Seattle Seahawk themed Imperial Knight for Celesticon 2014

Being a football fan and a war gamer are two hobbies that don't often collide.  While trying to pick a color scheme for an Imperial Knight I was painting up for an event at Celesticon 2014 I realized I could use a certain team I am somewhat of a supporter of and take a rare opportunity for my two favorite hobbies to meet in an unholy union.

While most of my gamer friends may not realize this, being a fan of an out of market team can either be frustrating or fun.  My wife, who is a a Saints fan, another out of market team, tends to get upset at all of the ribbing she gets from local fans.  I, on the other hand, go a different route and tend to have a lot of fan displaying my fandom for the Seattle Seahawks to those that might not be the biggest fans of my favorite team.   The Seahawks being rivals to the local team can be fun at times.

First off, the final result.

My first task was to do some color matching.  I'm not a huge fan of mixing my own colors so I picked up a bunch of different blues and greens to match to my favorite Jersey.  After some test swatches, I got the colors I wanted.  One from the Citadel paint line and one from the P3 line.  The green still didn't "pop" as much as I wanted it too though it was pretty close.  The Blue was pretty spot on.

After settling on colors I started the build and paint job.  For the body I mostly followed the Games Workshop painting tutorial posted on YouTube.

Most of the way through.  I decided to try out the crackle paint that GW is making, mostly because I didn't have enough time to do anything more detailed.  This was the day before the convention so I needed to wrap it up pretty quickly.  I also decided to add some details to the base painting in a certain local team's colors. 

 The night before the event I spent a few hours in my hotel room adding decals.  

On with some finished photos.

As a side note, this was actually the second Knight I had painted up in this scheme.  I had a horrible problem with some matte spray, that I was later to find out was because the can had been left in a cold garage, that sprayed texture all over the model and ruined it.  The green knight/brown in the pictures is actually this knight having be repainted.

Here is a picture of the first version of the Knight, that had to be repainted because it was ruined.

Imperial Knight Grand Melee - A Warhammer 40k Knight Event at Celesticon

On Sunday, my last event of Celesticon, was an large Imperial Knight only event.  The event was billed as a Grand Melee where Knights would face off in joust like style events.   Having played both regular 40k and non-traditional games I can easily say this was one of the most fun games I've played in a long time.

We started by dueling in some one on one matches, and then ended up battling in a team game to decide the victor.  I ended up losing my first match, and then winning my second two, putting me as captain of the B squad.  The large team game was a blast, with it going to the wire with me finishing off the last knight on the opposing team only to have it detonate and take out my knight as well.  Our team still one, even if my knight bit the bullet.

Warhammer 40k Narrative event at Celesticon 2014

I played in my regular semi-annual narrative Warhammer 40k event at Celesticon 2014.  This event was a bit different with being an Imiperial on Chaos goal though I ended up bring the only Chaos army so I was joined with several Space Marine players and an Eldar player.

The battle had been ongoing over several events and this portion had two forces fighting over some Dataslates.  My section of the table, on one of the ends, contained several large weapons batteries that when controlled could be turned on the rest of the battle.  While I managed to get them for one round of shooting most of the game the big gun was controlled my opponent, a Space Wolf player with a lot of drop pods and troops coming in from transports, forcing me to turtle up a bit and shoot him off objectives.

The game ended with one Dataslate in our possession and the other one in enemy hands, so basically a draw.