Dreadtober is an annual painting challenge that runs every October. Pretty much every year for the last several, I hope to start on it, but never end up finishing a model. This year, despite being as busy as I have been, I decided to try and speedrun a stealth entry and see if I could get something finished in time. That way if I didn’t manage to finish anything, it wouldn’t be a(nother) “Here’s the project I’m starting but actually not going to finish” post.

So how’d I go? Did I succeed? Well, yes and no. You can see the results in the picture above, but the caveat is that while I think it’s certainly table-ready, there are a few more things I still want to do with it. Weathering, more work on the base, possibly some greenstuff or guitar-wire cables on the old-school Lascannon, and I’m also not sure if I should add some more colours to the Lascannon.

This model is, obviously, based on the original Dreadnoughts from Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader – sculpted by Bob Naismith. I’ve had this STL sitting on my PC for quite a few years now, and as I’ve now got a printer that isn’t a huge pain in the arse, it was time to break out this nostalgic bad boy and make it physical.

As a 3D printed model, you can see some of the print lines on it – I feel like they’re not as problematic on a mechanical model as they would be for something organic. I’m still pretty happy with the result, especially given that it’s an FDM print and so is much “cleaner” and more straightforward than resin printing.

After looking around online, I decided to print it at 115% as people had suggested – at that enhanced size it fits more with the current Contemptor models, which is what people tend to use these as. I guess in a 40k situation it’d be a Hellbrute, but 40k has really messed up the whole Dreadnought situation pretty badly with their model/range culls of recent times. As someone who hasn’t actually played for far too long and has no interest in competitive play, IDGAF so I’ll just use it as whatever whenever I get back to friendly games.

I may or may not add some more colour modulation as well. It is a bit tricky with a limited-palette, limited-detail model like this, but perhaps a little more brownish tint on the lower portions and some more highlights up top – though I don’t want it to look too shiny, either!

And here’s a little bit of WIP-progression from the last week or so, photographed a bit at a time. As noted here and in yesterday’s post, I haven’t really had a lot of time for blogging, and let’s be honest – none of the above photos really deserves a post of it’s own, either!

Still, this is the first 40k related thing I’ve painted in quite a long time, and the first Iron Warriors model I’ve painted in even longer. Might be time to harness some of this enthusiasm and fit some more Warhammer back into this blog!