Table Ready: Iron Warriors Contemptor Dreadnought

[This post was originally posted to Otherverse Games & Hobbies as part of a series called Plastic to Painted, or P2P. You may see logos or references to this site and series]

Iron Murder Hornet

In the summer of 2019, after having painted almost 3,000 points of Iron Warriors in about 5 months, I joined up with a group of people dedicating those hot mid year months to Horus Heresy armies. A summer of 30K, as it was called. Most people were focusing on creating new armies or making 30K variants of their 40K armies. I created the beginnings of a White Scars army, and fashioned an Iron Warriors Contemptor Dreadnought for use in 40K. I had no plans on making a 30K Iron Warriors army as I have spent considerable time on my 40K army. I purchased two Betrayal At Calth stand-alone table top game boxes specifically for their MKIV armored Marines. These would be put into service of my 30K White Scars. Also inside each of these boxes was a Contemptor Dreadnought. Seeing as White Scars despise the sarcophagus*, I decided to use at least one of them for my Iron Warriors.

*Around this time Forgeworld would release a White Scars dreadnought. Nothing says fast attack, like a Dreadnought. Sure they could get airdropped in. But, meh.

The small issue I had with that these dreadnoughts was that they were very… loyalist. Because, of course they were. So I had to get creative. I took the dremel to the front armor, and crudely erased most of the markings. I had two of these dreads, so it gave me room for mistakes. I could just swap in a new part. Unfortunately I screwed up one really bad when the dremel slipped, and had to settle with the one that only looked okay.

Before and after. The right one would be used in my final product. I screwed up the left one pretty bad.

Next, I moved on to painting the sub-assemblies. And it was here that I went crazy with the masking tape. I am not sure of my mindset at this point, but when I look at these ‘in-progress’ pictures, and the final product, I must have had a vision of the whole damn machine being covered in hazard stripes. No sublty. Just black and yellow warning lines. Also, I used the smallest masking tape I had for some reason, so the result looked less like hazard stripes and more like a murder hornet or bumble bee.

I must have blacked out as the result of some kind of masking tape lust. I won’t even begin to try and think about how long it took me to mask all of this.
I knew as soon as I removed the tape, that I had screwed up.

So I needed to fix my err. I decided to paint over some of the “hazard stripes”. The result left me with a bunch of textured lines on the body of the dreadnought. Left over from the masking tape. At first I was pissed, and was considering scrapping the whole thing. Or at least stripping it. But then I thought, “why not use it?”. This is a millennia old war-machine that is now in the service of the dark gods. Why would it look pristine and whatnot? With that realization, I would go about crudely weathering the chassis. The finished product surely isn’t what my mental image was from the get go. But it came out OK.

The lines almost look on purpose. But that is not the case. I would grow to like those textured lines. Accidentally on purpose, eh?

In terms of painting my Iron Warriors, I use the Iron Warriors base paint, followed by liberal amounts of Nuln Oil. Simple is best. I warm all the golds with Fleshshade and use bronze’s for the other metallics. The “hazard stripes” are airbrushed on with the help of Tamiya masking tapes. Typhus Corrosion works wonders, and looks great on metallics.


Iron Murder Hornet wants a hug

I am not as enamored with the Contemptor pattern as Tyson is. I don’t know what it is that I don’t like, but they just don’t do it for me. As far as dreadnoughts go, I will always have a soft spot for the 2nd edition boxy dreads. Amongst the newer patterns that have emerged since then, the Deredeo and Leviathan patterns have a lot more character than the Contemptor do, in my opinion.

I consider this project to be a successful failure. It was a hands on project that just didn’t go as well as I had hoped it would from the onset. But in the end, the effort I put into it, combined with the end product, gave me a sense of satisfaction. And I think that is what hobbying is all about. They can’t all look like show pieces. It’s models like this that have stories attached to them. Stories that you’ll most likely never forget. Kind of like my Fire Raptor debacle.



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Robert

All of these are true except for one:

Robert is: a Hobbyist, a Music Lover, an RPG Gamer, a Mustard Lover, Chaotic Neutral, a Japanese Speaker, a Veteran, an Otaku, a Table Tennis Player, an Anime Fan, an Aviation Professional, a New York Rangers Fan, a Chaos Lover With Loyalist Tendencies.

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