All about that bass

I had to break the knight down into 53 sub assemblies and that's just masochism.   I belatedly remembered that the piping/door handles were still on the sprue had to add them.  I can't believe I forgot during the build but it was deliberate, at first.  Once you release a tiny piece of model from the safety of its little sprue prison, it becomes a ticking time bomb.  Just waiting for that perfect opportunity to disappear discreetly down the back of the sofa.  Something you don't notice for days, even weeks and end up howling in despair and frustration because you know, for certain, that you will never see the cursed thing again and now the model is ruined.

All cut up and finding the negative spaces very interesting

So the handles stayed on the sprue till the last possible moment. However, right at this very moment I am convinced that I'm going to ruin it with paint.  I spent so much time and money on this folly, it is probably a stupid idea to be going all 'experimental'.  Nevertheless, I have committed to colorshift metal paint.  And copper and bone effects.  And gloss black paint.  And door handles.  As a daemonic entity, you never know when a convenient handhold is going to save your bacon.

I used plasticard, sprues, blu tac, green stuff and lashings of glue

Then of course, there was the base which I had no idea what to do with.  It all began to seem like too much effort and I started watching shite on Netflix instead of painting.  Inspiration finally arrived in the form of plasticard.

Tidied up with milliput

The half painted knight was a bit monochrome so I added some bone effects to the head and missile lanuchers.  It seemed ok but I needed more of the same colour to set it off.

Primed and recess shaded

I thought it might be good to contrast the dark themed model with a clean base and started mucking around with a sheet of thick plasticard.  If I chopped it up, maybe I could make it look like marble.  A cream coloured marble base would pick out the bone colours nicely, I thought.  Admittedly, I'd never tried to paint marble before so this could easily end in disaster but there are a surprising number of tutorials out there.

Ok I may have gotten a bit carried away with the veins.  And you can't tell that I used Brass Scorpion.  Oh well. 

After watching them and downloading a batch of marble pictures from shutterstock I reckoned I would try my hand at a brownish, cream marble with metallic veins.  I'm not going to post the inspirational pictures because mine looks nothing like them.  It is however very acceptable and may have gotten me back into the painting mood.   I definitely enjoy building models more than painting them and the whole base only took 3 evenings from concept to paint drying.

Glazing medium is fucking magic in a bottle