De Lage Landen Schilder Competitie 2012
No, don't panic, you haven't got a blog title in the wrong language - it's meant to be like that. This weekend marked De Lage Lander Schilder Competitie 2012 - the national painting competition for the Netherlands and Belgium. Much like last year, I was stuffed into a suitcase, loaded into an overhead compartment and flown across the Channel (that's the murky bit of water between England and Europe) to take pictures of the miniatures and generally join in with the fun of the day. Suffice to say that when the front doors opened at 10am, the Amsterdam Hobby Centre was quickly flooded with eager hobbyists all desperate to get their models entered into the competition. Not only that, but Dave Heathfield, one of the 'Eavy metal painters, also joined us in Amsterdam to help judge all the entries and show off a few of his painting skills to those that turned up. He quickly drew a very large crowd and spent the next couple of hours at the painting table surrounded by keen painters all desperate for painting advice. We finally lured him away with a plate of pancakes, but it wasn't easy.
Of course, most of you don't really want to read about pancakes and cramped planes to Amsterdam, you just want to see the pictures of the miniatures, right? Well, conveniently I have hundreds of them. Sadly not even Servitor 13 could load all those pictures into a computer and edit them overnight, so I have picked a choice selection of the 721 pictures that we took. Don't worry, we will be showing many of the pictures off over the next few weeks and we plan to make a gallery of all the winners too, just like last year. Until then, here are a few of our favourite entries:
Cris Stenhuis painted this Chaos Giant, which, if you haven't guessed by now, is very much dedicated to Nurgle. A vast amount of sculpting went into this kit, including all the maggots streaming out of its ruptured stomach (I hope you're not reading this while eating...). We were especially impressed with the weathered green skin tone on the model, which gave it a very natural, but incredibly sickly look. For his hard work, Cris bagged himself a third place prize in the Warhammer Monsters category with this miniature.
Maartje Giesbers entered a couple of miniatures into the competition, including Caradryan and an Eldar Farseer, which placed first and second in their respective categories. Caradryan was also one of the models in contention for the overall winner title and was only just pipped to the post. We thought the non-metallic metal effect on the armour and the halberd were just stunning, as were the freehand flames on the robes.
The Duel Category was very hotly contested this year and while this entry by Frank Strik didn't win, it was certainly one of my favourite entries. There's nothing quite like a Dark Eldar monstrosity blasting an enemy warrior (especially a Craftworld Eldar one) into tiny shards of glass just by looking at it. I'm a particular fan of the green glow effect that Frank used on the model and the rod of green energy spearing out from the Medusae's warp eye, which really ties the two miniatures together.
When it comes to The Lord of the Rings, I'm a bit of a fan of the Uruk-hai (OK, a lot of a fan). This rendition of Vraskû was painted by Gert D' Hollander, who also entered miniatures into many of the other categories too. Check out a few of his other models in the image gallery above.
And who would we be if we didn't show off the overall winner, eh? Nasty people, that's who. In the end we got our choice for the overall winner down to four miniatures. It then took us nearly half an hour to decide which one of those four miniatures would be the overall winner. This was when we really needed Dave's keen 'Eavy Metal eyes to point out all the intricacies of each miniature, ranging from tiny basing details to minutely painted scratches and chips on the clothes and armour. After much debate, and no small amount of chin-scratching, we decided on the winner - Boromir painted by Yennef Vereycken. Every detail of the miniature was so crisp and clean, from the weathering on the shield (including cracks in the red leather) to the non-metallic metals on the armour and the blade. Even the basing was absolutely exquisite. Check out the picture below.
Right, we're off to edit some more pictures - hopefully we'll have a few more of them up on the website in the next few days, including the winners gallery and some of the Armies on Parade entries.
