Finally, Be’Lakor, the Dark Master is complete. I originally started this figure just over three years ago, as part of the original Painting December, which was a personal challenge that became the genesis for our monthly painting challenges. It’s been a rather epic battle to get up the motivation to complete him, due to all the tons of little fiddly bits, and basically, negative inertia towards the model. This is why the challenges exist. To motivate me to get models like this one completed. I based him on the rolled-edge 50mm round base, as a regular 60mm base seemed much too large, while the regular 50mm base seemed a bit.. I dunno. Boring? I didn’t have any official GW 50mm bases at the time (that I could find), so I only had those alternative ones that are a mm or two shorter. I also mounted him up on some cork to increase his height and make him look a little more imposing.

His colour scheme is different to the “official” GW one. It was inspired by a google search I did when trying to figure out how to paint him. It may have been inspired by Noridicus‘ paint scheme, over at Heresy-Online, but given that he talks about how he’s also seen this sort of scheme used, it might have been one of the models that inspired him that also inspired me. I dunno. I know that Nordicus’ model looks great, and I think my rendition also looks pretty good as well.

Finally, I thought a scale shot would be in order, as without it many of these larger models seem to be much smaller than they actually are – so here he is alongside those two bastions of model scale, a Space Marine and a Primaris Space Marine! So, in the end it took three years to get him painted. I’m not sure that it’s been worth the wait, but I’m very definitely happy to have gotten him completed finally!

…now there’s one model left from that original Painting December trio. The Marauder Giant, an otherwise wonderful model with a stupid patchwork tunic. There’s no way he’ll be completed for Dauntess/Diabolical December, but perhaps as a centrepiece model for January?