It’s been a productive hobby month for the team in April, let’s see what they’ve been up to!
SRM
Oh fabulous day, callooh callay! It only took a month, but I finished these Cavaliers! With these done, I’ve fully finished the Cities of Sigmar launch box we reviewed last year:
These cavaliers were an absolute pain in the butt, from conceptualizing 5 different schemes and heraldry that would still tie into my existing army, all the way to painting around their armor, straps, barding, and so on. Building them was a pleasure, but there’s always more detail to paint on them, and it all needs defining. I love their look, love their vibe, and hope I never need to paint another one.
I had way, way more fun with this unit of Darkoath Marauders. I found painting them to be an awful lot like painting the Darkoath Savagers from Warcry (imagine that!) and while they’re a bit of legwork for 80 points, they’re an immensely fun 80 points.
Expect a full written review shortly, but these are absolutely, firmly, and definitively, My Shit. Large expanses of skin and cloth are my favorite things to paint, and these guys n’ gals deliver. I would have gotten them done sooner, but honestly I was having so much fun painting them that I luxuriated in every detail and resultantly spent 2 weeks on some pretty easy chaff. If these models dropped with Age of Sigmar’s launch, I would have been there day 1.
Next up, I don’t quite know! Stormbringer is sending me stuff that I need to paint, I would like to (and should like to!) paint more of these Darkoath yabbos, and my Templars could use some more Sword Brethren. More than anything, I think I should paint some goblins or Battletech models though – all these high effort models are starting to take their toll, and I could use something small and easy.
Soggy
I’ve been on a bit of a roll with painting tanks for my Heresy army at the moment, kicking off with one of the least White Scars vehicles ever – the Typhon. To double dip and get the biggest bang for buck, the gun is swappable to a third party plasma gun from BattleBling – which I’ll use to proxy a Cerberus.
As part of the same batch I painted up a second Land Raider to give me a second option to deliver melee troops into battle – I’m quite tempted to give an armoured spearhead a go. I also painted up my second White Scars Leviathan Dread, this time using the legion specific kit from Forge World. This kit absolutely owns, but due to my usual Rites of War I’ve only used the other one once!
As a quite palate cleanser and a bit of a treat a friend gifted me a special model, which I painted up immediately and am hoping to use at an event this weekend.
Introducing Khaneda.
Rockfish
I am still up to my eyeballs in various personal disasters and stuff that’s sapping my time and energy, but I did get to finish a few things recently.
You might have seen a few of these on warcom recently, I am fairly happy with the ones I managed to get done for the article even if a few were from when the boxset dropped a while ago.
I also spent some time plugging away on some ever so time-consuming orks, while I have always enjoyed the results this army is definitely one which can eat up a decent chunk of time on the painting table!
JellyMuppet
On a whim I bought a ticket to July’s Horus Heresy Throne of Skulls Doubles event, one of the UK’s most competitive Heresy events. I managed to bully my friend Max into it. He plays Dark Angels and I mostly play Death Guard, so we started concocting some floor is lava nonsense.
Max (sensibly) added an Excindio Battle Automata to the list, an incredibly janky unit that represents a shackled sentient automata from the Age of Darkness, an AMBOMINABLE INTELLIGENCE.
We had a laugh, then realised it doesn’t have the Dark Angels keyword, so would get ruined by the terrain both our armies were putting down, with no immunity. And then it would start killing our own models if it failed a leadership check. So we both swiftly took it out of the list.
Then I had a moment of inspiration, and made a draft list with four of them in droppods, because I love kitbashing and losing serious games of warhammer. I then ran upstairs, and started building a robot out of trash.
I remembered notable teeth enjoyer Toby Wrong had sent me a box of seashells a few months back. The best type of kitbashing is when your other kit is the sea. This lad is made of seashells, green stuff pipes, admech weapons, onager dunecrawler legs, jewellers chain and more pipes from Titanicus.
I painted it very lazily, mostly with drybrushing, leopard spotting, and insane inks, including a bit of questionable OSL on the atomantic shield generator.
AoS Coach
Last weekend I had the Bloodrite Bloodpact teams tournament and I had 2,000 points of Cities of Sigmar to paint. I got my hands on the Gnome Bloodbowl team and had to add the Murder Goose to my Wildercorp Hunters as my pride & joy.
Skails
It was Smash Bash season so of course I hurried up and finished something the the last week. Which also happens to be a lich for Necropolis28. I used parts from the following kits: Vokmortian, Torgillius the Chamberlain, Deadwalker Zombies, and Askurgan Trueblades.
“Contemptor” Kevin Stillman
After a furious February and March, April was a bit more low key.
I started the month by taking a break from green power armor, because I was sick of it. So in honor of the release of X-Men ’97, I painted Jean Grey.
After Jean, I decided to paint Primaris Dante, since I had built him while waiting around for the dealer’s room at Adepticon to open. I painted Dante mostly with the new Atom Paints and contrasts, and I cannot again recommend these paints enough. I am hopeful they will become more available soon!
I then decided to bulk out my Dark Angels a bit more, so I went with a squad of Infiltrators and a squad of Heavy Intercessors. Nothing fancy with these guys, just getting them out of the Pile of Shame and into the big Dark Angels display. During this, I learned that GW doesn’t really have squad markings for Dark Angels squads 11-15 and 17-20. Dark Imperium had the Squad 16 transfers, and so they got used on the Heavy Intercessors. I’m going to have to track down some Tome Keeper decals for future squads.
To close out the month, I painted up Settra the Imperishable, leader of the Tomb Kings of Khemri faction. I find the entire aesthetic of the line to be fun to paint and incredibly cool, so I was jazzed. The problem is that Settra is such a cool character and model, but the Chariot he comes in is kind of lame and small.
So I put him on a Necrolith Bone Dragon instead.
This model was possibly one of the more complicated and fragile big builds of a “modern” GW kit, and I still can’t figure out what I did to the standard behind Settra. I also made a few mistakes here on there – I should have left the two halves of the “saddle” off so that Settra had enough room to stand in the little howdah instead of standing on the edges, but oh well.  What I was going for was “1980s Saturday Morning Cartoon Big Villain Toy”, and I think I accomplished that.
Loxi
I have a few hobby ventures at the moment: as we all know, artificial deadlines you give yourself are what makes the world go round. I’m preparing for a Heresy event in June, but I’ve been needing a break from that hobbying and have been wanting to work towards another goal: a new, fully painted army for the start of AoS 4th edition.
Locally, we’ve been working on a slow-grow league to benefit players working on new armies and help grow our community before the new edition. My original plan was to play Kruleboyz and use them as my main springboard into the wonderful world of Destruction armies. Turns out, I springboarded a bit harder than anticipated and ended up with a big lot of Troggs after offloading some unwanted hobby stuff. They were something that seemed really fun to try out both from a gameplay and modelling perspective, so I decided to join the world of Gloomspite Gitz players.
I knew I wanted to do a more non-traditional style, and I also knew that most of my “paint army by X-deadline” projects that aren’t preparing for a specific event tend to end unfinished, so I knew I wanted something that I could get done decently fast and in batches, especially since it’s a pretty low model count army. I decided to go with a sunset-esque transition using Army Painter’s Speedpaint 2.0 line. Airbrushing these over some underpainted shading gives the skin a nice, almost finished look before I even pick up a bristled brush, making them a really clean and easy scheme to do en-masse.
I’m still deciding what to do for the Moonclan and Squig models in the army, but for now I’m focusing on getting my horde of Troggs done. I’ve got 100% of them base coated and about 1/3 are now fully completed, so things are shaping up nicely to have 2k completed by the time we get to play around with the new edition!
Liam_Jordan
First one of these I’ve partaken in so what to add? I’m attending an Old World Event on the Bank Holiday weekend at the start of May and I’ve been wanting to shake up my Elves a little by adding in some more fast options. The problem is I’ve been using Age of Sigmar Lumineth for my High Elves so adding chariots isn’t as easy as just using models and putting them on different bases. Combining Stormstrike Chariots, Dawnrider Mounts along with both Warden and Sentinel models seemed the best way to go and this is what I’ve ended up with.
By no means perfect but they’ll smash into hordes of my opponents light troops just as well. This takes me to pushing 3000pts of Lumineth backdated to The Old World so maybe next month I’ll have a new army on the horizon.
Saffgor
It’s my first time popping in for a Hobby Round-Up, and I’ve got some exciting developments to share! Conversions are one of the main ways I engage with the hobby, and I’ve got some killer counts-as coming down the pipeline.
I’ve been working on a Be’lakor conversion for my Beasts of Chaos Slakefray (Slaanesh-marked), and unfortunately the news broke before this beauty could hit the tournament tabletop. I’m one of the unfortunate folks who committed fully to BoC, with a wholly-converted army, and the news was a heavy blow, making working on the army a tough pill to swallow. Still, that’s positioned me to re-enter 40k after being gone since 7th, so let’s get into how I’ve approached that!
I’ve been hard at work on a 2000pt list of Admech for 10th, as a total conversion from Games Workshop’s Ash Waste Nomad line! I absolutely adore the rougher aesthetic and layered cloth, and I’m extremely excited to bring non-Tyranid insectoids to the table. Moreover, I’m being assisted by my good friend Louie with the paintjob, and even from the first test model I can’t wait to get these raiders on the table. To quote the man himself:
“The post-apocalyptic style of the Ash Waste models lends itself fantastically to the kitbashing work Carter’s done, the look of scavenged Mechanicus weapons tools and parts fit seamlessly on these sculpts and they’re a blast to paint!”
There’s more to come, and I’ve got big plans for this army, as well as plenty of trepidation towards convincing a TO to let me field it! Jokes aside, it’ll be comfy to get back into the swing of things, with a wholly unique 40k army.
Brushwizard
Hey all, I am excited to be able to join Goonhammer and also to have the opportunity to share what I’ve been working on in this month’s Hobby Round Up! It was a very productive month in April, I was able to knock out a whopping 14 characters up for Marvel Crisis Protocol! I’m pretty sure that’s a personal best I’ve not had since the days of army painting.
This month’s finished characters were Baron Mordo, Doctor Octopus, Sinister Scientist, Doctor Strange Supreme, Doctor Voodoo, Kraven the Hunter, Logan the Wolverine, Nebula, Punisher, Pyro, Rhino, Taskmaster, Thanos, The Blob and Viper.
The biggest thing this month was that I continued to challenge myself with more NMM chrome on Doctor Octopus, Sinister Scientist. I had previously attempted it on Ghost Rider and liked the results, so I decided to give Ock chromed limbs too. I also went all in with NMM gold on Thanos, something I’d struggled with previously on Hulkbuster.
When I first started painting MCP I challenged myself to only use NMM in lieu of Metallics and I’ve learned a lot. Both of those effects are things I’d struggled to grasp previously. But, the chrome and gold on these fellas have me feeling pretty good about them.
Another thing I started playing around with on this batch of characters was fluorescent paints. Doctor Voodoo’s smoke effect was painted by mixing a few different colors of AK Interactive fluorescent paints together to get the various pink and purple colors. While I used their fluorescent green on Doctor Octopus’ potion vial for a really nice glowing effect.
