Dreadtober 2020: Black Legion Hellbrute (Part 1)

It's that time of the year when one must select a Dreadnought* in order to participate in Dreadtober, the annual painting challenge themed around those big bipedal machines. For the past three years I combined Orktober with Dreadtober and painted an Ork Dreadnought. This year I decided to do something different and do something to support my Chaos Space Marine army. Also I simply haven't painted enough models from the Dark Vengeance boxed set, which I deeply regret, and thought this could be an opportunity to address that.

Hellbrute parts ready for assembly.

Long time readers might remember that I have painted one of these models before for the Khorne side of my Chaos Astartes, appropriately dubbed The Bloodbrute. You can see more and read about it in Part 1 and Part-2. But I can sum it up by saying that I knocked that model out in record time (for me). Some conditions applied to that situation that don't exist in my current one, namely free time. And I don't have much of that these days. As a result, this model may actually take me the whole month of October to complete.

The steps here will pretty much mirror Bloodbrute part 1, with really only the final color being different. This Hellbrute will be painted as a Black Legion machine, since most of my Chaos Marines are pretty much Black Legion at this point and they could use some love.

One of the things that I was really proud of, that I did on the Bloodbrute, was the base. I used some of the rock slates from the Warhammer 40,000 Basing Set which I believe is no longer produced. Since this is a special occasion (Dreadtober is special to me, surely it is to you too, right?) I decided to use one of the resin pieces in this set. The piece I selected was a helmet of a loyalist marine, which will sit amongst the shattered rocks which this Hellbrute will be stomping over. Not sure which Chapter this helmet belonged to, but I will figure that out soon enough.

The rock stage of basing. 

I flocked the base and then noticed that I forgot to drill out the holes on the barrel of the Multi-melta. I do recommend doing that before flocking the base, or even assembking any of the model actually. Never-the-less, it wasn't too problematic to do this and it wasn't as messy as you might envision. I don't drill out gun barrels like I used to mainly because the results rarely satisfy me for the effort that it takes, but on a gun like this one it looks really cool and turns out great each time thst I have done it.

Drilled out gun barrel.

On to the priming stage, and hopefully by next week I will be beyond that point and we'll into the basecoats....hopefully.

*"Collectors of every faction are welcome to participate; the only guideline is that your model should fit on a 60 mm base (or larger!)."