Something that I posed to our staff recently was a simple question: what was the kit you had the most fun painting? Then realised that that’s far too broad a question for us, so we’ll be looking at just Games Workshop kits today. We’ll probably be back with Historicals and Indie games too, so look out for those.

This is a very loose format, the question is: what is the single most fun you have had painting a Warhammer mini? This is not our writer’s best painted mini or the one that they think they pushed themselves to be “better” the most. This is about fun. You might not agree with the list and that’s fine, you can voice your opinion in the comments section.

Bair

Despite this being my idea for the article (that’s why I get to go first, it’s not alphabetical order) I actually spent a long time considering this. One on hand, it has to be a dwarf, right? That’s like, most of my schtick. Love dwarfs/dwarves. On the other hand, as much fun as they are to paint that joy is often fleeting. Because they’re small and paint up really quickly the way that I paint things.

But in the end, the most fun kit for me to paint has to go to the Warlord Titan. No, not the £1000+ one that’s 28mm scale. I am, of course, talking about the Adeptus Titanicus Warlord Titan. Specifically the kit with plasmas annihilators and laser destroyers but bonus points for getting a macro gatling cannon and paired gatling carapace weapons in reason. If you know, then you know. Titanicus as a game holds a very special place in my heart. I played the hell out of it when it first came out, got Soggy and some other locals playing, and then got dragged here to Goonhammer to write about it with Soggy and Condit back in January 2020. As much as I do love the Reaver, the kit itself is just not as satisfying to paint as the Warlord is. During lockdowns I build-and-painted each of my titans from sprue to finish within a day each (except Warhounds, those were two at a time, they’re small) across three separate Legios: Gryphonicus, Vulcanum, and Mordaxis. Some might say “oh but that’s a lot of trim and trim sucks!” and they would all be very wrong.

Trim is not that bad, actually, you just paint it.

The mix of machinery and large armour panels that you can adorn with freehand or transfers (the latter, for me, they’re easier) makes them a joy to get together while also being quick to paint if that’s your jam (it’s mine). Plus you can put tiny marines on the base for scale, which isn’t in the kit, but I’m counting it as a plus because it’s incredibly cool.

Just look at this absolute power house of a walking God Engine. What’s not to love?

Charlie

The basic Ork Boyz have three things going for them. First, and unusually among modern GW kits, they are not over-detailed, which makes them quick and fun to paint, particularly for basic troops.

Second, the anatomy looks great. Unlike the previous modular kit, featuring the zenith of the signature Games Workshop thigh gap, you can actually picture these Orks running. They have momentum and heft. They’d work well as cover art. Ork facial sculpts can sometimes look very angular and cartoony to the extent that they don’t really work (check out the cheekbones on the Nobz box to see what I mean). Not so with these gorgeous mugs:

Third, and this is why they’re in this article, they’re such a good sculpt that they’ll lift a quick and dirty paint job into looking cool as hell on the table. I (happily) put a huge amount of time into edge highlighting my Space Marines, so these ladz offer a delightful palette cleanser in between squads of Astartes.

In the interests of balance, I should say there is one big downside: if you buy more than one box, the repeated poses become very obvious since you can’t even do headswaps easily. Every single mini here only goes together one way, with some slightly different options for the rokkit launcha and nob. This wasn’t an issue with the old modular kit. If you want to paint multiples of this kit, you might like to engage in some light conversion work. I shaved off certain details, but found this alone was only sufficient to get to 20 Orks. Were I to do more, I think the move would be to hack off the choppas and swap them around, or if you’re feeling plush, get a box of the old modular kit – which GW still sells – and swap out the choppas entirely, since the weapons in that old kit have aged well, as have the faces (not that it’d be easy to attach the old heads to these new bodies).

If you’re curious about the method I used to paint the Goffs pictured here, the method would work fine for any Ork clan, and takes about one hour per Ork. If that sounds agreeable, I wrote up the method over on the Beard Bunker a few years ago.

Greggles

Orks may seem best, but they are nothing compared to the character and resilience behind the mighty grots.  Specifically the gretchin crew from the mek gun kit, and the Forgeworld gretchin crew kit (not available at the moment).

These kits not only have grots with massive character, but they are quick and easy to paint, and provide endless joy and usability on the tabletop.

The great thing about the Ork gretchin kits is how applicable they are to Ork armies.

* You can use them as a unit of grots with runtherders (or counts as runtherders)
* You can use them as game markers, such as ammo runts, grot orderly, grot assistant, distraction grot, mek gun crew, etc etc.
* They add immense character to any ork model or vehicle you add them too, as well as a dash of dice luck*

Make sure to come up with individual stories for each grot you field, and explain to your opponent how little Francis won’t be able to enjoy their retirement now that they’ve crushed them under the foot of a titan.

chimp

Typically, my requirements for a fun model to paint are a nice clean design, as few extra dangly bits and extraneous details as possible, and organic elements where I can paint quite sloppily and get away with it. Most of the time, painting is a process to get a thing that I want, rather than a terribly enjoyable activity in and of itself. That being said, the model that I have most enjoyed painting was the Eidolon of Mathlann, Aspect of the Storm.

Deepkin are the only army I’ve felt a true desire to push myself on – they’re my favourite range that Games Workshop do and I painted the army mostly during covid lockdowns where I had the time to work a bit harder on them and do a bit more than drybrushing and contrast. The Aspect of the Storm is where I pushed myself the most – finding an absurdly complicated ‘eavy metal tips sea cloak recipe by Max Faleij and attempting to copy that whilst also having my first punt as two brush blending to get a smooth transition.

It’s not perfect by any means, there’s lots of clumsy highlights and areas I could have put more attention into but at the end of the day it looks bloody great on the tabletop and I’m proud of the end result and effort I put in. Big shout out to an array of undersea creatures to make a model pop. I had a huge amount of fun learning new things and seeing the results play out basically as I had pictured them in my head, but would I paint another one, or an Aspect of the Sea? No.

Lenoon

I don’t paint a huge amount of 40k anymore – I used to, but my tastes are now older, fiddlier and substantially less fun to paint. What draws me back to 40k painting every time though is the Armiger. I think it’s the perfect 40k model for fun painting – exactly the right balance of angular metal, exposed pipes, valves and rivets, smooth carapace and delightful little details. All the elements of a Games Workshop vehicle are there in perfect balance, letting you take each one in whatever direction you choose – I like to play around with patterns, sponging and freehand, but you can go towards bright block colour, add heavy weathering, realistic tank patterning, staining and streaking, or hard cold metal. It’s a fantastic canvas and separated into almost equal halves between the carapace, shoulders, ankle and thigh plates and the excitingly bare metal.

I think little in the GW ranges gives you the level of openness and flexibility – essentially a 70mm sized humanoid bone structure, constructed of simple pieces with a mobility range in shoulder, arm and wrist that is sometimes absent on models this size. The simplicity of construction gives you a canvas and a structure, letting you play with it as much, or as little, as you desire. The basic Armiger kit is the best for this – Wardogs and Moriax constrain you a little more with pipework and resin – giving you nothing but, well, everything, should you want it.

I love painting the buggers, for all that my paint scheme is simple bone and copper. They capture my imagination in a way that even the bigger knights just don’t. It’s a fugue state, a flow state, where brush meets plastic and builds together.

Marquis of Peaches

Nothing says Warhammer like a Bretonnian Knight of the Realm, pennant streaming from a lance clutched valiantly in his hand, dashing charger bounding across the field of battle, prepared to strike fear into the hearts of all who would dare think evil of it. A far cry from the greenskins that dominated the early part of this article, my hands-down favorite kit to paint is the Bretonnian command sprue that snuck its way into the second-best game in the “More” category on Warhammer.com, Warhammer: Underworlds.

That’s right, reader – Grinkrak’s Looncourt. For those of you not in on the Bit, this squad of sneaky Gitz believe themselves to be a noble band of marauding knights, exploring the Underworlds of Warhammer one hex at a time. Their gameplay mechanics in the older edition of the game fully bought into this, letting them earn Glory by completing quests over the course of a game.

This band of li’l guys is incredibly fun to paint for a few reasons. First off, their story is simply so ridiculous that I couldn’t help but smile most of the time they were in my hands. The models are rich in sculpted storytelling – from Grib’s cobbled-together “lance” to the nod to the old Warhammer Fantasy command upgrades in Snorbo’s mushroom-cum-trumpet – that really leans into the Bit, and painting them was an exercise in delight as I found more and more fun details.

HOWEVER! This doesn’t mean that they’re overly-detailed. Two of the models in the warband were single pieces clipped straight from the sprue! For models released in the 2020s! The level of detail is essentially perfect for some li’l guys, with richly textured robes and some nice flat spots on pauldrons and shields giving you as much (or as little!) space as you could want to experiment with blending and freehanding.

Finally, there’s something about Gloomspite Gitz that makes me want to paint them in bright colors, something that’s all too rare in the Warhammer world. Inspired by this article on using pink in your miniatures, I chose to go with a bright yellow for their armor, contrasting with deep black robes and red squigs and mushrooms. Last year, our own SRM went with a bright turquoise for his squigs and mushrooms, set off with a beautiful dark pink in the robes. A riot of color looks just as much at home on them just as much as the classic yellow and black of the Bad Moon. Much like Greggle’s grots, the Gitz cry out for fun.

Rockfish

I’d say my go to relax and just play around kit type is the various simple guard vehicles. None of these things that are essentially mini dioramas on a massive base, just any of the dozen-plus options for something that is essentially one of the standard hulls with a random collection of weapons stuck on it, with the Russ being the best example for a single kit especially after the different versions were merged into one.

There’s a whole pile of different vehicles that, if we’ll be honest, are really basic and can be done in a single sitting because there’s not really a ton going on with them, it’s mostly all the body of green with some random details. Those details are where you can find a lot of opportunity to be creative without a high commitment or it really mattering if it goes wrong though, and that’s fantastic. If you’re only going to spend 2-3 hours working on a vehicle and no one is going to look at it that closely you can play with grime and crew art to your heart’s content and then just move on without needing to be perfect.

What’s the story of this tank? Has it got a great deed, an odd look, or maybe the crew actively mocks it or its role. Anything can work, and you can create that story for just yourself and anyone who is curious enough to know or maybe it’s just something you thought it might be funny at 11pm on a work night when you’re trying your best to get a few more minutes of free time before you turn in for the night.

Refrences are just as free game, be it from a popular story that could be recognized by someone with enough interest or the livery of your local bus company that’s meaningless to anyone but your friends.

I think one of the great things about this sort of playing around is it lets you escape from the effort and care you might put into your normal painting, maybe you don’t want to spend hours carefully getting that gradient just right on a cloak for a primarch tonight and you instead give yourself that little hobby ADHD brain tickle of doing something quick before returning to the grind tomorrow. I mean, painting is supposed to be something you do for fun or at least for relaxation if you’ve not made a career of it, and even if you have, it’s so fantastic to find something that keeps things loose and stress-free, right?

Colin Ward

I didn’t expect my answer to be the hot take of the group chat but without hesitation the most fun models for me to paint are Primaris Space Marine Intercessors. I’m a process-based painter and Intercessors fit my painting style and my process really, really well.  They’re extremely flexible base models and with little variation between MkX Power Armor squads it’s easy to carry the process over to huge chunks of the army.

They also take conversion bits really well and will absorb as much time and effort as you want to put into them. Want an Intercessor Squad in 3 hours? No problem. Want to win a Golden Demon with 400 hours on 5 models? Can do. I know I’m clowning myself by including the incomparable Andy Wardle’s Blood Angels Intercessors in this post, but damn they look incredible.

I use an airbrush to basecoat and highlight my Intercessors and then it’s off to work the process. I’m a sicko who loves edge highlighting marines and so the repetition brings me to a really calm and happy space when painting. I’ve painted well over 100 Intercessors and other units in MkX armor and I’m confident I’ll paint many, many more.

They look great in other colors too, of course!

Even though they might seem like the most Pumpkin Spice Latte pick of the list, I’m always happy when painting Intercessors. I’m not sure how many more I’ll ever need for my Blood Angels, but more MkX armor is in my future for sure.

Josh Boyes

My first reply to this question was the humble Rhino. I love that metal box with all my heart, and it’s truly a great kit to paint, (build on the other hand…) but I’ve only ever painted one. Can I say my favourite model to paint is something I’ve only ever done once? Sure it brought me a lot of joy but a favourite to me has to be something I can do again, and again, and again and still feel happy to do another.

Enter, the humble skeleton. I have painted around forty Deathrattle skeletons… I think. I swore I had around sixty or even eighty, but I can’t find the evidence. I lost a lot of miniatures when I moved and bits still emerge out of my parents house now-and-then like ghosts of projects past.

It doesn’t matter anyway because I could easily paint a hundred more. Whoever the sculptor is for the Deathrattle should consider it their crowning achievement. It’s such a perfect blend of functionality as a horde unit and artistry. Each model is hitting a characterful pose, oozing character, but you get twenty and so there are only so many details you need to drag your brush over.

There’s so much opportunity in these many tiny canvases and you’d struggle to go wrong. You can do them studio-style, with crisp lines and bone polished to a nice, clean white, or get nasty with it and make them look freshly risen from forgotten graves. They take washes exceptionally well, contrast especially, and you can have so much fun with exaggerated weathering. Rust and verdigris mixing together to create a story of how long these silly skeletons were stuck in the ground.

Most importantly, no matter what you do with them, it’s fun! It’s fun in a way that encourages you to experiment. You can turn over so many in a single sitting. Deathrattle were a turning point in finding my style in the hobby. I learned to use oils, airbrush highlights, apply contrast in new ways and play against the idea of smoothness and instead use texture to my advantage. I wasn’t afraid of spoiling a skeleton because there was always the next one, and the one after that, and– you get the idea.

These little skelemens helped me realise I could translate that vision in my head to a model, and that’s pretty cool. I’ll paint a hundred of these one day when I return to Age of Sigmar. I promise that.

Go Have Some Fun!

We make a lot of jokes in this hobby about how much of a slog painting through your next 30 Poxwalkers/Zombies/Skeletons/Orks is going to be, how awful X colour is to paint (yellow, mostly), or how much a certain texture/part (like trim) sucks to do often forgetting that this is meant to be enjoyable. So pick up a model you have in your backlog, I know you have one, that you haven’t looked at for a while and go paint it. Maybe it’s not something that’s even for any of your existing armies! It doesn’t matter. Paint it. Enjoy it. Don’t be scared of it, just start it and have fun in the creative process.

We had so many kits to talk about we couldn’t get to them all in one post, so we’ll be back tomorrow with more!

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