Welcome to February’s Hobby Roundup, brought to you by the good folks at Tiny Plastic People. This series showcases what we – the group of Tiny Plastic People Contributors – have been working on in our various hobby bubbles each month, even the stuff that Instagram doesn’t show.
Tom F (LeSwordfish)
As always, I spend December grumpily struggling to hit self-imposed targets (a thousand points of Seraphon this time), and so in January I relax, experience total hobby freedom, and paint some random bullshit that’s been on my list for ages. This year that was some Deathwatch, some neat old Wood Elves, and a pair of Warhounds for Adeptus Titanicus.
I particularly like the bases here: I wanted to use them to sell the power and scale of a titan. I think a flat-ish desert base doesn’t really do that, so I create little ruined city blocks with 3D printed terrain, different grades of sand, texture and crackle paints, and assorted spare bitz. That last is the hardest to use effectively – anything too recognisable immediately enforces its scale on the whole model, and you end up thinking “that’s a normal scale autocannon barrel, combined with a very small titan”. Cover it all in a unifying wash and drybrush though, and it looks pretty solid – and it’s a lot of fun to do, too. Really makes me see how people end up with model railways larger than their living rooms.
Rich (Cronch)
I’ve also been working on Titanicus this year, trying to finish off my Legio Ignatum collection before the upcoming Warmaster appears on shelves. Since the start of January I’ve completed a Warlord and a Reaver that have been sat half-done for far too long, and also painted up my first Lucius-pattern Warhound. This was converted from a plastic Games Workshop Warhound, using a 3D-printed kit developed by a friend and I for our own use. It’s been a fun experiment, and I’m keen to get back into Fusion 360 over the coming months and design some more things!
Aside from that, the overarching theme of 2021 so far has been “tidying up”, with outstanding bits from the shame pile finished off to add to my Necrons and Heresy-Era Iron Warriors, as well as a lot of time spent magnetising armies into storage boxes (about which more later, perhaps). I’ve also been working on a very special Land Raider for the Iron Warriors, a project which you can follow right here on the site!
Axolotl Questions
So far this year, as well as working on my Frostgrave board, I’ve been painting a whole bunch of related minis. My warbands are mainly made from the lovely plastic kits from North Star themselves, which are great fun to kitbash together. They also paint up nice and quick with Citadel’s Contrast paints, which is my preferred way of getting stuff done to a tabletop standard with minimum fuss.
Here we have some of my Necromancer’s warband:
As well as the start of a couple of other new warbands
I also knocked out a whole bunch of wandering monsters, so many so it was actually difficult to get a decent photo of them all, though this was helped by the skeletons and the wraith only needing to be rebased to fit into the frozen grounds of Felstad.
Lots more pictures are available on my Instagram.
Tom G (RespectableGeek)
This month has been all about the undead.
First up, a test model for my Indomitus Necrons. I’ve been struggling with working out how I want to paint these for a while; I started off wanting to try a ‘biblical angels’ aesthetic, all shining lights, glowing orbs, and too many eyes, however that felt like it would want extensive conversions. But then a recent White Dwarf had a short bit of flavour text that caught my eye.
“The deluge of magma caused by the creation of the New Argovan Fault destroyed some 90+% of a Necron tomb complex buried deep beneath Argovan’s surface.”
“What if,” I thought, “they weren’t actually destroyed?”
I’m really pleased with how this turned out; I wanted to give the impression of molten magma still within the core of the Necron, with a cooler crust of lava and ash on the surface. The blue adds some nice alien coldness to it.
The plan for this army going forward is to do the first stages of painting still on the sprue. I’ve never done this before, but I think the technique needs it, being mostly drybrushing to work the black up, which can be difficult when there is a gun in the way!
Meanwhile, for Age of Sigmar, I painted an entire army of Nighthaunt.
The goal here was speedpainting, something Nighthaunt lend themselves really well to. Having initially set myself an over-ambitious challenge of ‘paint the army entirely on New Year’s Day’, I settled with ‘paint the army entirely in January’. Overall, the above is a little under 24 hours painting, or 17 minutes per model.
The idea here was to keep things mostly ghostly, but with splashes of colour, particularly red. Amusingly, these started with a black undercoat, whereas the Necron started from white!
Next month: Blood Angels.
Rachel (Nersh)
Since late January I’ve been going through my backlog and preparing everything to be painted, so my paintbrushes have been at rest. In fact, this is probably the longest I’ve gone without painting in a couple of years! Yet the time has certainly not gone to waste, as I’ve industriously stripped, repaired, built and based hundreds of models. Soon I’ll be done with this phase and can move on to the probably week-long task of priming everything.
Writing this down has caused me to reflect how barmy this process might be. I keep telling myself it’ll be worth it: probably by the end of February my entire backlog will be ready to paint, and when the time comes to work on a particular bit of it, I can just grab it off the shelf and go.
Anyway, one of the models I’ve been working on recently is this old Warhawk Rider: stripping, reassembling and mounting it on a cool scenic base. For the base, I used a part from the Timeworn Ruins set, some Barbed Bracken, some Creeping Vines, some bits from the (sadly out-of-print) Glade Guard kit, some Milliput, some of my own texture paste and, of course, plenty of skulls. Luckily the bird already had a pin in it, so attaching it to the pillar wasn’t too difficult.
P.S. If anyone can tell me when this model was first released, I’d be grateful – so far my Google-fu has not proved sufficient to find out!
Luke Shaw
I’ve painted a lot in January, and I’ll be talking about it a bit more on the site later. I am pretty happy with these Deathshroud and the Lord of Virulence, which mark my return to Death Guard after about a year. It was strange going back to an old colour scheme after a while, as it was originally something I thought was really effective, but as I’ve learned more, I’ve become less happy.with it.
To push these I tried to do some more weathering and shading than I had in the past, and I think it works okay. I also pushed the red on the capes of the Deathshroud in order to convey their elite status, and to add something a bit more vibrant to the washed out palette.
James R
My Custodians have been an on and off project for about 2 years. For one thing, Custodian Guard are damn cool designs. When I first set eyes on them, they were something I thought I’d never see made by Games Workshop. In Second Edition times, the sketchy art of these strange, beyond human guards adorned the pages of Codex Imperialis. That one softback book was something beautiful, full of strange tales and lore of a future gone horribly wrong yet remaining so grandiose. The models I found upon my return to the hobby were even better than I had imagined.
And I, like a fool, decided to try to paint them white.
White armour was a challenge I just completely missed the target on. I tried several different recipes, the most successful being a Zandri dust base, with agrax, then Flayed one Flesh, but it took forever to get a smooth coat, and over larger areas just looked like a wet mess.
Thank goodness for Wraithbone paint. This nails the pale bone undertone I wanted, and a sepia wash (which I have since learnt to thin) captures the depth. I then leap to Pallid Wych Flesh; while lighter than Flayed, it covers smoothly, and a thinned coat in the recesses gets a really smooth finish. Lastly a few winks of White Scar and I’m done.
And what did I achieve, after all of this? One Custodian.
Big uncle Trajann Valoris.
And that’s about it for the whole month!
