You're kidding me, right? the contest model is a dwarf?

Ok, so I'm racist...

I hate dwarves.

They are dumb, slow, dumpy, and drink too much beer. I never in a million years thought I'd be spending upwards of 10 hours painting one... One of the local GW stores was having a painting contest, and were giving away an undisclosed model, which you then had a week to paint up. Entering the contest gave you a raffle ticket to win a free painted army, and the winner would get free product.

I walked in to get the model, (and picked up some defense lines that I want to use for an arbites precinct that is shaping up) and found out, to my chagrin, that it was a limited edition dwarf champion... for falk's sake... seriously???

I almost said: "thanks, but no thanks", but I figured it was worth a shot, and nothing was going to be more testing of my abilities and focus than trying to paint up something so silly looking as a gigantic beard on legs.

I knew that I would have to do something to make it more fun, so I decided to turn it into a project incorporating something I could relate to... goblins!

Since it was a contest model revolving around a dwarf, I decided that I should probably NOT have the dwarf getting chopped in half, although I will admit, I was very tempted...

I took an older edition herder model, and hacked up the arms, and put a newer night goblin shield and sword on it... There was excessive building up for the arm and blood/entrails/guts... I didn't get a great shot of the goblin from the front when taking the pictures, but I think that for one of my first real sculpts, the arm came out pretty decently... Up until this point, I had only used 2 part modeling epoxy for fixing holes, and smoothing out joints/etc.

I took a couple of in progress pictures, and then a couple of the finished project. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, and I can say that I have completed something I never thought I would ever work on... a dwarf champion.

Enjoy!

p.s. oh, I won a core box of my choice, but I didn't win the raffle, which was... guess what?

A dwarf army.

Not winning that prize has never felt better!

preliminary work on the gobbo

blood and guts

the finished product