A Space Marine Lost in the Woods

At the start of the year, I made a vow to myself to push my hobby to the next level this year.

Only problem is that I have zero clue what that meant.

I’ve been in the miniature wargame hobby since late 2015/early 2016. Prior to that, the most experience I had with miniatures were games like HeroClix and Star Wars: X-Wing. Since then I’ve gotten into dozen of various miniature games, though most of them are still in their gray state of shame.

I would paint from time to time, mostly hero models. The idea of batch painting small groups of look-a-like models bored me. That did change during the pandemic when I finally got into Warhammer 40K, but that is a story for another time.

Sometime around the end of February I began joking that I was going to enter the mythical Golden Demon and take home a Slayer Sword in my first event, retiring my brushes after that. And that is when it hit me. That is what my vow meant. I was going to actually attempt to enter the most contested miniature painting competition in the world.

Only problem is, aside from some illustrative art competitions, I’ve never competitively painted before. Even worse there aren’t really any events within my area that would give me the opportunity to practice and compare myself to others. Lucky a local game store was about to fix that for me.

The premier game store in my city decided to host a painting competition to determine the official paint scheme of the store’s Space Marine army. Painters would all use the same model (the free Space Marine model GW was giving away) and could not do any kit-bashing/alterations to the model. We had roughly a month to get it done, the voting would be done in store by the customers, and the winner would get a set of the Citadel Paint Brushes.

This sounded like the perfect chance for my first painting competition! Low stakes, decent reward.

I swung by and picked up the model from the store, paid the nominal entry fee ($5) and got to plotting my color scheme.