Despite being the shortest month, the team have been going hard on their hobby. Let’s check out what they’ve been up to.
Fowler
Any excuse to post the Gundam again. Check out the model review article for more!
It’s been a busy month for ‘cha boy. With a Necromunda campaign starting the day this article posts, I’ve been busy working on a beefy rules packet and Gallowdark Terrain layouts. Some other projects have managed to Kool-Aid-Man-in to my painting desk.
First up was the DKOK heavy weapons squad. I hadn’t finished a Traitor Guard unit in a while, and doing these guys up was fantastic. It’s entirely possible that I spent more time scraping off aquilas than I did with a paintbrush in my hand, but such is life with a meticulously converted army!
My wife and I have been playing a bunch of HeroQuest, and I’ve been painting up the minis. They are a refreshing change from some of the other projects I’ve worked on over the past few months. Just zenithal and slap some contrasts on! Next up – I am working on a expansion of my Van Saar gang so they can show up in week 2 of the campaign.
Soggy
At the start of the month I was in hobby duldrums and unsure what to work on next. Inspiration came in the form of a shitpost about my favourite character in the Horus Heresy, Shiban Khan.
While I had most of the parts for quite some time, I was unsure what head to use. Shiban was riddled with augmetics, so I needed a unique head with a bionic eye, to go with the other bionics from the Legion Praevian kit. I took the plunge greenstuffing on to Qin Xa’s head, which seemed rather ambitious given I normally only use it to weld things together.
After much swearing and squinting with the magnifiers which I rarely use, I had a solid result. The biggest challenge was trying to make the round lens within it’s mount, so I cheated by making a divot and putting in a drop of liquid resin, whose water tension flattened out into a perfect circle.
The end result was one I was proud of. Converting is one side of the hobby I’m not really creative enough for, so while it is not as flashy as other conversions or character models you see out there, it was mine and evoked the character in my mind.
I also did another quick character this month, as I had a doubles 40K event to get ready for. Instead of running my Blood Ravens or GSC, I instead opted to run my Heresy White Scars as the Liberator Assault group – which was incredibly good fun. I needed a jump captain to join 10 assault marines posing as assault intercessors, so painted up the White Scars Praetor model with a jump pack (magnetised so I can swap it around if needs be!).
Lastly, I worked on the Mechanicum Heavy Support Force Review, painting up three new plastic Mechanicum kits. Like a sicko, I have ordered another one, as this box was great fun to paint up. I imagine I’ll be working on more of the same in March, but we’ll see what takes my fancy.
Brushwizard
This month, I’ve been mainly working on things for The Path of the Worthy are Adepticon. But I’ve also been bitten by the Cyberpunk Combat Zone bug, and chromed up… thanks to the Cyberpunk Edgerunners Combat Zone release. After picking up some Maelstrom miniatures, I started practicing Comic Style/ Cell Shaded style painting on some of the minis. The aim is to eventually get the Edgerunners box painted up in glorious anime style paint jobs.
Still a lot to do, but I’m liking the results so far. I even swapped out their bases for clear acrylic discs, so they match whatever battlefield they are being deployed on. I’m pretty stoked, it’s been a nice palette cleanser.
Thundercloud
This month I’ve completed 49 models, and it’s not 49 rank and file goblins again.
First up is another Skaventide character, the Rat riding bigger Rat, and Calthia Xandire and her buddies from the Underworlds range (the bird isn’t done yet, I need to get better at painting birds). The Skaven was worked up from Thondia Brown, and is a nice big character model with a lot of detail. Calthia needed to be painted, as she’s a load bearing hero in a lot of Warcry lists and she may as well have her buddies with her.
Next up is Thundrik’s Profiteers. A first season Underworlds warband that I picked up as miniatures from the recent AoS magazine, they painted up pretty quick, giving me another Bladeborn order warband, and my first AoS dwarves painted. The minis are pretty nice, and painted up quick, but a handful of sky dwarves is probably the limit for me unless they bring out a Warcry box of them. They’re accompanied by the last Skaven underworlds band I had to paint, giving me 23 painted Skaven minis for Warcry and a reasonable number of things to choose from. I may as well paint up the rest of the Skaventide minis, starting with completing the Spearhead, but now I’ve got this many done it isn’t urgent as I’ve got to find nice sewer themed bases for them.
More Warcry Bladeborn bands in the form of the new Lizardmen box, which are done with contrast and I think turned out really well, with the skin underpainted and standard painting on the armour and weapons. The albino lizardman was the one I was concerned with but turned out really well, and I did the bases to match the lizardmen ruins in my Ghur terrain. I completed another Death warband with the electric zombies, giving me two Death bladeborn warbands and the Royal Beastflayers for Warcry. The zombies were simple and done with contrast for the non-metallic bits.
The start of my Rogue Trader project, which involves me doing a lot of old school 1st edition style stuff (though I’m picking up modern versions for the scaling and better modern sculpting, the Citadel Spacefarers including the Emperor of the Imperialists, are based on the 1981 Citadel Spacefarers range, which were the first Space Marines Citadel ever did, and which were used in Spacefarers, one of the precursors for 40k (though the mechanics of Rogue Trader owed a lot more to Laser Burn). Nice metal models without too much detail that go nicely with the Boarding Action bases.
Finally I painted a dozen Morannon Orcs for the Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game. I’m sorting out my armies for Middle Earth (I’ve got six of the damned things) for the new edition and Morannon Orcs are a staple in a lot of Evil lists. They painted up fairly quickly, but I feel they are showing their age now. I’ve got another 48 of the things, but I think I’ll leave a gap before painting up any more and sort out my Khazad-Dum Dwarves.
49 models is one less than last month, but it’s still a lot better than how many I was painting last year, and brings me to 99 painted models for the year so far.
Meltabombed
This month (and in my inaugural post to Goonhammer…!), I continued color testing on my new Thousand Sons Heresy army I’ll be working on this year. I only have one model done so far, but it’s pretty exciting if I do say so myself. I look forward to getting the rest of the tactical squad and couple centurions I have built done and on the table when we start our new escalation campaign this summer.
                       Credit – meltabombed
I also finisehd up a unit very near and dear to my heart, the Blood Angels Ofanim Court from the Death of Canopus Exemplary Battle pack for the Horus Heresy. This is a heavily converted and completely custom unit that I started building almost two years ago right before my daughter was born, so it feels really good to get them done right before her second birthday. I still need to make jump packs for them (which are magnetized), but it’s taken me some time to track down 5 of Zephon’s jump packs haha. Hope you like them all, and thanks for looking!
                        Credit – meltabombed
Rockfish
So I’ve spent the last month utterly destroyed by a combination of being sick and my back injury flaring up to very signifigant degree, which means I’ve not gotten a lot done and what I have done is mostly sitting around waiting for varnish and pictures so uh have the only thing I did manage to finish:
Extremely rough and ready as it was genuinely quite painful trying to finish by the end there, but hey they made it onto warcom so that’s pretty cool!
Liam_Jordan
It’s been a little while since I last contributed to one of these. Since then I’ve painted up a unit of High Elves with for our preview article for the Ellyrian Reavers here and finished off my Wolves of the Sea list for a tournament at WHW, adding in the unit of Huscarls in the bottom left of the display board and just neatening up a few bits and bobs I needed to on the rest of the force.
I also spent some time adding a new centre piece to the force as a whole in the shape of a Chaos Lord on a Manticore. Feel particularly pleased with how this has come out and can’t wait to unleash it on my enemies. Clearly based around the excellent Cities of Sigmar Manticore I’ve taken off the iconography and replaced the rider, choosing to add a little bit of freehand to the armour plates on the beasts shoulders to help cover the removed embossed artwork.
Saffgor
It’s been quite the hectic month for me, but progress continues on the Ash Wastes Admech army project! This month meant finishing up a unit of 4 Kastelans, their Datasmith, as well as two Manipuli, rounding out some of the larger heroes in the range. I believe the only Leader not yet done is Cawl himself, but that’s a bigger project to cap everything off!
Next up is a full ~40 Electro-Priests, starting with these 10 Corpuscarii. It’s a blast being able to put these Warcry bands to use, given their OOP status, and it’s a great time seeing them represent a model that’s otherwise not my favorite, no offense to Electro-Priest enjoyers.
chimp
February was the month of getting my hobby mojo back after a major slump – keen eyed readers may notice this unit of Palladors as one I had sort of almost finished back in October for the Stormcast review, and they had languished on my painting table ever since.
There’s two reasons I want to paint Stormcast at the moment, really. 1. I’d like to play them competitively and 2. It’s an excuse to try my hand at large areas of metal and really high contrast fabrics – two things I’ve never really done before, with all my previous armies being heavy on the natural materials and down to earth look. Neither the Palladors nor poor Iridan below help me with point 1, but at least it’s practice for 2.
I’m enjoying painting large amounts of gold quite a lot, it turns out the GW paints are good enough and easy to use, plus Fyreslayer Flesh is basically liquid magic over gold. High contrast cloth is a work in progress, I don’t have steady hands and I can’t get it to look the way I want yet. But that’s why we practice. Next, probably something with less cloak that’s more likely to see the table.
VH Eric
I started off February resolute in getting my Footsore Baron’s War models painted. There’s a powerful incentive for this – the moment you prime metal models, the timer has started for those models chipping unless you varnish them, so “half done but played with” is a state of considerable peril.
First up on that list was finishing our seven archers, to bring the total number of archers in my retinue up to a hefty ten.
There was some wrestling with these models, for a number of reasons. The first was actually what color to paint them – Baron’s War is set in a period where uniforms and heraldry are in their infancy (if that), so painting everyone the same isn’t really true to life. At the same time, I want my dudes to be immediately visually identifiable, etc. Also, black was an expensive color at the time, but my Baron’s heraldry is…green and black.
What I decided to do was to lean into the “Black is Expensive” idea, and as this is the garrison force for our campaign (Death and Taxes, the campaign rules, has you create three armies), I can get away with them being well clothed. And the uniformity or lack thereof was a compromise rule of both colors have to be somewhere on the model, but where isn’t fixed.
Unfortunately, these guys spent a lot of time in the ugly phase, and about halfway through I had a crisis of confidence, so they’re all I got done – I still have some Sergeants and Foot Knights left. Still, the retinue now has all the cheap filler troops done, so it’s on to the chainmail clad lads, who should go faster.
Additionally, I painted up several parts of a charcoal burner’s camp I bought via Kickstarter from Fogou Models. They seemed like a nice way to add some scatter terrain to “lonely forest road ambush” scenarios, suggesting there’s life and activity in said forest.
The painting here was mostly vibes based, without any real plans, and while contrast paints did the heavy listing, there’s about five different paint brands in that picture.
These immediately got used in a local game con running introductory games of Ravenfeast, which was gratifying. And they held up to the tender attentions of a five year old boy named Emerson, which is a relief for resin terrain.
cronch
This month I’ve been reviewing the new Gitmob Army Set for the site and trying to paint an endless supply of wolves to a deadline.
First off, the Sunsteala Wheelas. These chariots come in twos, so I would have felt bad painting just one, but I think the pair of them came out really well. It was fun to experiment with some different options for desert bases – my thanks to Evie for their helpful tips.
With the Wheelas under my belt, I tackled the big lad himself – Droggz da Sunchompa. I love this dude, he cuts an imposing figure among the other Grots and really channels some of that classic Warhammer goblin energy.
It was time for a unit of Snarlpack Cavalry. Delightfully, the riders and mounts can be fully separated for painting, but rather less delightfully this means you have to paint two whole grots for each wolf. That’s nine models (six small, three rather more chunky) for a whopping 100 points of unit. Doing this to a deadline was rather intense, but I’m pleased with how they came out.
Obviously not discouraged by my previous experience, I immediately finished off another three Snarlpack Cavalry, as well as the Snarlboss and Wolfgit Retinue. In a previous life these three were the Rippa’s Snarlfangs warband for Underworlds, but I stripped and repainted them to give them a new lease of life in the Age of Sigmar. Over the course of painting these I also managed to snap one of the Retinue’s spear several times, so I also invested in a tiny 0.6mm drill bit and some brass rod to fix it. Fun!
Those must be some of the worst photos I’ve taken in recent memory, for which I apologise – I haven’t yet had a chance to give them the full focus-stacking treatment.
McWhat
Looking back earlier in the article after having written this, I have to say it’s great to get a chance to see the variety of work Goonhammer folks put out. It’s pretty easy to stay in my ‘lil hobby bubbles, so it’s nice to check in on what’s going on in other spaces.
Like cronch above, I too get to live that jet-setting Goonhammer contributor lifestyle, painting models sometimes a whole month before they are released. Astounding! February was mostly about my usual Marvel: Crisis Protocol and Star Wars: Shatterpoint (proper colon placement is very important with these, y’all), including some pre-release stuff that is admittedly still fun to get. I’ve been incredibly busy at work, plus the whole you know, world crumbling around us thing. So I wasn’t as productive as I would have liked. But hey, at least I got some things done. (Also I really love how the central eye came out.)
I’ve had this super sweet beholder model sitting around forever. Out of the blue I thought to myself “vaporwave beholder” and pretty much immediately started working on it. The end result doesn’t quite scream vaporwave, but I’m still pretty happy with how it came out. If nothing else, it was a nice little one-evening side project.
When I don’t have a specific project or goal in mind, I often post a picture of my backlog in the LGS Discord server, and let the locals decide. That lead to me painting Sif first:
Nothing too fancy here, though I mostly substituted silver in place of the white on the studio model as I felt that read too Christmasy.
Next, I painted a pre-release Gladiator also for MCP. I was admittedly not keen on the model, but found it to be a fun, quick, and easy paint job. Even the assembly was easy, a real feat given all that spindly lightning/energy stuff going on.
I like the contrast of the greenish-yellow energy effects next to al the blue and red of the model. I was hemming and hawing over what color to paint that, so shout-out to local chum Roastbill for the suggestion I went with.
Next I switched gears for some pre-release Shatterpoint goodness.
I was excited at the opportunity to paint fan favorite Kit Fisto, Even more clones in white armor, not so much. But I’ve got the recipe for that down to a science, so at least they were quick. I actually really like how Fiston and his doomed Padawan Nahdarr Vebb came out. Nothing fancy again, just good examples of the bright, contrasty look I go for most of the time.
To round out the month, I finished how I started and painted a model chosen by a local. This time it was K-Mart Spider-Man aka Scarlet Spider:
This one came together very quickly, which I am never mad about. Currently on the docket for me is wrapping up a Spanish unit for Silver Bayonet, and continuing to plug away at MCP (Inhumans next, probably) and Shatterpoint (bounty hunters box next I think).
Josh Boyes
I’ve come back into the hobby this year in a big way after two years of basically nothing. Before I left for my job I had a dire commitment issue, jumping project to project, and coming back after a break has given a sense of focus and clarity to actually get something done.
My Black Templar have been languishing in various shades of brown, black, and grey for years and these past few months since moving home have mostly been able bringing up what I started into a finished state.
I love the look I’ve achieved. Black for a long time as a new comer to the hobby was something I really struggled with. Texture was my answer, and stippling the solution to get to it.
This dread is probably my favourite piece I’ve done yet, and I think it proves to myself that I can actually do this painting thing competently. I have the contrast I want with the rusty edges, the blue for the black, and that vibrant, rich red that reads to me as tarnished despite its vibrancy.
And it’s something I can do at any scale, too!
It’s considered done to me but the base & transfers are yet to be done — this is mainly for me to do later when I’ve got more of the forced organised so I can knock it all out more efficiently and figure out what works best.
Outside of the ‘hams, I’ve been playing around with some various fantasy things to build up my treasure trove of tabletop resources. Wargames Atlantic kindly sent me their guard kit to review!
As well that, I picked up and painted this Reaper Bones’ Colossal Skeleton around the same time with an intent to create some creepy background monster for scale for any future fantasy miniatures I do up. I did him up quick and very dirty with an intent to revisit him later, but I’m very happy with doing ‘as-is’ for this treasure trove idea I’m building.
As for the future, I have some Wasteland Raiders to paint up for the GHO coming in a couple weeks, and a tentative promise I’ve made to myself is to add something to my trove each month until I have a collection of all things fantasy whether that be miniatures, terrain, or a playing aid!
