Secret Golden Demon Project, update #3

Hi all! 

Time for another weekly update on my Golden Demon secret project. This one was the most meticulous so far so I really hope you will like it! 

The topic of this update will be a classic - freehanding a banner for Golden Demon! 

Many banners have been entered to Golden Demon across the years and you probably can remember a few of them from the top of your head. For me, a banner has to be stylish, it has to make sense with the composition and the lore, and it also has to be memorable. For me, the memorability of the banner is mostly defined by how good the technique behind it is and how overall beautiful it is. Easier said than done...

Before deciding what to freehand on the massive banner, that will be hanging on the wall in my diorama, I did some image searching. I've found these 3 amazing drawing collages on the Warhammer Community website. These were the icons that GW has had drawn before designing the new Sisters of Battle range. What a find! 

One particular drawing caught my eye:

I think that its a very beautiful piece, complicated enough, and it would also make sense with my diorama. As it is depicting a cup, I could tie it nicely with the treasure chest from the previous posts. So I will have a banner, showing a magnificent relic cup, and directly underneath it will be a treasure chest with the cup depicted on the banner. At least that will be indicated to the viewer! So this will work as a "Holy Grail" kind of a thing. Sisters are 40K nuns after all! Why not treasure a cup that Emperor drank from? :) 

So I started painting! The cup freehand had to be NMM gold, so I picked red for the banner itself, as it works nicely with gold and makes sense lore wise for sisters. 

I've first drawn the shape of the cup with white and then starting putting some color in. 

I've used this picture of a real cup as reference. You can notice the slight hint of red in the NMM on the right side. 

I worked on every section separately, to achieve the best possible results from the technical point of view. I know that sometimes sloppy paintjobs look good too, but that is just not the way I roll. 

Next it was time to add the fire. Before I started putting actual paint on the banner, I decided to draw the cup on a piece of paper and paint the flames onto it to see if I like how it looks like.

Next it was time to actually paint the flames on the real deal! It was nerve wracking, as I have spent over 15 hours on the freehand by that step. It would be really awful to ruin it. So I made sure to go slow and steady.

After this was done and I was happy with how it looked like, It was just a matter of finishing the base of the cup. Again, easier said than done, as it took an addition 3 hours to do... I've also added some shading on the sides to make the middle of the banner pop. Here is the final effect:

Overall, I've spent over 20 hours on this banner so far and as I intend to add the symbols of the 6 main Adepta Sororitas orders on the bottom of the banner, I think the final product will easily go past 30 hours. 

That is it for this week's update :) I really hope you like these posts. Next week we will have a look at painting the Inquisitor model (which is almost done by now - you can see pics of him on the Discord Server). 

Thank you for reading this far and supporting me! I really appreciate it and hope that you will continue to do so! haha :)

Cheers,

Mamikon