Goonhammer Hobby Round-up: May 2020 (mid-month)

Unbelievably, we’re already halfway through May. 2020 is both the longest and shortest year on record, and that’s reflected not only in the rapid advance of time (pretend I included one of those tear-off desk calendar things madly spraying pages everywhere here) but also in our authors’ fantastic hobby progress. Check out what we’ve been working on this month – from the insidious machinations of Genestealer Cultists and Thousand Sons Sorcerers to the ground-pounding advance of tiny Knightly Households.

Liam “Corrode” Royle

It’s just 14 days since we published the last hobby round-up and here in Chez Corrode it’s been a busy time for hobby. Also for real life, but whatever, I got plenty of painting done.

That’s 5 Intercessors, the Sanguinor, 5 Aberrants, 5 Acolyte Hybrids, an Abominant, and 5 Wraithblades. 22 models for the first two weeks of May is pretty good going I think! I’ve had most of the Genestealer Cult stuff sat in a box since November 2018, when I bought the Tooth & Claw boxed set at a Kill Team night at Dark Sphere that some of the proto-Goonhammer team indulged in when Rob visited from the US.

I painted these in a different scheme to my other GSC, partly because I still don’t have any Xereus Purple and partly because I couldn’t figure out how I wanted to do the orange and blue like my Magus from last month. I like the red and black though and it’s striking, although the Acolyte Hybrids are a bit garish.

The Wraithblades were of course being worked on last month, and the Intercessors I finished this morning. The Sanguinor is a funny one because he’s just been sat on my shelf for a bit after buying him second-hand, and then I took him down the other night and painted him start to finish, which was fun. I don’t really love the model, but it painted up easy enough. He’s in metal, so I look forward to finding out all the ways he’s going to chip should he ever make it to the table.

One other factor which has helped to turbo-boost my painting this month is the “Hams for Hunger” initiative being run by Safety Factor over on the SomethingAwful forums. He’s pledged to donate to the Houston Food Bank in $50 increments for each character, vehicle, monster, or 5-model unit submitted. Goons are predictably running him ragged, and good on them.

Booley

Robert “TheChirurgeon” Jones

I’m still working on my Blightlord Terminators! Since I fled to my parents’ house with my family in tow and a case full of my unpainted Death Guard, I’ve been slowly working on getting this army done, 1-2 models at a time. The big project right now is my Blightlord Terminators. I painted 4 of these guys in April, and so far in May I’ve painted two more. I need to pick up the pace and try and get these guys done a bit faster.

Greg

I painted more Tau. I have now painted, since I was first sentenced to the iso-cubes two months ago, an entire 1750 point Tau army. I am done painting Tau, and will be painting Tiny Titans for a while. 

That Gobbo

For this mini I wanted to do a Horus Heresy Death Guard scheme with drybrush stippled white armor. I paid special attention to doing tiny details in the armor like holes and scratches which turned out quite well I think. I also wanted to add a lot of color to the miniature so I made all the marine’s little friends bright and colorful, I tried to make sure they didn’t overpower the composition so the focal point was still the marine’s head and torso. This mini was featured on Games Workshop’s Hobby Roundup which was a pleasant surprise!

It’s been a bit of time since my Morkanaut was finished and I had an itch to get back into kitbashing more Ork mechs, so I picked up some HG Balls which worked great as foundations for Killa Kans. The first one turned out pretty cute and simple with just an autocannon and a drill arm. 

For the second kitbash I ended up going a bit wild. I had a Loonboss on Squig sprue sitting unused in my closet so I had a fun idea of a squig stuffed into a robot and prodded along toward its enemies. I don’t have that much greenstuff experience so this was a good way to work a little bit more with it, mainly I used it to cover up the areas where the legs would be glued into and have some wires plugged into the squig. I’m really happy with how it came out.

This was a quick fun experiment with airbrush glazing one day when I felt like working on something quick. I’ve always wanted to do a teal and pink scheme so this was the perfect opportunity. Really love how it turned out. 

At some point I needed a palette cleanser in between big projects so I pulled out Inquisitor Coteaz for a quick paint job. He’s a pretty cool model and I’m looking forward to being able to put him on the table with my Scions!

A counts-as Dark Apostle and Dark Disciples I put together from the Dark Vengeance Box and the Unmade warband. I tried so many times to do the head on the Apostle that I ended up clogging the detail so I attempted to salvage it by giving him a weird meathead. It’s Chaos so why not?

SRM

While I largely missed the #MarchForMacragge train, I’m catching up and knocking out my Ultramarines backlog. For starters, I wrapped up this thicc ladd, Redemptor Dreadnought Perseus:

I was predictably old school in my paintscheme for this guy, although I wish I did checks around the gun barrel instead of the laurel wreath design. Still, he’s done, bringing my Ultramarines vehicle pool to *checks manifest* two. I also got to play a bit with weathering powders on the engine block, and I’m pretty happy with that:

Next up is the dude I teased last time, Primaris Captain Maximo Volante:

I went hard with the 2nd ed aesthetics here, opting for a scheme as classic as his pose. I also had a lot of fun with his personal heraldry and that big honkin red cloak. I wish the transitions were a little smoother, but pobody’s nerfect:

Lastly, I decided to cleanse the palette and knock out this pair of Death Cult Assassins. They’ve been in the backlog for years now, so knocking them out mostly with Contrast and a single line highlight was cathartic. I think I could have gotten comparable results in a similar timeframe with layer paints though, as it’s hard to be super precise with Contrast. This time around I tried for that classic 3rd edition Daemonhunters aesthetic, with the glossy blue powerswords and red/black suits I remember from that book.

After posting what I’d painted so far this month, Corrode said “if you finish anything else by friday feel free to add it on but you’ve done a lot of goddamn painting recently anyway” and I took that as a challenge to get yet more done! I had built and primed 3 Inceptors for my Ultras but had to keep myself busy while the primer was drying outside, so I knocked out Nora and Dogmeat from the Fallout: Wasteland Warfare starter set:

Playing and reviewing Fallout 76 definitely put me in the mood to finally put brush to model on these guys. They’re kinda bendy plastic and are definitely “boardgame” quality miniatures, but I’m hoping once I get through the rest of the starter set I can move on to the nicer resin minis. 

Next up, I’ve got those 3 Inceptors who were to be the end of my Ultramarines backlog, but I added 10 more Incursors to the que after splitting the Prophecy of the Wolf box with a buddy of mine. He’s also tossing in a spare Intercessor to round out the diminished squad from last month, so THAT will be the end of my Ultramarines backlog. Hopefully time won’t make a fool of me like it always does and introduce a whole new slew of Marines the moment I finish what I’m working on. Here’s to being wrong again in two weeks! 

Silks

For the last few weeks I’ve been working on the biggest model I’ve ever painted. Seriously, this thing makes my Stompa look tiny. I assembled Archaon into sub assemblies, not something I normally like to do but in this case it was definitely justified. Even painting just the body and wings of the dragon wouldn’t fit in my airbrush booth! In the end it came out really well and I’m very happy with him. He also featured on Warhammer TV’s hobby roundup which is always a nice feeling!

Patrick Robins

It’s a good thing I generally play singleton lists because god dammit Invictors are a lot of work. Going into it I wanted to ape JDs being a scout dreadnought but as deadlines loomed, settled for cutting one of the spare Redemptor armour plates to fit and up-armouring it and changing out the phobos head for a spare tacticus one from a repulsor gunner. Ah well, I’ll have to settle for my second take at a Redemptor being an extremely fancy lad.

What better way to reduce backlog than to redo an existing character unnecessarily. As much as I loved my existing converted chaplain I was still having ideas about other things to do while still keeping in the general wheelhouse of “the reclusiam command squad chaplain; but primaris.” I’d seen in-progress pictures of a chaplain striding forward build from Lieutenant Calsius somewhere in the wilds of the internet and I wanted to make a chaplain with a good old fashioned rosarius dangling about his breastplate.

All told some 6-7 kits went into Chaplain Idoneus: calsius as a base, primaris chaplain donating one and a half arms, a book and some parchment, reclusiam chaplain giving a head, a crozius top and the chains for his rosarius, the rosarius itself coming from the basic terminator kit and lieutenant amulius donating his backpack because its not like I need a third lieutenant with a power sword.

Mike Bettle-Shaffer

It’s almost the middle of the year and I’ve finally gathered the willpower to finish off my Scarab Occult Terminators. They’re some of my favourite models from the entire range but hooo-boy are they a lot of work. I have a Thousand Sons Praetor left on the backlog and then… that’s all my Thousand Sons painted for now. Not a huge force for the time being but maybe I’ll be up for painting another ten Rubrics some time in 2021.

Soggy

Due to a lack of events to decide what I need to paint next, I’ve been creating polls to decide what to work on next in my dwindling backlog. The past two weeks I painted up my Bloodbowl Lizardmen team, which was kindly given to me as part of the Goonhammer secret Santa.

These were the first lizards I had painted up since the release of 8th edition WHFB, so it had been a while. I’m happy with how the skinks came out but started getting frustrated with the Saurus. The next poll decided overwhelmingly in favour of painting up another GSC magus. Most of my cult are in orange/blue, but due to how cult detachments work I do have an alternative paintscheme which this magus will go into. I’ve expect to be painting something completely different over the next few weeks, but will see how people vote.

Wings

I painted some Space Marines.

Yeah that’s right, didn’t see that one coming, did you?

Way back towards the end of last year, just after writing the Raven Guard review, I was enthused enough about Marines to want to pick up a small army, and a local club member was selling off some Shadowspear and Dark Vengeance halves. I did actually paint up 20 Intercessors in a fit of enthusiasm, but stalled from there. That was partially down to the absurd release schedule turning most of my painting time into writing time, and needing to churn out models for events in what little time I had, but it’s also because I started on this next project, didn’t like the initial results and let it stew on my painting station for months, acting as a major mental block on coming back to the army.

I used the public holiday weekend in the UK to finally smash through this barrier, and I present the first fully finished Marines from my new force (as the Intercessors are still waiting for batch basing).

Naturally they are Eliminators. I may be painting Space Marines, but I’m still one of the resident tournament tryhards.

The reason this went “wrong” part way through is that I’m doing these primarily with Contrast, and learning how tog et the most out of that is still an ongoing project. Specifically, here I’d started their cloaks with a layer of Creed Camo and it looked, bluntly, awful, and I was worried I’d have to start from scratch having already done a reasonable amount of effort in basing in the purple plates.The green looked anemic and blotchy and I basically couldn’t ever imagine it looking good.

Since that point, however, I’ve been working bits of Contrast into various other projects and have learnt to use it better, and came back to these with a rescue plan that worked out. Using a thinned layer of Ork Flesh over the Creed Camo, followed by some very quick edge highlights with Warboss Green gave me an effect that I was happy with. From there, I was able to deploy move contrast for the things it is very good at (two thin coats of Black Templar on the gun body, single coats of Snakebite Leather and Guilliman Flesh on the leather details and skin respectively), followed by a bit of metal detailing to get these through to a point where I’m actually super happy with how they’ve finished up. I’ve now got a squad of Aggressors on my painting station with their armour done and blacks blocked in that I’m aiming to get done for the next roundup, plus some Phobos characters sprayed and ready.

The other thing I’ve done this month is finish another thing that’s been stuck on my backlog, this handsome statue.

I have the second one from the set queued up but I’ll probably take a break before doing that – I love how these kits look when they’re done but they are a lot to get looking nice. I feel like they went too far with details that break up surfaces in a way that requires you to switch paints, an example being the exposed pipework on the front of these. Having an area that was just cracked instead would give a way to add some interest and texture that could be addressed with just a quick drybrush rather than having to block in black again and do the metals. This took me easily as long as doing a character model might despite looking like it should be quick and easy, and the ruin behind it was one of my single largest painting projects last year.

Looks nice though, so there’s that.