Somehow the first quarter of 2025 has already been and gone, let’s check up on what the team have been up to with their hobby.
Thundercloud
This is a very thin month for me due to end of year activity at work and family commitments. I’ve completed the Medbury dwarves I bought for a review, as I’m going back and sorting out my Khazad-Dum army for LOTR. Next up is 24 Rangers and any touching up on the existing models I have.
The sculpts are a modern quality, paint up nicely, and fit in reasonably well with the LOTR dwarves, and give me a bit more variety if and/or when I got to non-GW events or the club. Next month I’ll be back to painting a bunch of different things.
Soggy
While I spent most of the month working on on terrain for the March Goonhammer Open, I did manage to squeeze in a bit of hobby for myself. First up were two vehicles for my White Scars that had been sitting around for a few months in different states of completion. Motivation finally came in the form of an event, which called for more metal boxes to push around the table.
The only other thing on the hobby table were the new plastic Ursarax kit which we covered in our review. These models have a frankly absurd number of bits for what they are and I’m not the biggest fan of their heads – I’m curious to see what substitutions people do in the wider community.
I see lots of terrain in my future for April, as the upcoming May Goonhammer Open will be our biggest ever narrative event, calling for boatloads of bespoke items to set the scene.
Lenoon
I’ve not been making and painting much recently as I’ve been doing a writing class, parenting, work stuff, fallouting, all that kind of thing. But I have been knighting.
Having exorcised a lot of traumas and insecurities with the various knights I’ve painted over the last couple of years, I picked up a set of chaos armigers (whatever they’re called), with the sole idea of having some fun with movement and disgust. The first completed is, pretentiously (of course!), called rydych yn fwy, and is the joy of movement, fully articulated in the legs from hip to ankle, able to hop and skip, with bobbing head and pivoting arms, taking the play and joy of a children’s toy into the warhammer space. It can move, it does move, it will move.
It is created with feathers – pigeon, magpie, sparrow, and crow – raw off the street and at least in part, filth encrusted, with my traditional wood and pinecone and lichen. I like it, it is a wonder to me – the ease of construction a flow state, a languid and liquid creativity moving from place to place, component to piece, all in harmony and ease, more than any other knight how I would like to build and paint every time – decisions dancing to the forefront, making themselves as the hand of man merely transports plastic, wood and feather into places perhaps preordained by my personal gods – no great insight here beyond pleasure, making your mark in the world as it is, not as it should be, expression-thought-in-the-godhead, creation exposed and I wonder is this how it feels to be happy?
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Jay “Lorehunter” Kirkman
As one of the Goonhammer team’s lore guys, much of the hobby work I’m doing involves the bookcase. I’ll eventually tackle learning to paint, but for now here are some pics of my work in progress and general concept for the collection.
Saffgor
This month has been down to finalizing my list for 40k, given a few upcoming tournaments, and realizing Cawl needed to be painted ASAP. With that in mind, while he’s not quite finished, Buggisarius Crawl has been started.
This frankly insane conversion was born for my Ash Wastes Admech force I’ve been working on for the past 8 months, and with Cawl at its center, he was being saved for last, more or less. I absolutely adore the idea of this being a mounted bug, with the rider as the hero, and given Cawl’s…efficient output in-game, him being a bit smaller and weaker does make sense.
Furthermore, I’ve started work on my next batch of Ruststalkers, a fantastic addition to the force that was direly needed. While admittedly a more subtle conversion, these having some more cloth & different backpacks do just enough to keep them in-theme.
Cronch
Up first this month, I finished off (and reviewed) the War-wheela and Doom Diver Catapult, continuing to build up my collection of Gitmob. I’m hoping to expand this to a 2,000 point Gloomspite Gitz army over the rest of the year, but I’m really keen on the my desert Gitmob theme so I’m currently researching ways to make units like Troggs and Squigs fit in better.
It’s been a bumper month for Goonhammer-related hobby for me – I also spent a decent chunk of time working on a Wasteland Raiders gang for Fallout: Factions, ready to participate in the inaugural use of the matched play “C.O.M.P. Kit” at the Goonhammer Open. You can read about our experiences on the site! Needless to say, my Raiders did not cover themselves in glory.
My personal hobby time this month was mostly focused around my current Age of Sigmar obsession (Gitmob notwithstanding) – Stormcast Eternals. I’ve played 25 games of AoS since the new year, and at least 15 of them have been with Stormcast. In the main this is because I’ve been trying to get better at the game, and Stormcast fit the bill as a faction that is (currently) decently capable of hitting top tables whilst still having enough variety to weather any future Battlescroll changes. It’s been working, and I’ve had some decent event results! Learning to be willing to be more competitive rather than hiding inside a protective cocoon of “it doesn’t matter how well I do” has been an interesting experience, but I’m really glad to be doing it.
I finished off a Knight-Relictor and Stormcoven this month – both of these models were basecoated by a friend on commission, and then finished off to army standard by me. This is the first time I’ve found paying for commissions to be something that interests me – paying for someone willing to spend time basecoating, so that I can spend more time on the fun bits. This army is quite a way below my top standard, but I’ve resigned myself to it being quick and fun, and I want to be challenging for podium spots over painting awards at the moment.
I also dug a couple of old models out of the cabinet, leftovers from previous aborted attempts at Stormcast schemes from earlier years before I settled on the Hallowed Knights after reading Plague Garden. Two Knight-Incantors and a Knight-Zephyros (previously Neave Blacktalon) got rebased to fit in with my army, and I figure they’re all specialist enough roles that it might make sense for them to travel with a different Stormhost from time to time. As much as anything, I wanted to preserve the effort I’d put into the two limited Incantor sculpts.
Finally this month, I was in need of a quick win after a week of dedication to Fallout minis, and so I picked up a couple of units of Aetherwings off of the pile for a fun evening’s work. I’m currently very into the live feed of the peregrine falcons nesting in my local cathedral, so I tried to paint them to evoke that kind of vibe, although I stopped short of trying to replicate the striped pattern of their feathers. Pretty happy with these for an evening’s work, they fit in well.
A pretty packed month for me then! In April I’ll slow down, as I am working on a project for the Mini Painting Open in Bristol in May.
JellyMuppet
I’ve had a hell of a busy month. I attended full weekend of Heresy Hammer events, a Saturday 2500pt mandatory Assassins event, and a Sunday 1000pt Civil War “Small Heresy” event.
I’ve got a lot of Death Guard, but my ticket was Loyalist, so I couldn’t bring my normal list. This meant I had to paint up some more Dusk Raiders, so I committed (in a month) to painting 20 Breachers, 5 Destroyers and a pair of Land Raiders to put them in. I used a selection of lovely 3D printed and resin parts, as well as arming a unit with the same shields as my Victrix Saxon Militia (also Dusk Raider Auxiliaries).
This was a frenzied painting session, with a lot of sponging and mess. I also settled on a new basing scheme, utilising Krautcover’s A TALE OF GRIMDARK, which features tiny little resin bones and a lovely, crumbly dirty graveyard loam. This is my new favourite basing material of all time, and I might just have to rebase my entire 15,000pts(ish) of Death Guard in it. Maybe that’s a job for Hot Mud Summer.
April is the month of DEMONS, and I’ve built and started painting Balan Ghur, the Thief of Reason, master of the Eyeless Host. I’ve committed to painting him entirely in the John Blanche sets from Army Painter, and its proving an interesting challenge.
Momma Negan
It’s been a very slow month, with only three miniatures added to my collection.
First off is the promotional miniature from this month’s Bolt Action Compendium. First proper go at a model with a full Splittertarn Zeltbahn and I’d say it turned out beautifully!
Next up was a Panzer 1a painted up for a historicals painting article, while the mold is clearly pretty old, it still turned out pretty well, and the decals add just the right amount of oomph.
Last but not least is this Banshee for my old world vampires. To be honest, I really just wanted to paint up a ghost and had her laying around.
Josh
I’m in a similar boat as Rich! It’s been a huge uptick in Goonhammer-related hobby for me and it’s all been focused on Fallout Factions. I’ve managed to do up every miniature in the box, plus some additional robots to round them out for the future.
I’m plenty proud of them but I’ve got clear room for improvement, noticeably on the faces. I just don’t have the brush control or the mind to do nice skintones, and I’m leaning so heavily on speed-paint and washes for it at the moment. This month is going to be about focusing in on that.
What I think I’ve got down though is this rusty, dusty style of robot. I got a lot of confidence boosting comments on my Protectron, and I’m padded out my robots with an Eyebot I was gifted alongside the other Goonhammer team-mates. Not only do I really like the look of them, but they painted up so quick and easy that I really might just go crazy and get a whole lot of them. I’ve already got some Mr. Handys on the way!
I’m looking forward to getting them done, and setting up some spare heads I’ve got from my many boxes of Space Marines to practice skin-tones up on. If I don’t post any progress of that next month, please throw rocks at me.
NotThatHenryC
This month I’ve mainly been working through my Kill Team backlog. I’ve managed to get my Plague Marines finished, which is great because they’re absurdly detailed models. I converted them out of models from the 8th edition 40k starter box, so they kind of cost me nothing… or at least nothing least recently.
I tried out a “grimdark” painting style for the armour, involving putting paint on with a sponge. I think it worked ok but all the other gubbins kind of overwhelms it. They look ok though I think.
I’ve got a few Mk3 marines and some tanks lying around that don’t really fit for my 30k Raven Guard. The logical thing is therefore to start an entire new army with them and settled on Sons of Horus, mainly as they’d have a totally different play style to my Ravens. I thought it might be fun to try out more sponge painting on this test model and I’m pretty happy with the outcome. It gives the model a texture, a bit like what you see on tanks with cast armour. I’ve built the rest of this guy’s squad now and I think they’ll look good on the table.
Rockfish
So uh for the last better part of two months my disability has been disabling, so not much from me but I finally finished some models!
SRM
I missed last month’s round-up as I was traveling abroad, and nearly missed this one as I was traveling domestically (expect an entirely too long travelogue about my Adepticon experience sometime in the next week or two, lest editorial demand I split it up into more digestible sub-10k word behemoths) so let me close out this latest installment with, again, too many words about too many models.
I was part of the team reviewing the new Command and Heavy Weapon Squad kits for the Death Korps of Krieg, and I went predictably hard on my little group of bozos with their flamer carriages. The kit is none too hard to build and paint, provided you build in subassemblies and don’t spend an inordinate amount of effort painting T3 bozos on their Scootypuff Jrs. I had a ton of fun painting their little stripes, scratching them up, and adding plenty of weathering to their gun shields. I still don’t like doing too much weathering on infantry since I find that breaks up their silhouettes too much, but those big flat gun shields are begging for transfers, streaks, and rust.
I painted up a crew of character models next, but I’ll start with the best of them – Ursula Creed. In my curiosity, I found that her extremely out of place helmeted head is a reference to when Winston Churchill visited the trenches in WW1 and wore essentially the same French Adrian helmet. As Ursurkar Creed (and by extension, his daughter) are by and large references to a mythologized Churchill, it only makes sense that she’d have another reference to the ol’ Bulldog. I enjoyed working in more of a rich green for the interior of her coat, which you also see spilling out on the back where it’s torn up. I don’t have pictures of that here, but you can peep those on my Bluesky.
I also painted up the quartet of weirdos from the Darktide board game. Batch painting these at the same time as Creed with a vacation in between was a recipe for completely losing my place and slowing my progress further. Nothing slows your hobby progress like being away for two weeks, coming home, and wondering what stage of beige highlights you were on. Still, it was a fun crew to paint, even if I don’t like the psyker’s fivehead. Most fascinating of all is the Ogryn and Kasrkin, who are just a couple random pieces from the existing kits thrown onto a tiny sprue. I even converted the Kasrkin to be the missing demo trooper who I didn’t build in my actual squad, as the pieces are literally the exact same ones. Honestly, my only note on these is that you shouldn’t paint them at the same time as a fifth character. Learn from my hubris, dear reader.
I also contributed to the model review for the new Kill Team: Blood and Zeal set, as my hunger for Imperial Weirdos was not yet satisfied. I didn’t have a ton of time for these, so I crunched a smidge to get just the weirdest of the bunch done in time for the review. I think the general kit isn’t actually that overly detailed as it’s mostly just dudes in robes with guns and swords, but I focused on the fanciest boys and girls for this. As a dabbler in the old Daemonhunters range I was happy to paint these guys, even if I’m very tired of painting sculpted flames. If you want more specific thoughts on these, read our review.
The cherub also looks like Guy Fieri.
For next month, I think I’ve gotta go with something simpler. While I’ve been traveling a bunch, only having 21 models painted in three months is pretty paltry given my typical output. Unfortunately more real life stuff is probably going to keep that number pretty low, but I think I’ve got some plans for how to pump those numbers up. Fortunately, Adepticon got me pretty hyped about no fewer than three projects, some of which might be pretty easy to make progress on. On to April!
Badusernametag
March was a massive push for me to get five new hulls ready for the March Goonhammer Open Sack of Tallarn Horus Heresy event. I got there and was very pleased to add the below o my Night Lords army.
- Witchthroat- Land Raider
- Acid King- Kratos
- Harbinger Nox- Command Sicaran
- Sulphur Witch- Predator (Melta/Command)
- Unholy Serpent- Predator (Melta)
Special mention for my command Land Raider (The Gate of Perdition), which got a much needed re-paint and glow up.
I also snuck in some sneaky recon marines (3 snipers, 5 chads with shotguns and a can do attitude).
Big hobby month for me!
Bair
It’s been a very rough start to the year in my world and I didn’t get any hobby done in the first two months of the year. This month, though, I got a bunch of stuff done.
Saga released Age of Chivalry semi-recently and I went all-in on a One-Warband-Many-Boards style collection done in an easy generic scheme to use as Germans, Free Companies, or Hussites (for the War Wagon!).
I also painted up an army for Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game: Ents! An army that I’ve wanted to do for a couple of years now. These are a mix of minis using Games Workshop’s Treebeard, a Trish Carden sculpt from Footsore, and 3D prints from different makes. I’ll be adding the other GW ones real soon, too. Played a couple games with Cronch back to back and they were lots of fun!
Until Next Time
It’s great to see all sorts of awesome hobby going on by everyone. Happy hobbying and we’ll see you next month!
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