What a year. I’ve already talked a bit about the balance of 40k in our year end retrospective, but what I really care about is what models I’ve managed to get paint on this year. As far as I can recall, this has been my most productive year – I’ve painted models both big and small, characters and squads (and nearly all in power armor). Most of my work this year has been on my two main armies, Imperial Fists and Blood Angels, iterating on the schemes for both of them – Fists because I was forced to with the demise of Lamenter’s Yellow, Angels when I returned to them after painting Fists to find my technique less interesting than it could be.
I’m not one of the huge nerds with spreadsheets full of exactly what I’ve painted and what games I’ve won or lost – I’m figuring out my painting mostly by when I’ve taken photos for Instagram, and all I know about my gaming is that I think I’ve won more games of 40k than I’ve lost, even with my disastrous 1-5 run at TSHFT at the end of summer.
January/February
Some of the months are going to come in chunks, as I haven’t actually taken photos every single month, plus some of my units end up taking over a month. I spent the early part of the year mainly working on two projects – trying to get one of the first Sanguinus models on the internet (a success, with mine online well before it was even available on the FW webstore), and rounding out my tournament Marine army with the loyal 32 – an experiment in speed painting that I managed to finish in just one weekend.
March
Quite a bit happened in March. My man Alfredo commissioned me to paint up a Repulsor before Adepticon for his Ultramarines army, Shadowspear released, and I got my hands on the beautiful Blood Angel Praetor sculpts from Forge World. This is when I decided I needed to rework my BA color scheme.
April
The release of Book 8: Malevolence continued to drive my work on my Blood Angels, painting up a Lightning (one of my absolute favorite airplanes), the amazing Contemptor, a converted up squad of Angel’s Tears, and 15 more Assault Marines.
May
This month was dominated entirely by painting the single biggest model I’ve painted to date – my Reaver Titan. We had a mega battle coming up the first weekend in June to cap off a 30k campaign my store had been running, and I wanted to bring a big surprise to it. One of the traitors tried to surprise us with a Warhound, and it was incredibly satisfying to be able to one-up them with the Reaver. Sadly the default loadout isn’t the best, the gatling blaster and apocalypse launcher never accomplishing much. Since May I’ve added more turbolasers to both the second arm and the carapace. Dropping 8 D-blast ordnance templates a turn is incredibly dumb and I love it.
June
June was mostly a character month. Raldoron released (an amazing model, and is featured amazingly in the most recent Siege of Terra book, The Lost and the Damned), and I painted up a new slam captain based on the body of Alexis Polux.
July
The release of the Repulsor Executioner defined this month. While their fragility has kept them out of some of my most recent lists, I love the model. The slightly awkward Repulsor hull got a nice upgrade with the larger turret and main gun.
August/September
Starting a new job really ate into my painting time for a few months (and looking back at it for the rest of my year, I was incredibly productive early on). I thought about a Custodes army and painted Ixion Hale, worked out an alternate grey-based Imperial Fists scheme to run as Veteran Intercessors, and painted up a few models for our Iron Hands review.
October
The Imperial Fist supplement finally showed up, bringing with it his chonkiness Tor Garadon. I got him painted up, and finished the half painted Librarian and Chaplain I’d had sitting on my desk for ages. Prepping for a local tournament I also built a pair of Stormtalons, which combine being both extremely cool and extremely good (Coda approved).
November/December
The end of the year was filled up with work, so I was sadly barely able to paint anything. The new Adeptas Sororitas models have me hooked, so I painted up a test for our HTPE: Sisters article, and then took some time over the holidays at the end of the year to finish up an Astraeus for my Fists (my second Astraeus, making me certifiably one of the most insane people in the world).
This year has been a fantastic one for the hobby – I’ve painted up a ton of incredibly cool models and haven’t scratched the surface of what was released for just my armies this year, much less everything else GW has been flooding us with. Going into 2020 I’m looking forward to a couple things: more fantastic Goonhammer content with the best team of writers and editors I could ask for, starting up an AOS Slaves to Darkness army, and finally getting the time to put paint on my Adeptus Titanicus and Aeronautica Imperialis models.
Bring it the fuck on 2020.
[Editor’s Note: If you would like to see more of Jack’s insanely good Imperial Fists, check out his army showcase on them here.]
