PART I

What a weekend! The excitement has gone but the feeling of awe has settled deep in my being. I still have a hard time believing I won six demons at this years US Games day. I have always believed that if I went to Games day I would enter as many categories as possible so I would have a better chance of taking home at least one trophy. This shotgun approach, while reasonable on paper is very difficult to make a reality. Time is the most important commodity we have and I just spent 5 months of my life for this endeavor. In those 5 months I did over 1000 hours on nine entries [I only took 8]. If you do the math this is an average of 50 hours a week for 20 weeks. I also work full time so most evenings were filled with painting and weekends went by in the blur of a brush.

I walked the fine line of a controlled burn out for the majority of the last month and as it is, now I am interested in converting again but painting seems difficult to imagine. We shall see. As some of you know I also paint professionally on the side and I must say that the endurance required to do armies pales in comparison to that required to do uber models.

Was it worth it…? I feel that it was. In one weekend I have joined the elite rank of golden demon winners and even the elite of the elite as a multiple gold winner. I knew I was a good painter and have been told by many others that I am a good painter. Now I have been judged by those I respect and I came out with more than I would have allowed myself to imagine. I have been told by another very respectable Golden Demon winner that winning demons doesn’t matter…I disagreed then and I still disagree. I feel that the validation of style and talent to yourself as well as others is quite important. This is the big show where our art is judged and our soul is laid bare [a bit metaphysical but true]. Judging art is extremely difficult and being judged is also extremely stressful.

I decided long before I knew I would win any trophies to record how I painted my entries since they would be the best models I had ever done. I did this in 2 ways: I have a photo record of 189 pictures taken throughout the entire process and I noted how I did what while painting the figures. This record keeping, while disruptive to my normal creative process, actually helped me in the end. I was able to see what I did at a certain stage and to see how I went from point A to B. The breaks for photos and note taking also allowed me more time to formulate my next step.

The model with the most impact has to be the Forge World Abaddon. He was too big to put in a box so I carried him to registration. He was like a magnet pulling other painters to observe and comment. While I was quite flattered I was also quite nervous about all the attention since the resin is quite brittle and it takes almost no contact to cause something to break. I would like to relate the experience of painting this awesome model in a how-to article. It will show how I do what I do and what goes through my mind as I do it. Remember that it took me 160+ hours to paint this model and while some of the techniques are arduous they all aided in Abaddon placing 2nd in Large Model at this years USGD.

I started Abaddon a few months before I purchased him. That is, I fell in love with the model and formulated a plan of attack the moment I saw him on the Forge World site. I decided that since he is chaos undivided I wanted to impart that in how I painted him. So while all the colors work well on the model and are for the most part separated by vast expanses of black armour I used a very broad paint palette. I also wanted him to have silver trim on his armour since that is how the Black Legion’s armour looks. The gold trim, while nice doesn’t tie in with his chapter enough for my taste so that was the first major conceptual difference between the way GW paints him and how I saw him looking.

I purchased Abaddon at a retail GW store while on business. When I got him home I washed all the pieces in warm soapy water, rinsed them and left them to dry. I did this to make sure that the large areas were free from finger oils and dust so the primer would adhere better. I rarely do this on a standard sized model but Abaddon is so big that any and all primer trouble would be very apparent.