Trygon!!!

Last weekend contained two events for me, the Anderson Paint fest and the Warpstone Painting Contest. The Warstone contest was held at local GW stores across the country, with the challenge to paint one of the new Trygon's in a weekend. At my local GW, this entailed a time line of Noon on Saturday, with judging at 4pm on Sunday. That's right, for those mathematicians out there, that's 28 hours. Pictures of my Trygon follow:








I have to say that I was very impressed with the overall contest. There were 15 people pre-signed up for the challenge and there were 12 Trygons on the table for judging. I kick myself for not getting great pictures, but I can say that my model was in the bottom 3 on quality (in my opinion). There are a couple techniques and "tricks" that I picked up to improve my model in the future. First of those is gloss varnish on the shell/carapace. The majority of the models, and 3 of the 4 winners (1st place, 2nd place, and a tie for 3rd) had their carapace glossed. This had a couple effects I noticed. First, it drew the eye to the model. Second, it seemed to hide small blemish's and mistakes on the carapace.

The second technique which was on all 4 of the winning models was "hash's" painted onto the shell. This is a style that seems to be very popular and certainly showed its strength in this contest. Here is a sample picture of what I mean:



I am not sure how much affect this will have on my Eldar models, I expect very little. Its a technique that is very suited for carapace/shell but I do not feel it fits with the Eldar models. This is something I will have to think about.

Anderson Painting Fest
In addition to assembling and painting my Trygon for the paint competition, I also had the first Anderson Painting Fest on Saturday. The idea was to get a group of friends together specifically for painting in a group. I offered drink, food, and snacks along with the use of my paints (I have the full GW paint collection) and my Spray gun/Compressor for the groups use. In exchange, I asked that the focus be on painting the large collection of unpainted terrain that I have. Disapointingly, this was not a huge success. Of the 8 people invited, only 2 showed up. Now, the three of us had a great time working on both terrain and our Trygons and actually completed 7 pieces of terrain. This still leaves a fair amount in the bin, but it was a definite chunk.

So I need to do some thinking if I plan to do this again. Overall, the initial idea seemed to be well-received but there were a variety of reasons people did not make it. Moving past those who were sick, I need contemplate where things went sideways.