With September gone, stores are already have Christmas stock on shelves and the end of the year is in sight. Despite being a busy month with some big events, the team has some great hobby to share with everyone.
Ilor
September saw me getting more WW2 stuff done, starting with the miniatures used in my review of The Army Painter’s WW2 American set. I finially finished off the details and bases on these guys, looking forward to doing more paratroopers at some point.
I also finished off an MG-34 on tripod and associated team for the Afrika Korps. These are Perry Miniatures, four of which are metal and one of which is plastic. I dig that it’s hard to tell which is which until you pick them up. I have wanted to get these done for a while (they’re the last of the DAK troopers in my immediate backlog), and the 2nd Edition of Chain of Command has given tripod-mounted MGs a boost. They all now come with a free entrenchment when they deploy, so they are a little bit more economical for the cost.
Finally, I have started work on a couple of M3 “Honey” Stuart tanks that I’ll be doing up in 8th Army desert livery, which I wrote about here. So far I have the first one assembled. For the most part I generally like the Warlor/Italeri kits, but I have to say that this is one of the fiddliest kits I have ever worked with. The turret alone is like 20 separate pieces, it’s ridiculous. The second one is still in progress, and I’ll do that one with a closed turret hatch.
I am working on all the North Africa stuff in preparation to run another “Pint-Sized Campaign” for Chain of Command. This one will be about the Axis retreat from Gazala to El Agheila at the end of 1941. This is one I have wanted to do for a while and I’m stoked to be finally getting it on the table!
SRM
After 9 games of 40k in the GT at NOVA, I was feeling pretty burnt out and in need of a palate cleanser. One-off weirdos are absolutely the things to paint in times like this, and few weirdos are weirder than those in Trench Crusade.
I wanted to have sort of a flayed flesh look to my Communicant, so I went with magentas, reds, and pinks for his skin. His armor was essentially just backing up into my Stormcast scheme, and while I like the contrast that provides from his skin and weapons, it does kinda blend in with the bullet belt. Oh well. Still, it’s a fun model to paint and an unusual scale, as he’s unsettlingly tall and skinny.
Next is the most Necromunda-coded weirdo of the bunch, the Observer. I was talking with Keewa a while back and he asked me what my favorite orange and teal colors were and I was kinda stumped since I use those colors so rarely. This was my attempt to rectify this. The variety of textures on this guy were a load of fun to paint, and he strikes the balance most Trench Crusade minis do – detailed without being overburdened.
My Combat Medic is going with my New Antioch warband, so I painted her in the same colors. I gave her white armor because it would absolutely stand out and sell her role as a medic, and because a little weathering can go a long, long way on white. A couple transfers from the Black Templar transfer sheet and some Blood for the Blood God on her bonesaw finished the model. Again, she’s a delightfully simple model while still having all the detail you’d want from a modern miniature.
If the Observer is the most Necromunda-coded of the bunch, the Witchburner General is the most 40k Inquisition-coded of them. Obviously they’re drawing from the same exaggerated Catholic imagery, and I leaned into that hard by referencing cardinal robes and priest vestments. This much cloth was just easy and fun to paint. I tried going for a glossy finish on his armor to sell his status as Da Pope’s #1 Fanciest Boy and I think it came off reasonably well.
After painting that crew, I still had some colors left on my palette, and painted up the Mendelist Ammo Monk to go with them. I painted his robes to be a pretty typical for a friar, but had the notion that these guys would see ammo cans as sacred objects and their holy color would be olive drab as a result. Of the bunch I think this one is maybe too simple – some holes in the cloak or other detailing would have been nice – but he painted up quick.
Lastly, we return to 40k. I’d been invited to join Goonhammer at the Challenger’s Cup in Salt Lake City, and for my list I wanted a second Repulsor Executioner, as those are good as hell now. I’d be running Templars, naturally, and I ordered my RepEx at the start of the month, figuring I’d have a few weeks to paint it. Like a brain genius who understands release schedules and logistics, I’d pre-ordered Lysander in the same order, and after two weeks I realized this hadn’t shipped yet. I hit my FLGS up, grabbed the one RepEx off the shelf, and painted this in 8 days, varnishing about 24 hours before I flew out. I painted like it was my day job, because it practically was. That second (now third) RepEx has since shown up, but it was this one here who carried me through quite a few games in Utah this past weekend. Fun Fact: I absolutely hated how this model looked until I put all the subassemblies together and varnished it, and now it’s probably my favorite vehicle in the army.
Thundercloud
September was about finishing my Uruk Hai force for the Warhammer World event, and I managed to get 11 more metal Uruk Hai finished. I’ve got a handful of Uruk Hai almost done, that I’ll polish off in October, and then I’ll move on to chipping away at Mordor Orcs as the basis for about five different evil armies over the winter.
However October will be dominated by more Blood Angels for my next event and more Seb Games Void models for a big article.
Saffgor
It’s been a bit of a slow hobby time for me, as I’ve been playing a lot more than building & painting. That being said, with the balance changes to Admech it behooves me to finally pick up some Destroyers, so I’ve been working on converting some to look distinct from my Breachers, using the new Ashwing Helamite kit!
The base kit is a little smaller than I expected, but the contrast between gun & bug size is at the very least interesting. Also on the backburner, a small Cult of Blood force for World Eaters, using tons of Splintered Fang & associated snake goodies I got from a store sale! Ideally I’ll be showing off some finished Destroyers by mid-October, as I intend to register with Data-Psalm to 2 more GTs this season.
Rockfish
Bit of a topsy-turvy month with how much was going wrong, but I did manage a knight and a pile of Battletech models.
This might be my chaos knights done for 10th? I have a pretty decent collection with a good variety of play styles, and I am not particularly jumping to do duplicates of stuff right now.
It’s a bit funny given I immediately went to buy a few more models, but I managed to knock off my remaining unique mech backlog for battletech this month and I am pretty close to no grey BT models at all!
Primaris Kevin
It’s been a very, very long time since I contributed to this lovely round-up. It’s also been an equally long time since I painted an actual model. I’ve done some work with terrain for GHO, but I genuinely can’t remember the last time I put a new model on the table. The reasons for this are not particularly fun, but what matters is that’s now changing. My friends encouraged me to get into Horus Heresy (to which more than a few people question if they’re really my friends), and I decided to embrace the Iron Within and get down on some hazard stripes.
I decided to do something crazy; commit to actually finishing a box before I purchase another. So that means the 20 Marines I purchased at NOVA will all have to be done before I buy something else. And for once I was smart and worked out a method that would actually be somewhat efficient. My goal was to do something a little different from most Iron Warriors, which have warm undertones and hint of rust. I wanted them cold.
The legs, torso, and arms are primed black and then coated with Rub n’ Buff Pewter, which is a wax-based metallic which has great coverage. I immediately seal the wax metallic with gloss acrylic. The shoulders are primed white, the yellow is three thin coats of Liquitex Ink! Yellow Orange Azo, and then the hazard stripes are actually custom printed decals. It’s tricky to do right but I can get 20 of them done in an hour. I paint a streak of Vallejo Model Metallic Black inside to get a dark iron effect, and that’s also the backdrop for the black shoulder pads. The shoulder pads with decals are then assembled onto the model and everything is washed with Winsor & Newton Water Washable Payne’s Gray. Once it dries I pick out the details, and the back of the backpack and the gun shroud are painted with three successive washes of Army Painter Black, then Blue, then Black again to get a blued steel effect that I’m very happy with. The base glued sand, and I start with a base layer of VGC Terracotta. I then mix a bunch of rust pigments together, blot the pigments on the base, seal with White Spirit, and then lightly apply a little more pigment to get the dust effect back. It’s a lot of steps but they’re easy to do in batches and the other 19 are already at the decal stage.
Bair
Other than Jan-March where I didn’t paint anything this is by far my slowest month of only 12 whole models bringing my total for 2025 up to 335 completed minis. I did get a lot built including more Heresy and the bulk of what a Never Mind the Billhooks army will be.
What I did paint was 8 Victrix Foot Knights, mostly for use with Greathelm (which you should read my review of, the game is stupid good). These are done in my quasi-historical green and yellow that I’ve done the rest of my Medieval stuff in, and what I’ll be doing the rest of the above Billhooks army in as well; planning on that being a Hussite force with war wagons. Cool as hell.
This game has really taken off in our discord and for good reason, I’m really excited and have some really silly ideas as well.
In a very, very, different aesthetic I was targeted for an advertisement on social media for a “dieselcore” mech game. We’ve also reviewed that and is also very cool. Snafu printed some rigs for me and got to a handful of them so far with another small group ready for sponging. These are small, about Space Marine Terminator sized, and were a lot of fun to go heavier on with verdigris and rust after painting a lot of cleaner models the last couple of months; can’t wait to get to the larger ones!
Soggy
This month was a very hectic one for me but I did manage to sneak in a few things before everything went sideways. With the Goonhammer Open at the start of the month I had to paint up a Salamanders centurion and his Firedrake escort to allow me to act as a spare player, which came out ok despite how rushed they were. The hobby highlight was certainly covering the new plastic Fellblade for our review, an insanely huge and satisfying kit. I did also manage to squeak in a Salamanders Centurion and Firedrake escort to allow me to fill in at the Goonhammer Open at the start of the month.
I’m honestly not too sure how much hobby is on the cards for me in October, but let’s see how we go.
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