Castellan Crowe [1]

I purchased a Castellan Crowe figure in metal before I tried Finecast, and once i'd tried the new product I couldn't bring myself to build the metal. All the mucking around with pinning, filing, etc. However, this Finecast of Crowe has been one of the worst figures I've had so far. It's had all the usual issues, and some of the worst - thin or missing detail (the exhausts on the backpack are only half there), resin misalignments (huge seam lines across the pauldrons and foot), and big gobs of resin on the shoulder pads which has completely obliterated detail. I've spent ages carving down the resin mess, and trying to resculpt in missing detail. Some of it was extremely difficult to do since it is in hard to reach places, or you risk damaging some piece of remaining detail that is near to the affected area. It's certainly been quite disappointing. I still like the Finecast product for the good features it brings, light-weight, easy to work with, but the quality control issues need some serious addressing and quickly by GW. Maybe I should put the metal one together after all and do a side by side comparison against the Finecast miniature?

So I've finally got the miniature to a point where its good enough (although I'm seriously considering slicing off the exhaust vents on the backpack and replacing them with ones from a plastic backpack), and I've started painting him. I've also got a squad of Purifiers which i'm working on alongside Crowe, so he should be finished with his guys. As usual the white helmets, and pauldrons took a bit of mucking around to get right. White is such a difficult color to paint and have it look clean, but I'm finding starting with a basecoat of Adeptus Battlegray, then working up through Codex Grey, to Fortress Grey, then finally white is working pretty well so far.

I'm really enjoying painting the purple on the model. It's not a color you often get to paint with, and the purple purity seals, sword blade, and book is something a bit different and unusual to do. The blade was wet blended like the other Grey Knights, but using shades of purple, becoming progressively lighter through the addition of Skull White to the mix. The chaos logo visible on the cross guard of the sword was an interesting touch too. Although I was disappointed that part of the guard on the sword was broken off or missing.