May was a busy month for many of us, let’s check out what the team has been up to!
Bair
It’s been a real-slow month for painting in the Bair household. Just 20 Irondrakes added to my Old World Dwarf army after finding finally finding some for sale. Any Old World dwarf player will know the necessity of these. I got them pre-built and have been running in 2 units of 10 each, one as a detachment to Ironbreakers and the other with full command which has actually paid off numerous times, surprisingly.
I was also lucky and got to both paint up the preview of the Wilderfiend but even better got it featured on Warhammer Community’s Darkoath post which ruled. Second time I’ve managed to get on there and this is a model I’m particularly pleased with! Even got out the wet palette I bought at the start of the year and hadn’t used before and everything.
Other than that it’s just been a lot of building. Got a bunch of Brotherhood of Steel stuff for Fallout Factions and started a Saga Vikings force using predominantly Victrix kits. Really great models all around and very excited to start painting them!
Momma Negan
Having returned from my Vacation I’ve been slowly getting back into the groove. In anticipation for a certain project, I’ve painted up a German Stormtrooper I bought while in the UK.
Rob Bass
Lately my focus has been on trying to complete my W’adruhn army for Conquest, The Last Argument of Kings. Here we have a big block of Blooded, a fun unit to run that looks great on the table. I tried to keep the tribal look to the army by painting everyones clothing is a variety of colours, whilst picking out a few pieces to paint in a dark red to help unify the unit. A tedious process, but I really like the effect.
The unit also includes two characters, with the Matriarch Queen and the Abberation. Both great resin models from Parabellum. The Abberation has a great crazed look, whilst the Matriarch poses with a nice calm and collected posture, fitting of a Queen. I particuarly enjoyed the wet blending on her feathers, which add a big pop of colour to the unit.
There is still a lot more that I need to get painted for my W’adruhn, but this unit was a big chunk of it that I am happy to get completed and see on the tabletop!
Saint
I am normally a very slow painter, but this month I went crazy. With some help from my wife, I was able to speed paint an entire 2k Black Templars army in 2.5 weeks and play it at Storm of Silence in Spokane, WA.
This was also my first time using an oil wash, which I think turned out quite well and helped immensely with the whites and reds. Because of the time crunch I was only able to do a few highlights on the characters, and I will probably go back later and add more (especially where there are light sources like the Plasma Pistols).
SRM
Only now, looking just above, do I recognize Saint’s army as one of the Black Templar armies I saw when I was at Storm of Silence. A chunk of this month’s hobby went into rehabilitating my old display board for said event, which was mostly just a lot of masking, sanding, priming, and spraying. However, I did get up to some more exciting stuff:
I got to review the Darkoath launch box alongside Bair and a few others, and was also in the Warcom roundup. I just focused on the yabbos on foot because I spent all of April painting 5 fucking horses and I would much rather just paint some regular dudes and dudettes.
We don’t always have painted pictures of stuff for my Stormbringer reviews, so when I reviewed week 24 I had to knock out this Loonboss real quick. After painting a bunch of fairly large and rather detailed human models, I was happy to just paint a little platemailed goober and some colorful shrooms. He wasn’t the only goblin this month though!
This Squigboss, who people far cleverer than I have called “MF Gloom” was a delightful gift from my wife that she picked up at MOX Boarding House in Portland. I very quickly turned the little guy around, picking out a bunch of his textures at the same time as the Loonboss before him. It’s a weirdly squat model, but I love the mushrooms emerging from his armor, and any squig is a good squig.
I rounded out these heroic gobbos with – get this – more gobbos! I haven’t played Underworlds in an age, but Grinkrak’s Looncourt are some of my absolute favorite models from that entire game. It was a challenge to mix up colors for the mushrooms and squigs that would be sympathetic with the gobbo scheme I cooked up, and I feel like I did a pretty decent job for the most part. The pink squig is still a bit close to the robe color but who cares, they’re goblins. Stormbringer is going to be sending me many, many more in due course, so I thought I would discover the groove for painting batches of the little buggers now.
Around mid-late May, I started getting emails from Catalyst Game Labs about their Mercenaries Kickstarter finally shipping. I have entirely too many mechs in my backlog, and if I didn’t paint at least a few between backing that Kickstarter and its eventual delivery, I fear I might die from the collective weight of my unpainted plastic collection. I painted up most of one of the mercenary lances in my Lyran Commonwealth scheme, getting them done in a couple days. Compared to the laborious layering, blending, and highlighting of my Warhammer minis, these go by refreshingly quickly.
Lastly, I painted up Abraxia from the new Dawnbringers set. I missed the Warcom submission date by a few days, but by the time this article goes out, I should have published my review. I’ll give it to you real shortlike: this model owns. She went together in under 90 minutes and painting was by and large a remarkably pleasant experience.
Whilst rifling through my cabinet of half-finished projects, I found this dude I converted in January last year. I wanted to return to my Templars in some capacity, and a quick little character was the right way to do it! He’s nominally a Judiciar, but I feel I could credibly use him as just about any Lieutenant, Captain, Castellan, or whatever else I wanted.
After two events in May, I’ve been finding some shortcomings in my Templar lists and may continue on the black power armor train. Battleline units seem like they’ll be the bee’s knees, and I’ve got boxes of Scouts, Sword Brethren, and a third Land Raider all calling to me. Maybe I’ll just vibe out and paint more mechs though.
JellyMuppet
Last month I wrote a Faction Focus for the Horus Heresy on the Imperialis Militia. I’ve been making bad decisions ever since.
I said “No one actually owns an optimised Militia army that would be insane”, but then got excited about the idea of Abhuman Muster/Feral Warriors lads with chainaxes.
My normal Solar Auxilia/Imperial Guard/Imperialis militia is a hodgepodge of different and uniquely British kits. Some GW Leman Russes, a lot of 3d printed Stationforge Grimguard, Victrix French Cannons as my artillery, Rough Riders made from Perry Russian Ulhan Lancers with Les Grognard Shako heads, GW Solar Auxilia with Les Grogard bearskins, thousand other weird anachronistic bits. They mix the best of WW1, Napoleonics and the Grimdark Far Future.
The 17th Oeste-Albion “Smogborn” hail from the hives of Wolvreham and Dudlaigh, proudly a part of the Old One Hundred regiments of Old Earth. It is split into various detachments. The Rifles are the Krieg-like massed infantry, the Dragoons are the cavalry and armour, the Solar Auxilia are the Beranbearn, loosely “the Bear-Sons”. Now I wanted a hundred men with chainaxes and gasmasks, so I called upon Victrix.
You know what else is British? Saxons! I bought a box each of Unarmoured Late Romans, Armoured Late Romans and Unarmoured Early Saxons, for 96 total infantry to fill out the ranks of the Huscarls. Their heads are Solar Auxilia ones, left over from converting the Beranbearn. I also scavenged some “laser bows” from a Dacian Sprue since these grenadiers also have lasguns.
Their Discipline Masters are the Smokedrinkers, warriors chosen from lots by the Death Guard to be allowed to abandon their helmets and bask in the fumes of the battlefield. I scavenged some Dark Age Irish to act as the bodies for these, and used the messiest heads the Victrix sprues would offer.
This is very work in progress shot of the 50 or so I have so far. Basing and highlights aren’t done, but I’m getting silly with it. I’ve got plans for horse drawn chariots as sentinels, some more heaviky armoured troops, maybe an elephant? I’m off to an event at Greetings In The Warp in September, so the plan is the entire 3000 points regiment to take point by then.
Thanks to Lupe, Lenoon and Matt Moran for supplying bitz to aid me on my quest.
Brushwizard
Spring is in full swing at the Ferguson house and I didn’t get nearly as much painted in May as I did in April. But! That doesn’t mean I wasn’t productive, as I was able to get the new repackaged Cabal Affiliation box painted up and wrote How to Paint articles for all four of them. I can’t wait to share those with you all once they go live. Especially the chrome Ultron, he was a lot of fun!
Rockfish
I’m still caught up in a lot of messy life stuff so I’ve not had a lot time to work on stuff, but IÂ still got a few things finished up.
Kans are probably the biggest reminder of why I only ever do a handful of ork units in any given edition, these are incredibly detailed models that look super cool once finished but let’s be honest and admit that they are exhausting to paint. There is just so much that goes into each model that even when I am keeping them pretty simple, they eat up a ton of time. I am still glad I did them because they look neat when finished!
Speaking of finishing things, I finally got the last few models for this havoc squad completed!
I also did a Forgefiend as something to try out the scheme on a bigger model, and I had a decent amount of fun with it and it wasn’t even too much of a slog to get through!
The last thing I got done was this Chaos Lord, and this means I actually managed to finish both kits I got from a birthday circle this year even if it took a few months lmao.
“Contemptor” Kevin Stillman
My May 2024 Hobby Progress was somewhat uneven, because I spent a fair chunk of my time building some models versus painting them up.
First, I painted up a full Squad of Bladeguard for my Dark Angels. Three from an Indomitus box set I finally cracked open, three from the Lion Guard Box that came out last year. I took advantage of the Dark Angels upgrade sprue to give them all hooded-yet-helmeted heads, to match my helmeted Azrael. The theme behind these guys are that they are Azrael’s bodyguard while he explores a Space Hulk in a Boarding Action. Owing to various airbrush issues, these guys took a little while to finish up.
After they were finished, I took the opportunity to build a few sprues that had been lying around for a year or so. I also finally cleaned off my hobby desk and reorganized my paints, to make things easier to find. I also packed away my Monument Hobbies paints, because I was taking them with me to the Dallas Open for the painting adventure that awaited me there.
When I got to Dallas, I began a flurry of painting activity. Thursday night, after picking up my badge/swag bag and checking out the store, I went back to my hotel room and spent the night and a chunk of the next morning painting up Vashtorr the Arkifane.
That Friday afternoon and early evening in Dallas I participated in the 40K Masterclass. I’ll have a write-up about the event soon(ish), but I had a blast. The event was taught by Will Hahn, and the class was aimed at having us paint from Black Primer to Parade Ready a Blood Angels Ballistus Dreadnought. I misunderstood the assignment, however.
After finishing up the class and getting a bite to eat, it was time for the Age of Sigmar 4th Edition Spearhead event. I received a blind box of black-primed Seraphon! After my games ending around Midnight, I went back to my room and painted the entire thing for games on Saturday night at 8:30 pm.
Following my return from Dallas, I primed a bunch of finished Ravenwing models, and got the black armor completed on all of them. However, I only had time to finish one model before the end of the month. I intended that model to be a Storm Speeder Thunderstrike, but that didn’t quite happen.
NotThatHenryC
I had a chance to review a couple of models. the Solar Auxilia Basilisk and Hermes Light Sentinel. Both were wonderful models with tons of detail and interesting moving parts, making them great to work on, once. I’ve now set myself a goal of having six of these Hermes ready for the GHO in just a few weeks, and to be honest it’s feeling like a bit of a slog. Full review article here if you’re interested.
I’ve wanted to try out Kill Team properly for ages. As much as I enjoy the narrative specialist games I usually play I still love a proper competitive game and wanted to see if Kill Team would do that for me. The recent-ish release of Nightmare and a bunch of spare 30k bodies and bits provided all I needed to make my first proper Kill Team. These are my Shattered Legion, who I play using the rules for Nemesis Claw.
Originally I was going to do all these guys as Raven Guard, to match my 30k army. Their sneaky behaviour would have been a reasonably close match for Night Lords. But as I was making the models some of them didn’t feel right as Raven Guard and I decided that they were actually a band made up of lost members of various Legions, around a core of Raven Guard.
Not that long ago I wrote a review of the 30k rules for Shattered Legions, which I didn’t like at all. But I really like the concept of them and I’m happy to have this little team. I’m particularly happy with the two Salamanders – so much so that I’m feeling dangerously tempted to try out a little allied detachment of them. Maybe more.
I took these guys to the their first event, or at least half of it, a couple of weeks ago. Family stuff meant I couldn’t make it to the first day but I got to play my first three proper games of Kill Team on the Sunday. My ultimate submarine strategy of not showing up till day two paid off so I actually won all three games and finished in the top half of the event. Happy with that!
Saffgor
This past month for me involved further experimentation with how far I could go to fully convert models for my Ash Waste Admech army, to some electrifying results! I’ve been pretty busy, so there’s not been a ton of progress, but little by little I’m approaching 2000 points of models I can truly be proud about.
First up are a unit of Infiltrators with some additional banners & cloth, to help tie them into the Ash Waste theming. One thing I love about the official Games Workshop Sicarians is the Princeps, with his billowing cloak, and having that aesthetic added to all the other models in the unit was imperative for me. The colors being soft callbacks to Ryza & Metalica insofar as the inclusion of that rich orange and white-on-maroon is what I’d call a happy accident, which should hopefully reinforce that these are precisely the unit they’re intended to be.
Part of my experience with the squatting of various AoS ranges involved a panicked buying of nearabout 4 boxes of Tarantulos Brood, as I feared they were going OOS, and that meant I had to find a use for these arachnid ambushers. On a lark, I opted to make a few test models for them as the Electro-Priest proxies in my Admech, and given the results I’m likely going to build up the rest of the kits as equal parts Corpuscarii & Fulgurite! There’s something special about bringing AoS & Necromunda kits into the 40k setting, indeed.
Skails
It’s ‘Olden Demon’ season so I painted up this Champion of Nurgle. This is a Jes Goodwin sculpt from 1988. I cut off the metal slotta tab, then cut out a section from the front of the base and attached the tab with greenstuff.
