Warhammer 40,000: Ancient Moraie - A Blast from the Past

There's no two ways about it, moving house is stressful. Packing and sorting belongings, securing boxes and remembering all of the things that need to be cancelled, updated or transferred... However one of the upsides to going through everything to see what can be cleared out is that sometimes you come across something you'd forgotten all about tucked away somewhere. Which is exactly what happened with Ancient Moraie earlier this week.

2013 was not a good year for me. Due to a variety of factors, including some not entirely wise decision making on my part, I found myself homeless and things looked pretty bleak. As I was making my way north from a temporary stay with some relatives to try and figure out what to do, I got a message from my friend Fraser asking me if there was an address he could mail something to me at.

When I arrived back in the north, there was a package waiting for me as I made a quick stop at my father's on the way to Inverness and inside was a Contemptor dreadnought that was in need of a little TLC which was a wonderful wee surprise and gave me something to devote some time and attention to while beginning to make a start at putting my life back together.

A couple of months later I was invited to take part in a collaborative hobby challenge that was the brainchild of Ead Brown (formerly of Forge World) and Jon Hart with the aim of creating a considerable portion of the Minotaurs chapter of the Adeptus Astartes as deployed during the Anthela V campaign in 953.M41 in miniature form. 

 

This seemed like the perfect opportunity to make use of the Contemptor, which by now I'd managed to get cleaned up and ready to be put back together, especially as one of the warriors deployed at Anthela V was Ancient Moraie. Also known as 'The Red Ruin' he was a contemptor pattern dreadnought in assault configuration...

After dryfitting everything to test out the pose, I got busy pinning, gluing, tearing up cork and painting so I could bring Moraie to life and he even featured in a number of posts on my earlier blog 'The Pig's Sty'. 

At the time I was at a much different stage of my hobby journey so the colours are quite flat and the base, while fairly fancy, was lacking tonal variation, but overall, I was pretty pleased with him - though looking back at the pics on The Pig's Sty, I was as rubbish at taking good photos back then as I sometimes still am! At some stage over the last decade, although I don't remember exactly when, Moraie was moved from my display cabinet as other projects were put in and he ultimately ending up being stored with some other miniatures in a box in a cupboard. In all honesty, I'd completely forgotten about him until I came across him again while emptying out the cupboard a couple of evenings ago. In need of both a break from packing boxes and a little recharging of my batteries, I decided to sit down and spend a few hours with him on the hobby desk so I could spruce things up a bit.

I didn't make any sweeping changes, but working with what was already established, I added highlights to the red, gunmetal and bronze as well as reworking the aquila on his plastron and repainting his left poleyn and the fuel tanks of the multimelta. I also added some soot to the exhaust stacks and some subtle verdigris in and around some of the raised details of his armour before using some weathering washes on the base and his feet to tie everything together a little more. Finally, decided to push the contrast on the purity seals a bit higher so added some highlights to the wax and parchment to help them 'pop'.

Life might be changing again, but was it good to spend some time recharging my batteries with all that's going on at the moment. It was also quite wonderful to be reminded of the generosity of my friend which not only helped me through a trying time in the past but was able to do so again this week.

Until next time, as always, thanks for reading.