Painting a Death Company Dreadnought

Introducing Old Shatter Hands! Jawaballs Productions is proud to announce the first guest writer on The Blood Angels and Warhammer 40k. He has been a frequent commenter and contributer for years, and now it is official. I have had the pleasure to meet and play with him personally and am looking forward to many more articles from him to come as he develops his own Blood Angels army.

Jawaballs

My debut on The Blood Angels and Warhammer 40k Blog will be ushered in by this magnificent robot, the Death Company Dreadnought. Great in girth and stature, this fellow is going to make a great addition to my Blood Angels force. Having played him only once in a game, I don't have much to say about him tactically, but I know he'll make a mess of any heretical Space Marines that get in his way. Painting-wise this was a surprisingly quick job because I limited my palette to black, red, bone and metallic colors. 

So much of painting is method, process and the order of things. The first thing I did was paint all the parts I wanted metal. These are back portions of the model, all the mechanical bits and the gun barrels. I coated them in Boltgun Metal, let it dry and then did a liberal wash of Badab Black. When that was dry, I then did another wash of Badab Black. Let that dry and then highlightted the edges with Boltgun Metal again. I then picked out little highlights with Mithril Silver here and there.

Next it was time to paint the markings and insignias. For the wounds on Sanguinius, I painted an X with Mecharite Red, then did a coat of Vallejo Carmine Red. I tightened it up by outlining it with Chaos Black, then I highlighted it with Blazing Orange. 

To make this dreadnought a true Blood Angels creation, I ordered Blood Angels Etched Brass from Forge World along with the kit. The Crux Terminatus on his right chest-plate signifies this Dreadnought as once part of the Blood Angels 1st Company before succumbing to the Black Rage, reaching near-death and then being encased in a mechanical body. The details on the Etched Brass are extremely fine and you need to make sure you have watered down your paints when painting them as you can easily lose the detail with thicker paint. I lightly brushed on Khemri Brown and cleaned up any mistakes with Black. Then I took thinned down Bleached Bone and painted it on, as though light was coming top-down. Then I thinned out some Skull White and painted the top portions to complete the look. Then I painted the blood drop Carmine Red, highlighted it slightly with Blazing Orange and painted in a dot of Skull White. 

Once I had painted all of the details and insignias, I started on highlighting the black. I mixed 2:1 Chaos Black with Shadow Grey and brushed on light highlights on the edges of the armor plates. I used a semi-thin brush for this. Then I took Shadow Grey mixed it with Skull White about 1:1. I made sure it was thinned down enough as I only wanted to produce thin lines on the hard edges of the model. I took my smallest brush to paint these on. You have to exercise a certain about of restraint when painting black and I made sure to leave most of the black as a flat color. Once that was done, I moved on to the claws. I wanted these to rally stand out but I wanted to keep an element of realism so I decided not to painted bright blue or red, and instead chose a metallic color with hints of red. 

I painted the claws Boltgun Metal and then washed them with Badab Black. I waited for the wash to dry and I highlighted with Boltgun Metal, followed by Mithril Silver. Then I grabbed my pot of Dark Flesh. I took some out and watered it down to the consistency of a wash. I lightly feathered on the Dark Flesh wash on the claws. I waited for that to dry, then I feathered on some more of my Dark Flesh wash and repeated this process until I had nearly flat Dark Flesh at the base of the claws. To clean it up a bit, I highlighted with Mithril Silver once more. I really liked how this looked and I had leftover Dark Flesh wash so I went around on the metallic parts of the model and brushed in the color. It added a layer of corrosion to the metal and added hints of red here and then. It really worked well. 

I painted the gold Imperial Aquillas and purity seals, nothing special here but when that was complete I was done. This towering behemoth is ready to return to service for the Emperor.