Building Guide: Relic Contemptor Dreadnought

The Contemptor Dreadnought has been the hot new toy for Marine players for a little while now. Being a dedicated follower of fashion, I got one for myself this past weekend and here present a guide to construction for everyone :)

It is generally a simple kit to put together as long as you have some photgraphic reference of a completed one - like at the bottom of this page :) There are a couple of pieces that must be used the right way round and the correct orientation is not always obvious. I also present a guide to constructing the CCB - this is a little more fiddly with quite a few extra pieces included in the bag and some steps that must be carried out in sequence. The kit is highly posable too - lots of ball joints and hinge joints too so it will help for you to have an idea of how you want your dread to be posed before you commit to glueing. For that same reason, the fact your dread will look how you want it too, consider this less a construction guide, than a guide to how the pieces all fit together. So, get out your glue, your clippers, and hobby knife, and lets get going!


First off we can start with the main torso and power plant. Nothing too hard about this bit, just make sure you clean all the flash off the engine and align it with the tabs on the back of the dread.


Next we can put the head in the cavity at the top of the torso. It is found on this sprue alongside the two kneeguards. The guards are, as far as I can tell, universal - you can put either on either knee - but leave them on the sprue for now.


The abdominals come next. This is a two-piece section. The piece on the left is the top part. That big plate with the grills goes towards the front. You glue the other piece underneath it with the arrow-like pointy bit pointing up. This is your dread's codpiece, if you like. Both these parts attach to others via ball joints - so make sure you;ve got them lined up with how you want your dread to be standing when you've finished the model before gluing.


Next block of resin has your dread's upper legs. At first glance these are identical but there is a right way to use them. The key is the little plastic tab you can see sticking up at the top of the pieces. Essentially this picture shows the parts upside down, as those tabs need to be orientated so the flat section faces to the front of your dread. The top of these thigh sections is ball jointed, the bottom fits into the calves by a tongue and groove joint. Bear posing in mind again before applying glue.

We're almost finished now, and its the turn of the calf-pieces. These too must be orientated the right way round. The piece at the bottom of the picture is your dread's left calf, the other goes on his right.

And last but not least, the feet. Now, for some unknown, undisclosed reason, Forge World saw fit to label these, and only these parts. And provide pretty-much identical multiples. Yes, there is a L1, L2, R1, and R2. I'm not sure there is any difference at all between the the two left or two right feet. If there is any, it is marginal. If there are two feet to help the dread pose in two different positions, well, the advantage is nothing compared to that provided by all the other definable joints in the model. But hey, I'm sure those great big beautiful feet will be useful in some other project, some day.

Now, if you've done it all right, your dread should look something like this:

I have left the kneeguards off so you can see how the tabs on the thighs should be orientated. This is highly important as the kneeguards simply will not properly fit to the other side of the knee joint. I speak from experience ><



There we go - all parts present and accounted for. I have added the shoulders in this picture as we are going to look at building the CCB's next. Note the orientation and, sadly, the damage done to the top of both pieces during removal from the frame. Each shoulder was pretty solidly attached and I recommend caution when you remove yours.

The Contemptor CCB baggie contains what may at first glance be a bewildering selection of pieces:

I have labeled them, for your convenience, starting with the first piece to attach to the shoulder piece:

Note that parts 4 and 4b are optional weapons to be contained within the fist, Iron man style. You have a choice here of plasma gun and flamer. Make sure you choose one and glue it in before adding part 5 - the 'hand'.

Bear in mind here that part 5 is designed so the 'thumb' goes opposite the three 'fingers' of the fist. that is, it will be oriented differently depending on whether this is a right hand weapon, or left. If you're not sure, try putting your own arm in the pose you want your dread's arm to end up in before attaching this, or any, parts.

On the same block as the projectile weapons are two optional power pack type pieces that attach to the underside of the fist(look for a little raised tab to site the pieces) and guard for the rear of the elbow.

Then you get two sets of digits to go in your fist - traditional stubby ones or more wicked looking claws. Being that I am building a Space Wolves Contemptor I, of course, went with the claws, leaving me a model looking a little like this:


Note that the digits are not universal - each is designed for a specific slot in the fist. You can tell which is which by checking the sides of each at the point where the digit attaches to the hand. You will see each has a drum-shape t enable it to slot into the fist and be posed anywhere from clenched shut to extended (yes, your dread can be giving the finger to his enemies!). Now look at the sides of these drums. You will see that two of them have a rivet-like detail on one side only - you want to be able to see this rivet when you glue the fingers down. One of the digits will be blank in both sides, this is that all important middle finger :)

As with most Forge World kits then, the Contemptor Dreadnought's construction relies on a large amount of dry-fitting and a little bit of flash-trimming and mold-line removal to be successful. Putting things in the right place in the right order is also vital and I hope this guide will help you do that. Please learn from my mistakes!

The versatility of the kit is really really good. No two Contemptors need ever look the same - hopefully you can see I have tried to capture some of the feral nature of Space Wolves in mine, something more or less impossible in the more traditional dreadnought models. But this too does not come without effort and forethought. Attaching all the leg joints simultaneously and achieving a naturalistic pose was not childs-play and required quite a few re-poses and reattachments of certain joints.

Its well worth the effort though to have such a unique and attractive model to the further customise and paint though and I encourage you to give it a go too. Feel free to leave any comments or questions and also check the post on greenstuffing and further customization of my Contemptor.

Its better wet

I know I started this blog as a Space Wolves diary, but... I couldn't resist the temptation any longer and started a Blood Angels army at Christmas.

The major turning point for collecting Blood Angels, or Space Pimps as I usually refer to them, was the Stormraven. Yeah, I know lots of people hate it and its not exactly fashionable to speak in its favour, but I really like it. A Space Marines vehicle should be bulky, it should be severe, and it shouldn't be all sleek and curvy. Leave that sort of thing to the xeno's! We're using 10,000yr old designs here, from a time when man could barely get out of orbit, let alone look good doing it!

So I put Space Pimps on my Christmas list and was given a box of Sanguinary Guard and the Sanguinor. To that I've added another squad of SG, Dante, 2 librarian dreads, 5 Death Company, and a DC dread, the last two units being carried in a Stormraven. Its a compact list and is designed to table you rather than go for objectives.



It's turned out to be quite good at doing that, wiping out 1500 points of Eldar and a more traditional BA list recently. I have enough high strength weapons, especially if I give both libby's lance, to pop a lot of tanks, and there's not a lot that likes getting assaulted by SG, rabid Death Company, or, shudder, the irresistable force of a DC dread with blood talons. That thing has happily chewed through Dire Avengers, Sanguinary Guard, and Astorath the Grim (isn't he supposed to be in charge of rounding up these guys after the battle?)

When it came to painting the dreads I noticed the GW showcase one has had its force weapon done in NMM. I decided to try to emulate this using a homemade wet palette for the first time. I know you can buy these off the shelf so I'm glad I found this video first. They are really cheap and easy to make - you just need a plastic box (I used a takeaway curry container), some kitchen towel, and some parchment paper. I paid about £4 for 50 sheets of the paper on ebay and each sheet gets cut down to make two palettes.

A wet palette does two things for you: it keeps your paint longer and it helps you make lots of mixes, great for blending or layering. It does this by creating a reservoir of water beneath the paper that slowly gets absorbed on the top surface. Your paint, which would quickly dry out on a dry palette as its water evaporated, instead absorbs this fresh water so it stays wet for longer. I have some paint on my palette now I put there two days ago and its still perfectly good. Mixes stay wet longer too, meaning you can mix up your gradients of colours before you apply them and go back to them to retouch layers you need to fix. No longer do you need to go try to remix a colour to match a layer you've already laid down - the original mix stays fresh on your palette for ages (depending on how much you made in the first place of course).



So I now have two nicely blended force weapons to show off :) They're not 'eavy metal standard of course, but they're still pretty sweet.

The next big blending project will be doing the second squad of Sanguinary Guard in NMM. I had a dry run at it on my Sanguinor and it looks, well, ok. Not great, not awful, but ok. The biggest hiccup in the project was washing on thin layers of dark flesh as shadows around the highlights I had already painted on. I wasn't convinced it was the right colour to use and as a result put it on too thick or thoo thin. So parts of my Sanguinor look a bit, well, wooden. And of course I couldn't go back to reapply the layers I had obscured because I was using a dry palette and the shades had all dried up and I didn't have the energy to remix them. I'm hoping using the wet palette, plus having a little more experience of NMM will make my next attempts a little more convincing and natural looking.