Saturday 24 December 2022

A Tale of Two Santas: Chaos Noctilith Crown

 Welcome back to the Vault, and a very Happy Christmas to you all. Regular readers will appreciate I haven't posted in a while; I've made some priority changes to my schedule in the last couple of months and whilst I am blogging less I am painting more. There is a veritable back log of Iron Warriors to share in upcoming posts.

I've been involved in a Christmas painting challenge. In 2020 a number of my friends participated in a "Tale of Four Santas" producing painted models as gifts for each other. This year we revisited the challenge in a slightly different manner; each participant would keep the model but the particular miniature had to be inspired by the lyrics of the "The Twelve Days of Christmas". 

For me there was an obvious choice; the Chaos Noctilith Crown aka the Stargate. The central ring would serve wonderfully as a Gold Ring. 

Overall I'm pretty pleased with how the model turned out, particularly the glowing runes! Decent light really catches the metallic paint and makes it pop.

Bit of a frustrating build; whilst the circles are symmetrical in terms of runes facing each other top and bottom, there is only one way to slot the base to the model and I didn't appreciate that. Should have paid closer attention to the build instructions.

There was a lot of experimentation/learning with this model as well:

  • First time using an airbrush (mainly for priming and the silver on the pedestal)
  • First time using a number of Vallejo paints (applied by both airbrush and normal brush), and including Vallejo model wash for weathering.
With hindsight I should probably painted in subassemblies (you live and learn), and I didn't really appreciate how big the model was until I'd actually built it. Screw building/painting 5 of them just to totally match the Christmas song! 

I really like the blue glow plasma coils in the centre of each gold section.


And finally here's a pic with a regular mini for scale.


Will I win the bragging rights in the challenge? I'll let you know in a future post.

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