2024 has been the best and hardest year of my life. Great fun with my kid (now a year and a half old), great travelling, more games than ever on the hobby side and probably more models painted in a year than ever before. I’ve also been repeatedly ill, crazy stressed, burned out not once but twice and really struggled with motivation. I painted a couple of hundred models this year and wrote an article nearly every week – 48 out of 52 ain’t bad. To say it’s been a bit up and down is an understatement – let’s dig into it.
December
We should start in December because that’s when I finished the Knight Lancer. It happened last year but it cast a huge shadow over this one. I was – and am – really proud of it, despite the passage of a year showing me a hundred places I could improve the build and push the concept much further. The Lancer has sat on my shelf demotivating me for a year – I spent the first three months of 2024 wondering if I’d ever make (or write) something like it again. It took a solid month before I picked up a paintbrush again for more than five minutes.
January
February
Over Christmas 2023 I picked up the entire Master and Commander series, which kicked off Lenoon’s Year of the Ship, an ultimately doomed series where I thought I’d play a ton of Black Seas. I painted a good whack of ships and picked up several dozen more, did a lot of reading (fiction and nonfiction) and really enjoyed the games I got in.
These models are a real pleasure to paint, but in the end I ran out of steam (wind?) with the project. Eleven ships fully rigged and painted, with another 34(!) on the build queue. It just kind of ended though, as in March I started to gear up for paternity leave, which basically just meant taking on so much stress at work I started getting really debilitating nosebleeds. It’s hard to paint, especially when it requires the kind of focus that running rigging requires, when you’re dripping blood out of your face.
As I’m writing this though, I really want to get back into them – perhaps year of the ship just has to last a bit longer.
March and April
I burnt out hard with the hobby (and writing!) in March and April. Part of that was that I was off on paternity leave, travelling around Europe with my family (which was awesome), but the other part was that I tried to finish up too many deadlines at once. I ended up with the Solar Aux box set for Heresy, which meant a fuckload of painting at short notice. Initially really, really enjoying the concept and the painting scheme, after cranking out 20 rifles, two tanks and (a couple of months later) the Veletaris I honestly ended up hating the models like I’ve never hated anything to do with this hobby before.
The Russ was a fair amount of fun, but with every piece on the Solar Aux I just felt my life seeping out of my paintbrush, they became a hideous, unbearable slog. I also got a huge amount of comments in various places that I was getting some kind of unfair or unjust advantage with getting these kits for review – and that my painting, photography and building was sub par, because people get really shitty about this stuff for some reason. I forced myself to finish off a couple of articles and pulled a big strop, heading out of Goonhammer (and refusing to paint anything even for my own pleasure) until May.
May
Five months after finishing it I was still really under the cloud of the Lancer. Everything I’d done since then was very rote, or became boring, or just couldn’t really pull focus away from the lurking monster on the shelf behind me. Trying to do something daft pulled me out of it though, leading to the most controversial thing I’ve ever made – The Toe Tanks.
The toes are disgusting – if you can stomach it and you haven’t read the article, go have a look – but they represent something special to me, and that’s finding joy in making and painting and writing again. May was a really fun time, just me at home with the kid, hanging out, swimming, going to museums, occasionally getting really sad and isolated but making the best out of a golden opportunity to hang out with a one year old before work took over again. They were really good fun to make, but most of all they were incredibly good fun to show people – I felt very pleased to see every vomiting react or “what the fuck, lenoon”, and remain so.
Summer
Work overwhelmed me upon my return – late May, June and July were without a shadow of a doubt the hardest months of my professional life so far. Luckily, in my role as Historicals co-editor, I get to vicariously live through the joy and achievements of my team – we kicked off Guns of August and Summer of Saga, really fantastic content blocks on First World War gaming and the various ages of Saga. I didn’t write a lot for either one – pulling off a Norman Saga army in 24 hours and collating the recommendations of the team for First World War Reading.
While I lament the fact I haven’t made a Saga landing page yet – I will, but man it’s been a year and a half – you can see all our Saga Summer content here, and it’s some of the best stuff we’ve ever put together in Historicals. Really proud of everyone who contributed – if we got you into Saga, please do say hello in the comments!
The Medieval really took over the rest of my hobby year and all the way from June through to October and November I was painting knights – on foot and mounted before taking them all to a different game and theatre of war entirely with the Barons’ War. I have really enjoyed dipping my toe into Footsore’s Game and Miniature offers, really falling for The Barons’ War Outremer, an intelligent and respectful approach to gaming in the crusades.
I went from having a small Norman Saga force to having massive Armies of Crusaders and Fatmids within a couple of months, which was unexpectedly awesome.
Both armies are now well beyond 8 points (in Saga) and the size of several Barons’ War forces (about 1,000 points of each now). They’re based to be opponents with a single dry scrub scheme, but the painting has been deliberately very different – my characteristic dirty wool and linen which crops up everywhere, and then as bright as I possibly could for the Islamic armies.
October and November
The Islamic armies really caught my imagination, and I spent much of October reading about the period and building up a pretty comprehensive range for comparisons – mixing Victrix, Gripping Beast, Footsore, Essex and a couple of other places. I think they’re all great – I’ve no idea how large this army is going to get, but “very big indeed” seems to be the logical end point.
Next year I’d like to make a board and keep building both armies – there’s a lot more plastic kits on the horizon from Victrix and Wargames Atlantic, and a huge range of Crusader models from every lead-spinning small manufacturer. I’d love to make a Palestinian board that could function for several centuries – and Trench Crusade – with some varied scatter terrain, a story behind it all and magnetised details. We’ll see how far that goes. Having both armies together, painted and even hitting the table with a couple of great games of Saga felt fantastic, a real affirmation that actually this hobby is fun, writing about it is great and getting excited by a new army project is wonderful.
December
It’s almost tradition now that I get a Knight for my birthday, fuck about with it for three weeks achieving nothing and then burn myself to the ground building and painting it during December. The Porphyrion was a long time coming, a model concept I’ve been kicking around since 2022 at least, and I’m glad it’s come good in the end. It was a lot of work, and the article about it a frankly only semi-coherent scream of frustration and anguish and joy, very much my process in written form. It felt draining to produce in many ways, and caps off a series that I started writing in 2022 and started building for way back in 2020. It feels good to have finished with the Knights and Feelings – an experiment in whether we can really use Warhammer to talk about mental health and happiness and trauma. I think I pulled it off, for the most part, though I have perhaps succeeded only in pushing myself up the pretentious bastard rankings. Hopefully it made a couple of people think about themselves in a different way. I know it did for me.
Finishing another big knight ends up casting another big shadow. This time, to avoid the feeling that “I’ve completely fucked next year again”, I’ve immediately started painting something else, some decidedly fishy comrades for an upcoming and very exciting game project.
I’m going into 2024 with a different approach to painting and modelling, so hopefully next year will be just as productive with much less stress. To make a bit of a promise to myself (and I suppose to you – accountability and all that) I got all the ships out of storage and started painting the HMS Sophie – perhaps it will be the year of the ship next year after all, or perhaps I’ll finally bow down to peer pressure and make a Warhound Titan. Either way, I’ve no doubt Historicals-based distractions will come up and fill most of my time – I didn’t think I’d end this year with three massive Medieval armies, but life comes at you fast, doesn’t it?
Thanks for reading along with anything or everything this year – happy new year to you and yours, and lets see what terrors 2025 brings.
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