While many of the Goonhammer crew have been on mid-year breaks, some of them have been busy painting. Let’s check up what they’ve been up to.
MildNorman
With the new edition of Age of Sigmar upon us, I wanted to start a Nurgle army. As part of it, and in an effort to stave off burnout, I challenged myself to paint at least one model a night. Whether it be a Great Unclean One or a single Plaguebeaerer, I got it fully based and finished and uploaded a picture to my local discord to keep me honest. Keeping to that I painted a lot more than just a few models and managed to paint over 2,000 points in just 25 days. Here are the fruits of that labor.
In addition to these morons, I painted up the Forbbiden Power lore of endless spells and a couple other odds and ends. This project is a lot of fun and I’m almost fully through my backlog for the army. Hopefully it should be wrapped with every model I’d ever want to run by the end of August.
Jack
Most of my painting time this month was taken up by Battletech. In expectation of the Mercenaries kickstarter and doing some updates to our main landing page I’ve been trying to get every single force pack fully painted so I can take a single photo of them. While I already had a good chunk of the mechs done, many packs turned out to have one or two that I’d just never gotten around to finishing.
To keep my pace up on these I’ve prioritized two of my easier schemes, the Hastati Sentinels in black and gold, and Sea Fox in silver and blue. At this point I’ve only got 8 more mechs from the original Clan Invasion force packs to do, and a handful from the newer mercenary ones (not the ones from the Kickstarter, the various single mercenary company packs released over the last year).
As we got towards the middle of the month and the Kickstarter started to be delivered, I picked up a handful of the mechs in the core box on Ebay and from locals who got theirs in the first wave – with Perigrin’s help we managed to roll out articles on all 10 units in that box over the course of a week.
Finally I wrapped out the month with two of my favorite mechs, the Blood Asp and Loki Mk II.
SRM
This month saw me frantically painting away at all three of my primary game systems, knocking out 27 models – a quarter of how many I’ve painted all year! Whatever could have caused this prodigal output? Could it have been mostly panic? Read on to find out!
First up is a pair of Scout squads for my Templars. Having a pair of these squads for actions and board control seems pretty clutch in any self-respecting Marine list, and for my strategy of “cram as many lethal sustained melee attacks inside Land Raiders as possible”, it’s good to have some versatility. I found both these squads to be easy to build and paint – a pleasant upgrade over the crotch-bulging putty-faced Scouts of old. I also used the Templar Neophyte arms on them for a bare-armed look. I had those bits lying around, may as well use em! The shotguns and bolters are mostly there for squad differentiation, since they shouldn’t be shooting much anyway.
I was too late to get this crew ready for our Skaventide review, as I got held up painting the flames on their wings. Getting through their armor and basing was a smooth ride and until those flames, I was on track to get these done quickly. Discouraged, I put the squad away for a few weeks while I worked on Scouts instead. Now that they’re done, I think they add some beautiful verticality to my Stormcast force, and they’re going to be really useful in my games of 4th, if I ever get to play the dang game.
Friends of mine started getting their Battletech Mercenaries Kickstarters this month, so in a panic I grabbed some of the loose mechs I had lying around. I had to get through at least some of this backlog before mine showed up! I had a pleasant time painting this group, even if it had been so long since I painted any Northwind Highlanders that I forgot it’s supposed to be green below and brown up top. Oops. The Black Knight with Clanbuster was fun though, and my first resin model from Catalyst. It was nice to go for my typical power sword blend on that big stupid Final Fantasy VII sword.
Continuing this same pattern, I painted the Inner Sphere Heavy Lance, a wonderful selection of “just a guy” mechs. I’ve started to dress up my older Lyran Commonwealth scheme with some more red accents, and adding decals to mechs gives them a lot more personality than my earlier models.
Closing out this month is a terrain set I built in 2022, primed in 2023, and only got around to painting now. I hate painting terrain. Even with an airbrush or a menagerie of spray paints like this set, I don’t enjoy the process. I primed this green, zenithal’d it with Wraithbone, and drybrushed it white, leaving it as such for like a year. I slathered watered down Loren Forest over the bottom and painted most of the rest with Contrast and more drybrushing, then varnished the hell out of it.
Next month is NOVA, and ideally I’ll have finished the 6 models I need for my Templar list – 5 Sword Brethren and a Land Raider. I’ll also need to repaint the weapons on my existing 5 Sword Brethren to match my newer blue fade effect, but we’ll see if we can get those done, but the other 6 models are the priority. I’d be working on those, but I ran out of black primer halfway through the month, my FLGS doesn’t have any, and my order has been in Postal Hell for a week at the time I write this. Fingers crossed for August!
Momma Negan
This month was pretty hard, didn’t get to paint a lot due to sickness and stress, but I did finish some minis for a HTPE WW1 Germans!!
Then I finished another unit from the new Epic Battles Hail Caesar, for being small miniatures and fast to paint, these are taking me way too long to be honest.
And lastly, in anticipation of the new Old World Dwarfen Strongholds, I got my hands on Khrys Rabinsson from the 1984 Dwarf Adventurers line and gave him a proper paintjob befitting his grim demeanor.
Charlie B
The clarion call of videogames and a slew of Real Life has somewhat stymied my hobby progress over the last few months, but happily, some progress has still occurred between March (my last update) and now. I finally got around to painting ten women for my old Imperial Guard army, complete with additional Chimera. Said women were then sprinkled throughout the army, giving me a 75-25% male-female ratio. It feels good to have diluted the sausage fest, even if it meant repainting a LOT of squad numerals.
I also converted and painted a Primaris Psyker for them, with a head from Statuesque Minis and some snipping. You can get more notes on the conversion over on the Beard Bunker.
For my marines, I added two more grav bikes so they can fly around in a giant V formation, which is at least as important as butchering the enemies of Mankind. I also painted up a Hammerfall Bunker, and made some adjustments to the turret so that I can pop it on the top of a Gladiator chassis for use as a grav-Whirlwind. Again, you can see how that looks over on the Bunker.
Finally, I have produced that most unexciting and yet transformative of terrain pieces: some modular roads. This is the first of two planned batches, but already it’s been a bit of a visual force multiplier for the rest of my terrain collection. You can read about how I made them here.
McBill
This month was a little slower for me compared to my crazy June, at least as far as painting is concerned. I spent a great deal of my hobby time researching and building the start of a Welsh warband for SAGA, since I finally got sucked in by SAGA Summer. Living down the road from historical gaming’s biggest cheerleader probably didn’t help, either.
I started out the month feeling the itch to do some terrain. So, I started work on what will eventually be my third table for Marvel: Crisis Protocol. The idea for this started when a kind local provided me with a quinjet model, as well as another that failed in printing. I made some lemonade from that lemon and turned it into a crashed quinjet terrain piece. I then thought of a way to combine an extra playmat and some other terrain pieces I’ve had sitting around. First, I added some trees I’ve had collecting dust for years. I popped the Xmas decoration trees off their bases, then pried the bottom off the bases. I glued in some washers to make them sturdier then reattached the bottoms. I primed and painted the bases, then promptly covered all the painting with snow. I am a hobby genius. It was a surprising amount of work but the trees should work as Size 2 and 3 terrain without falling over if you bump them.
After that I went real old school, using a hot-wire cutter to carve boulders out of insulation foam. Those will serve as smaller Size 1 and 2 scatter terrain that’s super important for MCP. The Weapon-X bunker I was given in return for painting a few models will eventually serve as a Size 5 terrain piece. I also picked up some toy jeeps that I’ll repaint to match as well. In the end, I hope to have a table that tells a story- two groups fighting over the contents of a wrecked quinjet in a cold, northern forest. Bonus- the rocks and trees can serve double duty as SAGA terrain.
After that, it was back to my MCP and Shatterpoint mainstays. This Sam Wilson model was gifted by a friend and has sat around unpainted for a couple of years. The shame finally got to me, so I knocked the model out across a couple of sessions. The detail was tedious to paint and the sculpt doesn’t match the studio style, but I do like how it came out in the end.
I next had a couple weeks of SAGA model building squeezed in around a busy couple of weeks for our family. My next paintjob was Luminara Unduli. Shockingly after so many lightsaber-wielding models, she was the first I damaged. The lightsaber snapped off, and her left thumb is just a nub. I wound up very carefully replacing the blade with some super thin plasticard rod. It wouldn’t stay glued, so I found myself painstakingly drilling a tiny hole in the hilt using my pin vise. That helped to hold the plasticard in place enough. Fun times.
Next I did Commander Wolffe and his Wolfpack clone troopers from the Lead by Example unit box. I also did a pair of test Star Wars: Legion clones as part of an upcoming Goonhammer article. I can really knock out clones and stormtroopers in a hurry with my method, which is good because there’s so many of them!
Next, I flipped back to MCP and painted this Namor. He’s half of the newest expansion box and is really shaping up to be a staple pick in the meta. I don’t chase meta, but he is affiliated with Defenders, who I’m focused on for the remainder of the year. Painting this reinforced my new love for Pro Acryl flesh tones. I also brought back an old “sepia wash over silver” technique for his trident. I hadn’t done it in years and I like the results.
Lastly I surprised myself by quickly knocking out Plo Koon at the last minute. He’s unfortunately not great on the table, and also not part of my Empire focus for the remainder of the year. But like most Jedi, he paints up pretty quickly. With him done, I have only five more models before my entire Shatterpoint backlog is cleared out. This is absolutely unprecedented and exciting for me. (Please respect my privacy and do not ask about backlogs for other games. Thank you for your understanding.)
AoS Coach
Man… I gotta get faster at submitting my photos 🤣. This month I’ve been working on my Stormcast Eternals which I hadn’t touched for a good 18 months. The backstory for my SCE is a defender/crusade force based in Ghur, drawing inspiration from the Knights Hospitaller / Black Templar (I’m half Maltese) using red, black and white colour pallet similar to 40k Blood Ravens. House of Dragons has me also painting SCE dragons like Krondys and Stormdrake Guard.
Soggy
This month was a huge write off with a family summer holiday, followed by recovering from covid caught on said holiday. I did manage to squeak out one little thing though, the new Mechanicum Battlegroup which we covered in our review here.
These are awesome kits and I can’t wait to see what different schemes people cook up for them and what impact this will have on the amount of Mech played at Heresy events.
Rockfish
So I’ve been busy with real life as ever, but I managed to squeeze a few models in this month anyway!
I finished off the last three models of the stormcast spearhead to kick the month off, then went on a rambling journey across a bunch of different things…
A small pile of Battletech models when the box happened to turn up, along with…
I got a just the odd one or two guard models done this month! Don’t think too hard about how I did all ten scions in a single evening…
Last but not least I got a few more of my skaven finished up! This brings me up to a full spearhead of them, which is nice but I’m not looking forward to the other twenty clanrats…
