Aspiring for greatness

Hi,

The week is at an end. I had a great game of WH40k with Space Marines & Tau vs. Astra Militarum (aka Imperial Guard). It was the first game I won since we started playing so that was nice. I will post a mini report on that game in a separate post.

Today I spent half a day painting a Chosen Chaos Space Marine that will be an Aspiring Champion for my CMS squad.

I wanted to push my boundaries of my paintig skills with this one as the sculpt deserves a great paint job. A few challenges I set out for this one;

-Power Axe effect with Object Source Lightning (or OSL)
This is aa first time for me painting a power weapon effect and I wanted to make it look that the gem in the blade looks like it lights up the rest of the blade
-A smooth gradient from dark to light on the shoulderpad. 
I wanted that neat almost gemlike gradient for the shoulderpad from dark to light
-Neat edge high lightas
I tried to be as neat as possible with the edge highlights and tried to avoid large blobs.

I am quite pleased with the end-restult, the axe took me a few retries and experimentig before I had an end result I was pleased with. Even if it took me about 5 hours to complete I had tons of fun and learned a lot in the process. Here some pictures, enjoy!

Front

Side with Power axe

Back, note tenctacles on bolter. 

Alternate front pic

Complete squad