I'm temporarily suspending the green tide to bring you this member of the Deathwatch

The local GW here in Eindhoven has sent out a request to all customers to build and paint a Deathwatch Space Marine before the end of November. I think it is actually a cooperation between a lot of European stores, but being very blonde and easily distracted I have to admit I forgot most of the details. I just remember: 'end of November', 'Deathwatch', 'Black rim on base' and 'Paint your own name on the rim'. So the relevant details (I hope ;) ). As I was planning to convert my Primaris marines to Deathwatch I already had some shoulder pads on hand. And here is my marine.

Eat your own medicine you Eldar scum!

As the Deathwatch are allowed naughty things my marine is carrying an Eldar weapon. Sure as the Adeptus Mechanicus would point out it is an ancient and inferior design, but well it was on hand. Being a proud Son of Russ my marine picked it up and is using it anyway. The fact that I will give this model away so I won't be using it in regular games gave me an excuse to make a conversion that is not covered in the (modern) rules.

Given that my Space Marine is holding a flamer and a plasma pistol I have to assume this is someone else's victim.

One of the takeaways from this is that I still suck at painting black. I tried giving some gradients with different shades of grey and finished up with a thinned down purple to make it a bit more interesting (I actually regret that, I don't think it looks that good). I tried subtle highlights but they were practically invisible. Overcompensating I used highlights that look a bit too harsh I guess. So, lets say black is not my color and take some time to paint more black power armors soon, who knows practice may make perfect and all that... I did have a lot of fun setting up the dead Eldar on the base. I also improvised a small dais from bits to make my marine stand out amid the expected crowd of other models.

I think I can finally check 'successfully apply a decal' of my bucket list.

This shoulder pad makes me very happy. I think this is the best decal I ever applied to a model (and to think my initial respons to decals was 'this is cheating'). After painting the shoulder pad I applied a layer of gloss varnish. When this dried I applied Micro Set followed up by the Decal. I gave it some time to dry in place and then applied Micro Sol to melt it down. After that I managed to refrain from immediately applying more gloss varnish (my go to mistake at this point). My Vallejo Gloss reacts with Micro Set forming tiny white grains (and generally destroying all the hard work). I waited for the Micro Set to dry completely overnight and then applied the gloss varnish. After this had dried I ended up using an airbrush for a layer of mat varnish. I think I can safely say this works. So next step: visit my local GW to drop off the model.