Salute 2016

Last weekend saw my fourth trip up to London for Salute and to be honest it rather crept up on me! The main focus of my efforts for the last year and a half has been ‘Project Nurgle’ for the Golden Demons. I was a bit caught out by the announcement that the Golden Demons would fall in May this year. I had anticipated that the Demons would be held in the Autumn and had to adjust my plans.

I’d intended to paint a fantasy character miniature for Salute but doing that would have put a lot of pressure on the, now shorter, ‘Project Nurgle’ time scale. So I shifted all my attention to getting ready for the ‘Demons’.

I decided some time ago that I would hold Gutrot Spume back for a ‘grand debut’, alongside the Plaguebearers, at the Demons. That left me with a choice between Commodore Borgossa and Abalam for Salute.

There was much dithering on my part as only one entry is allowed per category but, with a little help from my painting friends, I decided it had to be Borgossa.

I entered Borgossa into the largescale category, which includes busts, and then spent the rest of the day browsing the stands and chatting. The chance to meet up with other painters is always one of the chief highlights of these events. As is usual for Salute the day went astonishingly quickly and, before I’d had time to get around all the stands, the competition results were announced!

Borgossa took the second place in his category! That rewarded my efforts over the last year to gain experience of painting larger scale minis and busts.

One of the judges was Peter Bell and he was kind enough to give me some useful feedback on Borgossa, which I hope I can incorporate into subsequent projects. In short, the overall paintjob on Borgossa was let down by the maroon jacket which didn’t match up to the texture work on the other areas.

It’s a bit of a relief that it was the jacket. I felt that there was something lacking but I’d not been able to pin down what the problem was!

Hindsight is all well and good but I need to sharpen my instincts, and hopefully, I will do so as I gain more experience painting larger scale pieces.