Commander Dante - Work in Progress #3 (and final)

As the last in this series of posts on Commander Dante, there's not a whole lot more to say about remaining details. There are a few notes though, so I'll go over each in brief.

I missed talking about the belt buckle in previous posts, and yes, it was never meant to have blue tinted wings. That would be too much, and a little variety doesn't hurt.

The hidden shoulder pad I actually used a very fine pen to write his name on, although looking at it I'm sure I'd like to use a brush next time. Words are difficult to do correctly, but I'm sure a very fine brush is better suited to such detail. Where the fine pen does work great is on small dots and dashes on the purity seals (can't be seen in the photos above). This is something that can be achieved with a brush too, but using a pen is simply easier. The only downside to the pen is that the ink takes a while to dry, and has a gloss rather than a matte finish.

There was also a decal of a skull applied to the hidden shoulder pad. I used that to experiment with mostly because it would be hidden in the end anyway. The decal was perhaps unsuitable to the shoulder pad however, and suffered from that terrible problem of folding, or edges sticking out where it doesn't quite conform to the curved surface. Cutting small slits in places helps with this, but I find that it also doubles up in certain places, making the decal look "odd" on the crease lines. Painting over it can help, but only if the decal lies flat. I did use a coat of Lahmian Medium to seal the decal, touching up the edges with Auric Armour Gold to help blend everything into the underlying paint better. I definitely need more experience with decals.

Lastly here, the base. Finecast miniature bases seem to continue the tradition of coming with a large gap down the middle of the base. I used a putty similar to blu-tac to seal over this, however masking tape is actually just as effective. Given a layer or two of paint and it can be barely seen. The base here was given a layer of Armageddon Dust, followed by a drybrushing with Underhive Ash, and then a touch of Longbeard Grey drybrushed over that. The lighter colour of the grey helps break it up a bit, although certainly some other colours might help some more. I didn't want the base to overshadow the model however, and so stuck with something very simple. The texture paints work rather well - it's like painting small sand onto the base. I will experiment with texture paints more in the future.

Overall I'm fairly happy with the finish. The gold works well, and the blue tint to the wings also turned out respectable. The axe head doesn't really look how I want it to however, so I may at some point in the future do some more work there.

Now, time to apply what I've learned to other models.

  -- silly painter