Warhammer 40,000 Open Day: Some Golden Space Marines Demon Entries

I have actually been painting things! They aren't quite finished yet, though, and I still have yet more pictures from the Warhammer 40,000 Open Day. This time around, it's from the Sunday, where I had a run down the Golden Demon cabinets to get some photos of some of the entries.

This is an awesome Blood Angels Terminator that was in the staff competition, painted by Lizzie from the Peterborough store. We'd chatted a bit in the queue to get in before it opened - all the Seminar tickets had run out on the Saturday, so I got up early to make sure I got some on the Sunday. My wife had sensibly decided she liked a lie in more than going to seminars...

One of the squad entries - I really like the massively contrasted red to white style - does anyone know what's it's called. I think it looks like a certain type of comic book, but I don't know if there's a name for it.

Here's an Ultramarines entry to the squad category.

Here's another Ultramarines squad - sadly let down by my awful lack of photography skills.

The vehicles section was heavily contested. This is, I think, the Warhammer World exclusive Land Raider model.

I love the brass they're putting on Space Wolf Dreadnoughts at the moment - it goes really well with the grey blue.

A Chaplain Dreadnought. Black is a hard colour, and they've done some interesting weathering on the base, too.

I have a lot of time for this sort of sea green colour.

Someone is showing off how posable the Contemptor kit is... Again, my awful photography letting down a well done model.

Here, the Contemptor's hand is resting on the scenery.

More Contemptors! This one with a lot of hand painted battle damage. The Contemptor is a good model for painters to show off their skills, so you see a lot of them in Golden Demon.

Fellblades are also popular - and they have big areas to show off things like weathering.

Another well painted Fellblade.

Murderfang, bless his cotton socks. I do like his skull mask.

Spartan Assault tank, and taking the opportunity to go White Scars and show off how well you can do white, which is a difficult colour to do.

On to the Young Blood category. These are all done by under 16s.

The skill with which some of these are put together is breathtaking considering the age of the competitors!

I certainly couldn't have freehanded the name as well as that at that age - I'd be hard pressed to do so now!

There's a lot of really good entries!

Even the "OKish" entries like this one are still really good. Very impressed with the standard of entry by the younger painters.

This diorama was in the open category. I really like it.

It shows a group of Dark Angels attacking some chaos forces.

There's tons of little details, like this chap with a censor near the bottom, coming of a door near a pool of stagnant water.

All the while, his colleague is racing ahead, probably to stop some evil ritual.

However, this was the winning Open entry. It's amazingly done. If my photography was up to scratch, you'd be able to see that there's little red reflections in things like the assault cannon barrels where the other Marines reflections would be. A really worthy winner, and worth finding a good picture of!

Warhammer 40,000 Open Day - Exhibition - Armies on Parade Display

More pictures taken while I was at the Warhammer 40,000 Open Day at Warhammer World. This time, the exhibition of Armies of Parade entrants.

First up is an internet famous one! This is an amazing Dark Eldar display piece done by James Taro. I think it's a bit of a shame that there wasn't a national Armies on Parade competition last year or this year, as I think this would have been a serious contender for winning last year.

I like Orks, and I'm very fond of irresponsible giant land ships. This board has both. It doesn't look great from a distance as the multi-coloured metal plates break up the outline a lot, but it's really nice.

Here's an awesome chaos board, with a lot of work gone into customising the board to add the chaos star.

An awesome chaos daemons board, invading an Imperial city. Some of the daemons have had some green stuff work done to change their faces.

This Ork board is apparently inspired by the old Deff Skwadron comic.

Nice little Grey Knight force working alongside some Storm Troopers. Coteaz supervises from the building on the back.

A nice simple Adeptus Mechanicus and Skitarii board - really like the rusted pipes and weathering.

This is a Tomb Kings / Nagash Age of Sigmar board - the idea of the column of skeletons coming out of the Realmgate is a really nice one.

If you look closely, you can also see some spirit hosts just behind the portal, painted in the same colours. I really like that effect.

Bit of a Space Hulk vibe going on here...

An oldie but a goodie - one of the White Dwarf team's Empire board.

Warhammer 40,000 Open Day - The Exhibition Halls

I hope to get a little more up to date with processing all my pictures from Cool Things I Did over past weekends, but I'm still trawling through a lot of photos!

This post - what we saw in the exhibition halls as we wandered around them on Saturday afternoon at the 40K Open Day.

First up, this is the new Age of Sigmar display that had been added since we'd last arrived. There were giant floating islands, with Stormcast Eternals and Chaos forces fighting over it.

There was a massive, epic presence to it. The display really does look like some of the art work. For me, it emphasised the very different style and theme of Age of Sigmar, as opposed to the Old World. More high fantasy, almost to the point of heavy metal album covers.

While it is different to the Old World, I think my conclusion is that I like this. I like the look, I like the themes, and I like how it's developing. It's a more high fantasy world, and it's more flexible in what you can do with it. I still love the Old World setting, but don't particularly think one or the other is a "better" setting.

But, to return to the display, it's really well put together and really brings to life the new setting. While I might not be all that enthused about Stormcast Eternals, I am looking

Ironically, I took this photo as i was more interested in how they'd painted up the arcane ruins than I was in the Khornate demon chariot in front of it...

 
And here's another interesting use of scenery - converting a ruined tower to have teeth so it's clearly very chaos mutated.

 
I'm not sure I remember this converted Baneblade being here the first time I came around. I mostly took the photo because I kind of want one. The use of the wings is really clever.

But this? This is genius. I am unsure if I could justify the expense of a winged Valkyrie, but I kind of want one for my Inquisition force...

 
I think the Death Korps display is new, though. It's a lovely, weathered display that almost calls to mind historical displays in places.

This was mostly taken for scenery ideas, I will admit, but thought people might be interested in how it looks.

I didn't take many pictures of the Eldar display last time, so I tried taking a couple more this time.

Still, I'm not sure what it is, but Eldar versus Tyranids just doesn't really interest me. My camera frames some nice shots, but I don't get excited about it in the same way as I do at some of the other displays.

Here's the studio Emperor's Children army - photo mostly taken because I like the pink transition on their shoulder pads and I'm thinking about using it with my Chaos Marines.

Is this a new thing, or an old Forge World thing? I don't know Tau all that well and I'm too lazy to google it.

Here's the new Tau / Mechanicus display, starting off with the massive Forge World Manta on a landing pad. A decision was made that there was no good way to make it look awesome flying...

Here's bits of the new Tau defensive scenery, with big artillery walkers in the background.

Meanwhile, there's large rail guns and small turrets with missiles...

And advancing on them are a massive force of Mechanicus - Titans, Knights and an Ordinatus.

I mostly took this photo to post on twitter making Monty Python Black Knight jokes. I'm easily amused.