Welcome again to the Hobby Roundup, your chance to see what our community of Tiny Plastic People contributors have been up to this month.
There are glimmers of light at the end of the long lockdown tunnel – surely everyone is just putting the finishing touches on their isolation project and there won’t be a scrap of grey plastic to be seen when we meet up again? Surely?
Rachel (Nersh)
All through February I was fixing, assembling and basing almost my entire backlog, with the intent of getting them all primed at the end, too. Well, I abandoned that last bit of the plan, realising it would take ages and would make storing the models more difficult – you can’t just pile primed models into little boxes without the risk that any jostling will undo your work. So at the end of the month I moved back to painting, starting with a quartet of Stormcast Eternals.
(From top left, going clockwise: Knight-Zephyros (or Neave Blacktalon), Knight-Questor (store anniversary model), Liberator Prime (store opening model), Liberator with Grandhammer (some other special occasion).)
After that, my month-long buildathon paid off for the first time, as I grabbed a box of dwarves off the shelf, quickly got them primed and began painting them. These characterful fellows are the dwarf half of the old Battle for Skull Pass starter set for Warhammer 6th edition, and I’ve been looking forward to painting them for a long time.
They paint up nice and quickly, and I should have the whole set finished by the end of the week. Then I will move swiftly on to figuring out a fast, efficient scheme for my own speed-painted Nighthaunt army (inspired by Tom G’s amazing effort from last month’s Hobby Roundup), and also painting some little spaceships to use in A Billion Suns. Full steam ahead!
Luke Shaw
Recently I have been painting up some Hedonites of Slaanesh for Age of Sigmar. I’ve taken the core colours from the Dread Pageant that I painted up at the start of the year, and have expanded it into a theme that I hope will work across all of my units. I had to work out how to apply the same kind of basing effect to the minis as the sculpted effect on the dread pageant, and as such I’ve only based my Lord of Pain, as a test. I’ve enjoyed painting these, but the Slick Blade Seekers took an unreasonable amount of time – a beautiful kit, but each one feels as detailed as a hero model!
Tom F (LeSwordfish)
I read Saturnine you see, and that was what did it: a few hours of reading about my favourite character Nathaniel Garr♡ fighting alongside the Imperial Fists, and within a few days I had snapped up a discounted copy of Betrayal At Calth, some sculpted Imperial Palace bases from eBay, and I was trying to figure out how to paint yellow without losing my mind.
Turns out it’s not so bad, when working with a pale base. The recipe for this is a spray of Wraithbone, followed by Averland Sunset, recess wash of Seraphim Sepia, and then a fairly heavy drybrush of Yriel Yellow followed by an Ushabti Bone highlight. It won’t win me the Golden Demon, but heresy-era Space Marines are a horde army, so a FITD (which stands for Screw It, That’ll Do) standard is good enough for me.
That – and some Tempestus Scions about which the less said the better – was my lot for this month (in my defense, I was also moving house). For next month, I’m hoping to have finished the Tactical Squad that chap is from, and started work on some of the rest of the new project I guess I have now!
Drew
In the last week of February I finally made a start on Lion Dad (by which I mean The Lion, Primarch of the Dark Angels). I’d ear-marked a hundred hours to finish him, but I fancied being done faster than that. So I tried out a new technique that I’d seen Trent Denison use, because experimenting on centre-piece models is an A star idea.
Fortunately it worked out, and sketching in bold shades, often wet-in-wet, then going back and unifying them with the airbrush might be my new method of working for a lot of stuff.
The biggest issue I had was some very weird paint effects on the cloak where the acrylics seemed determined to reactivate, which in my experience, should not happen.
In the end, two and a half weeks of work got me a good amount through the model.
James Alone
This month it has been all about the Trogg.
Just one singular Trogg that became the focus of my attention after growing weary of the Custodes train I had laid out before me.
As a Christmas treat I picked up the Gloomspite army box and a few extra kits to replace my last failed attempt at an Age of Sigmar army.
Like all good Games Workshop boxes, you get a ton of spare bits, and I thought, hey, why not use those to build a Troggboss to lead the force.
Cut to 3 months later and I’ve hacked apart a Fomoroid Crusher, learnt how to sculpt feet badly, and fallen in love with painting grungy, mouldy trogg skin.
Maybe next month they will be finished!
Pete (Fiyenyaa)
February was a month where I continued to race through my smallish Black Legion collection. Since the impetus of actual games has disappeared into the immaterium, I’ve been focusing on finishing off the Chaos Space marine bits I picked up when they had their partial range refresh way back a couple of years ago. Something about painting black and gold I find massively satisfying.
Now that these are done, I’m only a handful of models away from having finished the lot! And of course that means I now have my eyes on some Chaos Terminators so I can keep painting this colour scheme…
Alistair C
In February I managed a whole month of hobby streak; trying to do at least an hour of hobby activity every day. My FLGS has been running a painting league for Malifaux during the lockdowns, so I painted models for my Ten Thunders and got quite a few done, though many are still waiting for their bases to be painted up. Some of those models remain unfinished, but sometimes your enthusiasm for a project just dries up, and I’ve found that trying to keep going in that case just sucks the fun out of hobbying.
Instead I started painting up my converted Khagra’s Ravagers warband for Warhammer Underworlds. These models are really excellent variations of the new Chaos Warriors sculpts, and my favourite is this fellow in a “come at me” pose which is clearly inspired by the classic Slambo model. If you’re interested in seeing more about these conversions, keep an eye on TPP for an article about my Slaves to Darkness conversions coming soon!
Rich (Cronch)
February was another month of odds and ends for me. I’m continuing work on another commission that I hope to get done by early April, so I’ve just been doing small personal projects around that to keep myself entertained. Conscious that I’ve done a lot of army painting for the last year or so, I decided to paint up a Space Marine Heroes Terminator in Ultramarines livery to the best of my ability. There’s definitely room for improvement, but I’m super happy with how he came out!
I’m also continuing my mission to finish off my backlog of Underworlds warbands before buying anything from the latest season, and the most recent addition to the finished pile is Morgwaeth’s Blade-Coven. I’ve been learning about glazing and paint consistency, so tried to put some of that into practice here with things like the weapons, as well as trying to use colours that I wouldn’t normally reach for. Overall, I think it was a success!
James O
In between periods of building and priming boxes of minis received as Christmas presents and some scenic bits and pieces, I have mainly spent the first couple of months of 2021 working my way through a combat squad of Noise Marines. It’s been a real slog – Chaos Space Marines must be some of the most time-consuming units in the whole of Games Workshop’s range to paint. So many pouches, holsters, grenades, bits of cloth, fur, chainmail, straps – the details just never end!
Don’t worry, they’re ‘armless.
On top of that, the Noise Marine upgrade sprues do not exactly play nice with the updated Chaos Space Marine sculpts. All of the pouches and holsters on the belts restrict the positioning of the arms somewhat and despite the new Heretic Astartes being larger than the old sculpts, the torsos somehow seem to be thinner than those the Sonic Blasters are designed to fit onto. I had to break out the green stuff to get rid of the gaps caused by the arms not sitting flush where they join at the shoulders.
Luckily the Noise Marine Champion for the squad doesn’t have these issues so I decided to finish him off just so something was finally complete and off the painting table in Q1!
This squad has also given me the opportunity to try my hand at painting some neon effects for the cabling and vents on the sonic weapons, like the doom siren on the Champion above. The tutorial I’m following uses an underpaint of white and a medium grey tone for shading, then I mix up a heavy wash of Vallejo Fluoro Magenta, flow improver and a touch of water and apply that, using multiple coats to build up the intensity of colour as required, and then finishing by using some white to pick out the highlight regions.
Knowing my luck I will complete the unit just in time for Games Workshop to announce an Emperor’s Children codex supplement and unveil a brand new line of sonically armed marines.
