#DreadTober Adeptus Titanicus - Warlord Titan 2 - Highlights

Afternoon #Warhammer Community it's the twelfth of #DreadTober2025 and my stretch goal Warlord titan is a bridge too far. I'm not upset about this, I didn't imagine it was achievable afterall. In fact I'm really pleased the momentum for the first one got me this far. And yet, I'm also slightly sad that that momentum evaporated all too quickly. I started with the dappled effect and it just felt tedious. Probably because I was much less concerned about it when I did the first Warlord. It was very messy and casual. Here I was more careful, which gave me a thrill while I was doing it, because I felt how much effort I was putting into it. But at the end I was just disappointed at my lack of progress and how much I still had to do! This painting malarkey is just riddled with emotional and mental challenges. It's a wonder I see it as fun at all! 🤪 

Anyway, there's an abundance of blue on this, as I painted all the weapon armour blue [except the left arm mount, which is for the personal heraldry]. So I wanted to minimise this a bit and put a diagonal line through the armour. This will be white eventually. The Apocalypse Missile Launcher has one too, but leaning backwards. While the Turbo Laser carapace weapons have checks on the front half. 

This goes some way to mitigate the excess of blue and gives me an opportunity to play around with freehand. You can see the left arm has the personal heraldry pattern. This will echo the knee plate from one of my Reavers, they're from the same maniple. They both have yellow lower legs too.

I think I added some more Basilicanum Grey to the grey panels too. I wasn't 100% happy with the heatbloom on the gatling barrels. It looked OK in pictures but not up close. So, I toned it down a little with Leadbelcher over the sepia and purple bits. Then subtly added a purple wash and I don't think it needs the sepia. But the blue is what was already there. I may have to tweak the Plasma glow too. Some other bits on the gun need some blue glows so I need add some of my blue to the airbrushed bits so it matches.  

Here's a close-up or the dappled grey. So much of that underpainting is rough, it's almost pink in places where the grey basecoat over the red oxide primer wasn't opaque enough.

This is after a glaze over the first set of dappled highlights. Again I was super pleased with my efforts. This felt awesome and exactly as I wanted it to be. Then I looked at the first one and the Reavers and realised I'd been less detailed about the blobs, so this felt like something of an anomaly. It shouldn't matter at all. I've already acknowledged there can be differences due to changes in the Forgeworld manufacture, hence the silver skeleton. 

So, whatever reservations I had were mostly put aside and I was left with the rather mundane task of repeating this on all the panels, grey, blue and yellow. Then I have to highlight the gold trim, two sets of highlights. Which might look unnecessary, but Warlord 1's brassy bronze isn't a million miles away from this gold. I'd rather it was clearly different and identifiable as gold, so it needs to be done.

I'll have one more 'official' DreadTober post this week. It'll show the current WiP as the month comes to an end - 'this is as far as I got'. I'll still be tagging it DreadTober afterwards but I've some other delayed posts to share too, not to mention my #ArmiesOnParade2025 post!