Completing my W’adrhŭn

How I’d gotten this far without doing the leather was confusing but immediately filling me with regret as I realised that meant I now had to be super careful not to ruin my feathers and skin, there was HOURS in this model at this point, perhaps 10hours atleast.

The base is a rather simply dry brushing job, the dirt was actulally Army Painter Speedpaint and here’s the thing, Speedpaint is actually used in a number of area’s, I was shocked at how well they look along side the regular paints, it doesnt have that stand out quality that contrast does which was a nice surprise.
I’ve been using them for a while now as part of a long term test I’ve been preparing, this project was the first time the reactivation actually happened but it was on the pallet and not the model thankfully

Wait what’s this.. Oooh no, this was the wrong queen, now I have another one to paint..

Oh well I got stuff done and the project is started in… and I havent said this publically in a while..  In a way I am very genuinely proud of, the highlight of the black feathers might have done a little too far but it was supposed to be inspired by rather than a copy of, I can always darken them down later if I need to, for now I am leaving it because I am happy.

So here’s where the truth comes out, Friday night actually started with the Matriach Queen (which I thought was the rider and I didn’t realise it wasnt until afterwards that I realised this was the individual models.. haha

So I wasn’t entirely unhappy with this one, the skin blending could certainly be better but most of the skin was in hard to reach places, making the boke a jade was a personal choice for this character in particular rather than something that was intended to go across the entire force. Something I might actually use elsewhere as time continues. But something felt off and it was the jade itself, I had started on a brighter green than I should have but ultimately it wasnt until I showed my house mate and he mentioned that the green and the blue together didn’t make it balance that I realised, the green feathers ontop of her head were too much, THEY needed to change.

I did also completely repaint the jade to make the blending work better

Inspiration is an annoying thing, it just strikes. Oooh a cassowary could be a fun thing to base the Apex Predator on and so I began to work in my head what that could look like given you know a T-Rex and a Cassowary look nothing alike but given they’re pretty much referring to locally as the closest modern day equilivent to the raptor.

This helped me decide firstly on the skintones I wanted to use, I was going to stick with grey, dull and uninteresting quite deliberately as the flair and the excitement would all come from the decorations, the feathers the weapons etc etc Almost as if the W’adrhŭn was trying to compensate for the fact their creators had not ‘finished’ them.

So far things were going well, at this point I think I had stopped painting 3 times for the day only to pick it back up again and it would continue until 2am an entire day of hobby feeling like it was making up for a year of delays.

To some extent it feels silly to start with the Apex Predator but in my next post I will show you that I actually didn’t, I might have fibbed ever so slightly

A week and a half ago I dropped and ruined my airbrush, hooked pin and ruined the tip itself, prior to this I had primed the Apex Predator and sat it to the side because I really wanted to have a reason to paint it, it kept jumping out at me over the past few weeks.

This is the way I like to prime now a black primer, and then a heavy zenethial highlights with white acrylic ink, honestly I cannot reccoment white acrylic enough, its far more effective and easier to use than white primer is.

I touched a little on this in the project description but when I obtained a new job within the hospital at work I rewarded myself by buying into two new games. The Pandemic was really hard for a lot of people, but working within the Emergency Ward was extremely exhausting and genuinely in some ways I’m still mentally recovering.

Now I brought in Conquest with the W’adrhŭn because I mean its Orc’s riding Dinosaurs, what on earth could be cooler than that, as part of my excitement I did a full on series for Conquest concentrating on the Wadrhun that went really really well, on’ce the Wadrhun rush was off I was intending to continue through with the rest of the factions from a rules perspective but the views just didn’t justify keeping the video’s coming.

Ontop of that I made the same mistake we all did, I brought too much for that wall of plastic, because I didn’t just but Conquest and Kings of War Armada but then Gerry and Free forced me to buy Moonstone as well. Yeah I’m still blaming them for my lack of self control 😛

But enough stalling….

So the first thing that drew my attention away was the series of video’s Ben and I did on Bushido, something I’m very proud of, this was also a game we were playing a lot as well but the groups main game for a long time had been Bot War and although its not my main game I do enjoy it and these two things were the ig reason why my attention got drawn.

And then of course came the “secret project” that I discussed on a recent XLBS which is a game I am working on that really did draw a huge amount of my attention for a long time (and I have zero regrets for this one). But the bagging began a few months ago. When are we playing Conquest? Jason how much of your Conquest is playable?

I kept putting it off quite deliberately honestly I just didn’t  have the energy for it at that time and to this all started with one main problem.

One of the first thing’s I went out to grab was some cool bases from Elric Hobbies, something else I unboxed but the shipping crisis delayed everything on that front, giving me my second excuse.

And then I began to question my painting choices, I knew very very early on that I didn’t want to do green I mean green orcs are cool but everyone does them, I honestly never have but I wanted to do my own thing my first thought was a very very pale green and I even purchased the colours for the recepie ut the more I thought about it, the more I really really didnt wan’t to torture myself by picking something so hard to paint. So then my best thought was grey skin, I mean I havent seen it done for a long time and its not a skin colour done very often and then ooh what about brown.. I went in circles like this for literally months until eventually I packed the boxes away and decided on purpose to just leave it alone. There was a time I almost considered selling them.

Thankfully that thought passed when my inspiration return.

So this is why I’ve gone through this whole story with you, I mean a lot of it at first might not feel much like a hobby story but this is the thing I was leading to, during this whole ordeal what I had been dealing with was burn out, some of it was from work, some of it was self induced by trying to push too much too fast but honestly, a huge part of it came from simply not allowing myself to take time off.

Everyone has their own way of dealing with things but my honest advice if you fear you might at this point is to talk with someone, a friend, a family member, someone online, a therapist. Its a hard thing to do but something worthwhile.

In my next post I will show off the two models I painted this week for my army, and the bases of what the rest will be built around.