With Covid-19 rampaging across the world, many of our authors have way more painting time than normal. As such, for April we’re doing a two-part hobby round-up, in the middle of the month and at the end, to let everyone show off their stuff without making the post longer than Start Competing: Space Marines (tbc). Check out our Sisters of Battle, tiny Titans, Death Guard, and sundry other bits and pieces of hobby progress below!
Liam “Corrode” Royle
Not only am I working from home for the foreseeable thanks to the coronavirus, I also had the best part of 2 weeks booked off at the start of April for a trip to Vienna which was now very firmly cancelled. Rather than cancel the leave (which I don’t expect to be able to use later this year for anything productive) I took that 2 weeks to sit down and relax. This meant a lot of reading, a lot of exercise I’ve been avoiding, some of the longer-term chores around the house getting done, and of course some painting! Oh, and replaying Morrowind, because apparently my preferred gaming style is to replay 15 year old RPGs.
In the event I didn’t get quite as much done in terms of number of models as I would have hoped, partly because I tried not to spend all day sat in front of my desk in the office when that’s what I was going to have to do once I got back to work anyway, and partly because my main focus was on more of the Sisters of Battle models from the army set last year. I love these models in terms of their look, but they’re a bit of a chore to actually paint, which makes them slow going. I also had some Infiltrators left over from March to edge highlight, and buzzed through a couple of Marine characters. I even managed to sneak a Canoness across the line by finishing her basing this morning. Overall still not a bad month – the official count is 15 models down by April 15th, which is good going when you consider that half of that number is Battle Sisters and Seraphim – and I made progress in other areas including building a bunch more tiny titans. I also started work on a Knight Valiant I’ve had sat in a box since late 2018, which was going well until I opened my Xereus Purple (the key colour in my purple-and-gold scheme) and found it was a solid lump. Welp. That poor Knight will have to wait around a little longer, although I can at least still make some progress on other parts of it.
For the rest of April, I have the Repentia Superior from the army set sat on my painting desk, as well as a Genestealer Cults Magus for something a bit different. After that I’m thinking of my Tech-priest Manipulus and then probably a return to Space Marines with the last 5 Intercessors and the old metal Scouts I’ve been sitting on for a while. I expect all of these plans to change by the time April 30th rolls around, and I’ll end up painting Eldar or an Underworlds warband or something. We’ll just have to wait and see!
Robert “TheChirurgeon” Jones
My long work painting Death Guard continues! I’ve had a little less time over the last couple of weeks, but I’ve managed to get two Blightlord Terminators painted, plus everything else is primed and a lot of it has been basecoated Castellan Green.
Also, as an added bonus, I’ve been staying at my parents’ house with my family over the past month. And while I was digging around through my old Legos, I found one of the first minis I ever painted: The Heroquest Dwarf, painted with Testor’s Enamel Paint. Behold the finest paint job that 12 year-old Rob could muster! Note: Some of the paint has worn off/chipped.
Greg
Two main projects this month (so far). First, finishing the unit of XV8 Crisis Suits I started at the end of March. The unit is six models, which was just about the largest amount of bullshit I ever want to batch paint in one go ever again. One thing I’ve been trying to do with this army, which the eagle-eyed reader may have noticed, is wedging either a flight stand or a brass rod under every battlesuit, to take the weight off of those little Tau ankles and hopefully avoid breaking more than one model per game. These were a complete slog, but I’m pretty happy with the end result.
With that done, I’ve now painted over a thousand points (1042, total) of Tau since I dove back into the army at the start of March, so I figured it was time to Trolley Problem my way over and finish off my Fallen Angels. I’d previously done 16 of the 32 infantry, and it only took a couple of weeks to finish the other half of them, base everyone, and build/paint their Rhino:
It’s not much of an Army, being just about 750 points, but it’s also the biggest possible Fallen list you can make outside of summoning Daemons or taking fortifications, so I guess this is a Finished Army, and if I can talk my wife into playing Kill Team, I’ll have pretty much all the options for that, too.
Next on deck, I’ll probably go back into my Tau, but I’m tempted to dig into the “Dark Vengeance Plus Random Metal Goobers” set I picked up when those were on Made To Order last year. I particularly enjoyed painting the Chaos Sorcerer here in Librarian colors, and I’d like to take that same approach – trying to push myself to do the best job I can while focusing on one model at a time, rather than joylessly ripping through stock recipes on auto-pilot while trying to finish an entire army – on the old metal Dark Angels sculpts.
Silks
I was lucky enough to have very little to do over the Easter Bank holiday (4 day weekend in the UK) so I got quite a lot done.
First up was finishing my Sisters of Battle army. This was quite a quick “concept” army so I’ve now managed to do all 2000 points minus a preacher, which I wasn’t able to get hold of.
Once they were finished, it was time to crack on with the remaining Bonereapers in my hobby pile. I only needed the Liege Kavalos done in order to get 2000 points painted and once he was done I decided to have some fun with the big models I wasn’t necessarily planning on using straight away.
I also hosted a “Hangout and Hobby” over Skype with some friends, which I highly recommend. Was good to be sociable and I also got this little chap done from start to finish.
I’m now in serious danger of running out of models to paint so I started looking around online to find shops with models still in stock. I managed to hit the jackpot here and now have these to work on. The plan is to try not to rush (years of painting frantically to get ready for tournaments has got me into this bad habit) and paint them to the absolute best of my ability with freehand, tattoos e.t.c
Pendulin
Having built my first Age of Sigmar model in March, it seemed that April was as good a time as any to dive right in. I started reading the rules and lore for Age of Sigmar, and am even more resolute in my decision to pick Skaven. They are murder-rats. They murder, and are rats. What’s not to love?
Horde armies are a bit of a personal challenge because I’m an extremely slow painter. However, restricting myself to predominantly using Contrast paints sped things up. Drastically. From start to finish, each of these rats took only 30 minutes to paint, which is just a fraction of the time I would normally spend on models this size. I already finished up a box of 20 Clanrats, and I honestly spent more time cleaning mould lines than I did painting. Next up for this month are Packmasters, Giant Rats, and Rat Ogors (which are all together sold in a single box), as well as tossing in some Plague Monks for good measure. Rats and rats and rats and …
Credit: Pendulin
Soggy
As per last month’s hobby post, the Goonhammer discord resoundingly voted in favour that I cracked the plastic on my Titanicus Knight Household force. Batch painting this many models in one go is probably not a clever idea, so I guess this makes it on brand.
In the past two weeks I managed to make some progress on this, getting the majority of the force built, painted and pinwashed. In the second half of the month, I have another five Questoris that need painting and I hope to get these completed including basing, transfers and all of the weapon options for the Questoris which I magnetised but are still awaiting paint.
I initially thought it was a bit ambitious to try and get these all ready in one month, so I’m pretty stoked with getting this far already.
Alfredo
April started off pretty eclectic for me (as most months do) before I decided to hunker down and focus on a specific project for the foreseeable future.
First, I cranked out a quick pupper for How to Paint Everything: Pets of Warhammer. I based him the same as my Necromunda models so that he might join my Enforcers at some point. The goal here was to paint him like a Great Dane with fawn colors rather than the doberman look of the boxart.
I then convinced my wife to watch Captain Marvel with me and immediately afterwards decided I needed to paint Captain Marvel, coincidentally also the only remaining figure in the Marvel: Crisis Protocol core set I hadn’t painted yet. She was a blast to work on since the sculpt pose is really great and a good opportunity to work on some painting skills. I put a lot of effort into the face, trying to get smooth blends without too much contrast and also did gold NMM for the first time, which was a lot of fun. She’s definitely my favorite model out of the core set and I hope to get to play this game some time this year.
Next up, I decided to work on my skin skills so I dug out the half-painted Garrek’s Reavers I’d set aside almost three years ago. They are cool models with tons of skin on them and I had no emotional attachment to them so they made for a great canvas to practice on. This was a ton of fun to do, at least the skin part, and I feel like I learned a ton about blending skins and doing different tones. My volume definition can still use a lot of work but at least I am no longer scared of painting skin.
Current Project
With the Reavers done and put away never to be seen again, I decided to shift my focus to something new and different. With the pandemic raging and lock-down in full swing, I decided I really wanted to find a cool minis game I could play by myself or with friends over webcam. I’m much more motivated about painting when I know I’m going to use those painted models at some defined time in the future. After exhausting research, I settled on Hellboy: The Board Game. It’s a co-op dungeon crawler with solo out of the box so I knew I could play it even if remote sessions didn’t work out. As it turns out, the game plays great over webcame and I have had a couple of super fun sessions with friends in the past week with more scheduled. So for the time being, I’m heads down on getting the game fully painted and right now I’m full steam ahead with painting frog monsters:
I hope that before the month is out I will have all of these minions painted plus the three bosses (Rasputin, Giant Frog Monster and Tentacle Monster) and have started work on the core agents, but we’ll see!
SRM
I’ve taken a definite “treat yo self” turn in my painting during lockdown. Now hasn’t been the time to cram for a tournament, but to paint the fun stuff I’ve had lying around for a while. I’ve also changed up my photo taking setup as I was getting pretty grouchy with my results before.
First up, a better picture of the Goliath ‘Zerker, lovingly known as Mungo Meatfist:
I painted him to match my other Goliaths, but the big ol’ vials of Bane Juice needed some work. Fortunately, there’s a GW tutorial for that and I’m real happy with the results. I also started playing with glazes on the knees and elbows since they’re so gnarly and swole. But speaking of Goliaths…
I painted up the next-most-swole members of the gang with these two Stimmers. These are just “what if a Goliath ganger, but more” and I painted them accordingly. I found the rusty metal to get lost on the chest, so I painted them in hazard stripes, AKA God’s Own Pattern. They were fun and pretty easy to knock out, even if I wish their poses weren’t so samey. I also put the wrong heads on so Renderizer hat is on the grenade launcher guy instead of the Renderizer guy, but I’m not gonna go prying that off.
I remained swole (but some might say still out of control) and painted up these Forge-Born who came in the Stimmers box. There aren’t really many options for them beyond what you see here, and some of the arms were tricky to match up, but I like the models a bunch. I’m just happy to add more diversity to my Goliaths with this particular musclebunch. I’m also wishing more and more that my older gangers had the same amount of hazard stripes on them that my new ones do, but c’est la vie.
Now you KNOW I had to get more striping in, right? It was time to break out The Good Shit so I started work on some Necromunda bounty hunters. Gor Half-Horn here was particularly inspired by an old Beastmen scheme I remember seeing in White Dwarf back in the day, and I was just happy to paint some red armor. He took me two days to knock out and he was pretty fun to paint, utilizing the fur techniques from my Daves to Darkness army along with all my Necromunda weathering and patterns. But he’s not the most dramatis of personae, that honor would go to…
Grundle Scruntleson himself, Grendl Grendlsen. This guy was an absolute joy to paint and I started and finished him in a day. The variety of textures, materials, and colors on him always kept me excited, and it was an experiment in seeing how much a wash and highlight can change the color of something – the leather and hazard stripes are both Averland Sunset before washes and highlights! Keen-eyed readers might recognize his scheme as well, which is based on the classic Space Dwarfs box art from Rogue Trader:
Fortunately my buddy Dylan had the box and took some photos for me to use as reference. Give him a follow on Instagram, he’s a talented fella.
Lastly, I got a bit more modern. Dylan was hosting a Zoom hobby hang that I showed up (late, tired, drunk) for, so I just grabbed whatever was on my desk that looked like it needed paint. I grabbed the 5 Veteran Intercessors who’ve been sitting under my monitor since November and started hashing away at them. Within the week they were finished, rounding out my Veteran Intercessor squad to a hearty 10 men.
For the rest of the month (and foreseeable future to be honest) I’m letting my hobby whims take me where they will. I just finished Ragnir Gunnstein (more of him at the end of the month!) and I’ve got the Ammo-Jack, Dome Runner, and 5 Intercessors on my hobby desk at the moment. Watch this space and see what comes next, as it might be none of those!
Craig “MasterSlowPoke” Sniffen
Most of my painting this year was to try and get everything available for Blackstone Fortress painted. I really wanted to try and get thorough with the Quest for the Hidden Vault with my fellow authors at Adepticon. I definitely lost steam once it was obvious the event was going to be canceled. There was probably a 6 week or so period where I just couldn’t get motivated to paint. Thankfully, watching everyone else work through their backlog and the well timed posting of an online painting contest for a local game store motivated me to finally get my Chapter Master conversion for my Rainbow Warriors completed.
One of my favorite units on the tabletop is the Gravis Captain. In the right position he’s just a deceptively durable bowling ball, knocking over enemy units. He definitely deserves a cooler model than the omnipresent Dark Imperium sculpt. I wanted also use this model as my Calgar for the 40k Friendly at Adepticon, so I magnetized his arm and his feet, and painted up both a 40mm and a 50mm base for him to stand on.
Special thanks are due to Pendulin for printing out the Iron Halo for me. It was the first time I have ever really designed something with a 3D modeling program and it came out better than I ever imagined. For the most rest of April I’d like to try and get a few more units finished up for my Rainbow Warriors. I’m only 5 models away from finishing the Shadowspear box set, and I have an Impulsor and a Repulsor Exterminator that I need to get finished.
Elye
Elye here; long-term background lurker and Admech botherer. This month I was supposed to be playing a number of events: the SN GT in Gibraltar which has been postponed along with an event down in Bristol at which I had to defend some sort of title (???)… Instead I used the work from home lockdown to full effect and tackled some projects that have been in the pile of shame for some time.
First on my list was my “resin albatross” and his totally loyal Tech Priest Dominus on Dark Abeyant.
After coming back from the WhW finals, the marine meta really crushed my spirit and love for my toaster boys, but spring sunshine and some amazing incoming models are a great healer.
I’m particularly proud of the my first go at an airbrush free glow effect on the singularity cannon, I’m not the best painter in the world compared to some of the guys on here, but it’s the little wins that keep me going.
Some basing courtesy of watch cog pieces from a car boot and some busted ruins I dropped when I fell down my stairs.
This was a pretty mammoth task for me, but it re-ignited my passion for my army. I can’t wait to get it on the field even though it isn’t competitively viable these days. The Atropos kit wasn’t anywhere near as bad as I expected other than the feet pistons. With sub-assemblies: blue tack is your friend, but ensure all your parts fit and do any heat bends before you start to think about priming… otherwise *crack*… As a newbie to resin I swore, I cried, but if I got there, you can too.
Next month I’ll be digging deep into the Archeotech Vault and tackling the Praying Mantis robots. Maybe by the time I finish them they will get 40k rules, with fires of Cyraxis, better chance of 10th edition.
Charlie A
Throughout the past several weeks I’ve been stressed. Like really stressed. I’m very lucky in that I still have my job and my wife still has hers, so I know it’s not rational. But with everything going on, sometimes I’m anxious and have no real reason why. Painting helps me focus this anxious energy productively, and over the past two weeks, I’ve made more progress recently than in any time in the past (including crunch time for a GT). I’ve got a list in mind that I want to take to events (when they start back up) and, after this progress, I very nearly have the whole list painted. Over the course of eleven days, I’ve painted twenty possessed (one is a Greater Possessed posing as a normie possessed, ssshhh!) and three Obliterators all from Prime to where they are now. There might be a few details I go back and pick out if I really want to earn max paint points (and I generally do), but these are a fine tabletop standard for me. I’ll be basing them once I get the last two models in the list painted so that I can base literally the whole list at once.
It was my first time trying OSL and, boy, was that scary to take a “completed” model and then most-probably mess it up. I made heavy use of the process and ideas found in GoonHammer’s very own Object Sourced Lighting articles. My work isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough.
