It’s 2021, and our contributors are back with another hobby round-up!
PierreTheMime
A new year and new hopes for some of my armies! Specifically, the Death Guard are getting a long-awaited 9th Edition book and my Tyranids just received a huge shot in the arm with the Forgeworld Imperial Armour Compendium. With those two things in mind, I committed myself to some relatively large projects for January and managed to finish Mortarion and one Scythed Hierodule (with another one and two Dimachaerons in queue).
Mortarion was honestly a bit of a slog, as there was a TON of detail to go over. I’m pretty pleased with the results though. If you’re interested in my process, we recently released an article on the subject.
The Scythed Hierodule was a return to working with resin and I must say I did not miss fiddling with oddly cast parts and pinning. By the end of assembly I had to reposition the thing a bit because the claw that’s supposed to dig into the base was a solid inch above where it was supposed to land, so I created some additional rock formations out of knife-cut spray foam. One big bug, ready to hose down pesky humanoids for predigestion:
Rockfish
January has been a bit slower for me then December, but I got some more infinity and CWE stuff done! I started by finishing off the PanO side of the Kaldstrom box, some fantastic models amongst them but they suffered from kinda poor photos due to my lacking lighting set up.
After that I did a quick Wave Serpent, its astounding how much faster it was then the last few vehicles I have done. Probably due to the lack of a ton of different materials that stuff like marines have.
To wrap up this half of the month, I did a couple of Yu Jing models!
These are some ludicrously fun to paint models, the worst bit is my available primer option being vallejo “grey” makes the green a touch tiring to base coat. I have some PanO models I am working on that won’t be done in time for this round up, oh well those will be good for the next one though!
SRM
After a harrowing move from Massachusetts to central Oregon, I’ve got my desk, hobby accoutrements, and models unpacked enough to get to work. I’ve even finished my first models of 2021, The Margaritaville Manglers!
Each and every one of these pint-sized dipshits has a unique Hawaiian shirt design, and coming up with a dozen unique patterns was a fun challenge.
I’ll keep from flooding this page with all the individual photos, but you can peep everyone’s distinct shirt designs over at this thread on Twitter.
After my too-brief posting hiatus, I’ve got the last things I painted out East. First, a Christmas gift for my buddy Dylan, whose work we showed off recently in Necromunday.
The caption running all the way around says “He Who Stands With Me Shall Be My Brother”, and I painted an Imperial Fist and Ultramarine – his and my favorite chapters, respectively.
He’s the guy who got me into Oldhammer, so I knew I had to put some of the slogans and such all over the armor of these 30something year old models.
Naturally, the model representing me and my Ultras is short and bedecked in caution stripes. This was an extremely fun project, and it was a blast going back to these old school lead minis. It really makes you appreciate how far models have come in that time, but also how many details have stayed consistent or evolved from each iteration of Space Marine to the next.
Lastly, the last model of Dumpster Year 2020 and one of my own personal hells, the Chaos Chariot. Round two wasn’t so bad as the first; I’d left off the cape and some of the doodads that took so long on the first, and I was just more familiar with the model itself and what it painting it entails. Not champing at the bit to get a third one, but it wasn’t so bad. I’m happy with how it looks, and all the new Chaos stuff being shown off has me pretty psyked for AoS in 2021.
Soggy
I was so close to finishing off my backlog at the start of December, although I managed to sandbag thanks to the release of Cyberpunk. For Xmas I treated myself to my first box of Terminators, which I’ve always loved the look of and was fortunate enough to get my hands on the Space Marine Christmas box. The two weeks off work over Christmas weren’t two productive, only finishing up the Terminators and the Impulsor, but it did get me back in the mood for painting.
I feel I’m happiest when I’m painting Titans or Dreadnoughts, so this year started off with a bang by painting up the Invictor from the boxset and repainting a Redemptor that was in a really bad state.
Primaris Kevin
This year I set three resolutions for myself:
- Paint for an average of one hour per day.
- Do an average of one hundreds push-ups per day.
- Don’t buy any models (that aren’t limited releases) until my Necromunda backlog is done.
The third resolution is the toughest; over the years I’ve accumulated six gangs and two tables worth of terrain to paint. Fortunately between hanging out virtually with my friends and random bits of inspiration have done a lot to help me establish the habit, and so long as I keep doing it that will be reinforced more and more. To start I painted up five Van Saar gangers in a very bright yellow and red paint scheme that I’m calling the Murder Hornets. Seemed very appropriate for 2020, and they’re a lot of fun to paint. The yellow is actually pretty easy to do and you can see a progression of it on this post on Twitter and there’s a great video on it by Goobertown Hobbies. Basically you start with Citadel Colour Wraith Bone, paint the whole thing an intense pink like Liquitex Ink! Quinacridone Magenta, apply a zenithal (overhead) spray with Wraith Bone, drybrush the edges with white, apply Liquitex Ink! Yellow Orange Azo, and then finish off by applying Army Painter Soft Tone to the recesses. The red is just a single past of Citadel Colour Blood Angel Red Contrast, which is an amazing color with great coverage.
Next up are another four Van Saar models; two Neoteks, another Augmek, and a Archeotek. The Archeotek has been without a doubt the biggest challenge, as I’m really not a fan of the proportions of the original model and felt compelled to do something different. So I cut down the oddly phallic plated “tie” in the front, put green stuff in the center of the plate where the other oddly phallic protuberance would normally go, added a laspistol, strapped on a backpack from a heavy plasma incinerator, and made a multi-melta by kitbashing the meltas from three Armigers and the curved plates from a pair of rad beamers. Magnets in the gun and the shield give me a lot of flexibility in the model, and to be honest it’s more likely that this model will be a Prime instead of a Archeotek because the Archeotek rules and weapon choices are just odd.
