August was a busy time for the team with many different events to get ready for, let’s see what they got up to!
Bair
After spending the first two weeks of the month eating (mostly) schnitzel, knedla, and various forms of cabbage in semi-rural Slovakia I spent the third week of August recovering. Then I painted my first Warmaster-scale minis! I don’t have a printer myself so I ordered these instead and obviously had to get dwarfs. Treated myself to a whole army even, thank god this takes up less space than my 28mm mostly-metal throng.
Started off with the heroes, didn’t have a penny to hand for scale shots because I’m not a peasant, so those unfamiliar with this currency, it’s a British Pound and you can look up how big it is here!
I did also paint another 15 metal Longbeards and 10 more metal slayers for my 28mm dwarfs, but they look the exact same as the last time I did those, so didn’t take nice pics. And since then have been working on a downed titan and some trench networks for Goonhammer Open UK.
Rockfish
This has been a bit of a funny month as I’ve been struggling with getting sick and/or being up to my eyeballs in work, but I’ve managed to persist with painting through it!
I did a few guard models at the start of the month along with a couple of mechs and some tiny WWII vehicles. The mechs are all from the clans this time, I ended up doing them after a chat on our discord where I took some suggestions for what to paint! (You too can get on there and bully me into painting stuff if you want to support us via Patreon!)
For world war two models I did a couple of things I had laying around on sprue already, a Sherman Firefly and a Sexton!
Just in case you can’t guess the scale these are 12mm!
I also did a test model for if I pick up legions imperialis when that eventually rolls around, I used a Storm Eagle from AI as I am hoping its in that game. (Worst case the model was only an hour and a half so I didn’t waste too much time on it)
That’s all, didn’t do anything else. Nope, quiet month and all…
Well, besides all the nids!
Not a bad month for painting!
Lenoon
This is the stupidest idea I’ve ever had.
Jackie Daytona
For once I remembered to take pictures of stuff, so this’ll be a July/August crosspost. Turns out it was a couple of pretty productive months, and I managed to get some projects out of procrastination hell, inspired by yelling and screaming from the Historicals editors. I went on a holiday as well, and managed to visit them in person at the Goonhammer Historicals S.T.A.R.F.O.R.T., which was as cold and clammy as you would imagine it to be. It’s a horrid place but it’s got a nice armory.
I also saw some ships on holiday, giving me an extra boost to finish the lovely raise the black starter from Firelock, and I even managed to make some half-decent sails.
I can not recommend these kits enough, just a joy to assemble and paint.
On the Titanicus front, I am very happy that Ignatum Walks, finally, and in hindsight I shouldn’t have done all of the titans at once, but I’m satisfied with the end result, although not happy. This’ll be one of those things where I delude myself that I’ll come back to it later. I finally got my first game in, and surprise, Titanicus is a really good game but my titans didn’t really walk, they were stumbling really.
Moving back to Historicals, Victrix once again pummels the competition with their Gallic kits. I reviewed three, and plan to use them for Saga, Age of Hannibal, or may expand into Infamy Infamy! if I feel cheeky and get some more kits. This is my third Saga ancients warband, and it’s very difficult to not collect more.
I’ve decided to focus on a couple of systems this year, and MESBG being one of them, I hope to finish up my Mordor stuff and prep Minas Tirith in the next months. There’s some Burrows and Badgers minis that need some love, as well as some nasty elves of the 10mm kind. Surely I will not be distracted from these simple and easily attainable goals
SRM
I just flew in from NOVA and boy are my arms tired! I’ll be posting at length about that later, but we recorded a live show there and it was some of the most fun I’ve had in my entire life. However, before bouncing over there, I got some painting in!
Hot off the heels of my middling tournament results in Tacoma, I knew I had to get some anti-armor punch in my Templar lists. I’d scooped up the only Storm Speeder I could find in the store there, built up a scenic base, jammed some magnets in there, and broke it down into as many subassemblies as I could. Said subassemblies were a nice little dopamine hit, each painting up quickly and letting me maintain some momentum before slogging away on the hull.
I also painted these little screens which nobody will ever see, but it was fun to put some pops of color in what is largely a black, white, and steel colored flying shoebox.
I had this stupid idea in my head for a Templar Apothecary and executed it exactly how I was hoping to. This “definitely not that kind of doctor” Space Marine is yet to see the table, but I had fun wilding out on the gun flames and painting some of the unusual Apothecary details. I also carved out the handle on the gun in his back holster for verisimilitude’s sake. Actual reference material on Templar Apothecaries is scant, but in the 4th edition codex there’s a single image of one in a Templar command squad. I always like finding reference material when I can, and I didn’t want to have a boring all-white Apothecary, so I pretty much just ripped off the color scheme. He was a fun little palate cleanser after churning on that Speeder from basically the moment I returned from Tacoma.
I was fortunate enough to be part of the crew who reviewed the Cities of Sigmar launch box, and delighted in starting my journey with the Marshal and Relic Envoy. I’d been hemming and hawing on paint schemes for some time, trying to figure out a scheme that would be new for me, and settled on one heavily inspired by Averland from Warhammer Fantasy. What do you know, that scheme basically already exists in the Greywater Fastness subfaction, one which I was particularly keen on in my review of the Battletome. These two were an absolute joy to paint, and it felt good establishing a scheme so quickly.
At the same time, I also painted up the musclewizard from the set. I’m not as wild with the results, but painting the glowing cube was an interesting new challenge, and it let me really test if my green leather recipe looks good with this scheme. I think it looks a little too cartoony but what are you gonna do.
In the leadup to NOVA I’ve been playing in a competitive 40k league at my local store, and in order to shuffle some points around, I swapped out my former smol Techmarine for a newer, better, Primaris version. I’d been using my Ultramarines Techmarine as a test, but with NOVA right around the corner, I wanted something more consistent with my army’s theming. Like with the Apothecary, I had a mad bit of inspiration and converted up a Techmarine to look exactly how I wanted. He’s roughly based on one piece of art from the 4th edition Templar book. I devised my own color scheme, balancing out the reds with black for a Templar look, and did my usual hot rod flames and caution stripes everywhere I could.
Next up, after writing entirely too many words about NOVA, I’m hoping to continue churning through the Cities of Sigmar launch box. I’m also very, very excited about Space Marines right now, so we’ll see what works for my Templars after the balance dataslate!
Soggy
This month was spread over two projects, the first of which was the new Cities of Sigmar launch box.
Hot damn these are lovely models with many details that took a lot longer than expected to paint up. That said I’m happy with the results and will have to look out and paint up two steam tanks I’ve had unpainted for the batter part of 20 years 😂
The second focus of the month was on terrain for Horus Heresy at the UK Goonhammer Open. This event was a narrative campaign with many different events which would impact peoples games over the weekend – my favourite being the BIG GUN, which players could use to fire upon other tables.
Surprisingly, for a bit of terrain so large it only took me and my wife the length of Total Recall to paint up. Which I thought was a solid return on time investment! For most of this terrain I was using a sponge and reverse tweezers, using a simmilar approach to Sonic Sledgehammers video here.
I was a big fan of the very simple but effective brackets to put on coke cans to recycle them into storage tanks. Flavourful little bits of scatter goes a long way to make tables feel *real*.
