Dreadnought in a Chris Foss style (hopefully)

 Happy Christmas everyone! I've been painting another Eldar dreadnought. 

When I was young, I used to read a lot of Isaac Asimov books. They almost all had covers drawn by the same artist: Chris Foss. He drew massive, brightly-coloured industrial spaceships, often with stripes. They were cool to look at and very distinctive.

Foss also drew some concept artwork for a 1970s film of Dune, which was never made. Here's a pirate ship:

I thought it looked very sleek and Eldarish. Because you get quite a lot of blank space on the dreadnought's head/carapace, I decided to see if I could copy this pattern on its head. The first thing was to shade the head from red to yellow. Here's a WIP.

This sort of dreadnought is the second variety, released in the late 1990s. The legs, head and body are the same as the original dreadnought, as seen in the blue Citadel catalogue. The arms are new (but also made of metal): bulkier and less sleek-looking, with more tubes. The back engine part is heftier too, and has a mounting-point for a heavy weapon. 

To be honest, I don't really like the tendency of later Eldar to get increasingly chunky: I'm not sure that the original models have ever been bested. But I do like this guy. I think his head has come out pretty well: it's very dramatic-looking! I might go on to use this colour scheme on a big vehicle at some point. 

Incidentally, I'm using a different lighting setup for these pictures, after being bought a lamp at Christmas (thanks Ruth!). Hopefully this might improve my dodgy photography...