Devil in the detail

This took far longer than it should have done.  I'm going to put it right up there with new Guilliman model in terms of being a fiddly nightmare to paint.  I wanted it to be intricate and baroque but seeing the finished product I reckon I went too far.  The base in particular is very busy and a lot of the detail is obscured.  It's difficult to tell what is actually going on.  The idea is that he is locked away in a remote, forgotten corner of the Imperium performing unethical experiments on a Canoptek Scarab.  

I should have left it at that but just kept adding more and more stuff.  He is utilising proscribed texts and has some daemon familiars helping him out under the watchful eye of the servo skull.  Taking notes with a quill pen and ink as well as keeping a fire extinguisher handy along with his trusty Volkite blaster in case things go wrong.  I even threw a spanner in the works.

But you can't even see the Scarab unless you look at the model from a very specific angle.  If I'm trying to tell a story with a vignette like this, its important to actually tell the story rather than saying, 'ooh look how teeny-tiny the details are!  How clever I am!'.  The end result has too much going on and doesn't draw the eye to a focal point like a painting would.  It's all over the place.

Despite this, I still like the model.  Its a cross between a mad scientist and a wizard and sort of painted itself.  I didn't really plan it out or think too much.  The spell book he is perusing was inspired by the Necronomicon from Evil Dead and I painted it in one session, with no do-overs or mistakes.  If I'd stopped to think about it, the whole thing would have taken days.  I started painting the cogitator and immediately realised that it was just a Sinclair Spectrum 48k with a few modifications (more 80's references. The Space Hulk C.A.T. is from 3rd Edition but it's still Space Hulk).

Maybe the little nurgling should have been green but he is leaning out to grab green Tyranidy bits whilst holding on to the tail of the greenish book familiar for balance, so I chose to paint him red.  Aside from that, I didn't really think about the colour scheme and all the practice of painting 30 odd Skitarii was extremely helpful.

So I kind of like it, despite the fact that I have a tournament in 3 weeks and no hope in hell of being ready now. There's a lot of me in this model, and not just the 80's references.  I always wanted to be a sorcerer, conducting absurd and fairly pointless experiments whilst procrastinating endlessly. There's a lot going on but much of it is irrelevant or unnecessary.  A whirl of ideas with no focus, fuelled by inner demons who pluck little pustules of evil out of the basement of the subconscious and fling them into the mix.