lord kit. To create the ditch I dremeled out the path and added some contours using white glue. I painted the rest of the base with a white glue and sand mixture, drybrushed it all in several tones of browns and greys, and added some various grasses and flocking. I made the guts from the marine out of green stuff. I painted the details and added a blue wash to the marine and debri. Rust weathering powders were then applied and the base was covered in dullcote.

Once all of that was completed three layers of Secret Weapon Miniatures 'Real Water' was added to the drainage ditch. After it had dried I trimmed the base in black and added two pins to post the knight in place.