Mini painting
Painting table update: April 2025
While 2025 started quite slowly for me on the painting front, things picked up through February and March, now into April.
I made a big push on my Stormcast Eternals Blood Bowl team; played with some synthwave-style colours on a couple of minis; went art deco(-ish) on a Voidsman-at-arms and have recently been inspired to work on a pretty cool Wolf Lord kitbash for my Space Wolves.
In this page:
Stormcast players
In the past month or so I’ve really managed to fill out my Stormcast Eternals Blood Bowl kitbash team. I’m now up to 15 models assembled with 7 fully painted and could actually start playing games.
For that though, I do still need to finalise exactly which position each model represents. A couple are obvious, where I’ve modelled them as throwers or catchers, but the others I need to make calls on.
The team — in terms of the source models they came from — currently looks like this (in no particular order):
- Averon Stormsire ✕1
- Vindictor ✕2
- Knight Arcanum ✕2
- Dhoraz Giant-Fell ✕1
- Liberator (old style) ✕1
- Liberator (new style) ✕1
- Gardus Steel-soul ✕1
- Yndrasta, the Celestial Spear ✕1
- Vanquisher ✕1
- Knight Incantor ✕1
- Neave Blacktalon ✕1 (the standalone model, not the Blacktalons box set version)
- Knight-Judicator ✕1
- Vorrus Starstrike ✕1
As you may notice, I’ve ended up going relatively heavy on named characters like Stormsire, Gardus and even Yndrasta.
In creating a fully-kitbashed team like this, it seemed worth going the extra mile and having a bit more individuality for each player, and the Stormcast Eternals have a ton of cool models. Warhammer Underworlds warbands are a good source of dynamic poses, while I was lucky to have (or source relatively cheaply) spares for a couple of others.
I’ll go into more detail on the Stormcast team in a dedicated post as this is just meant to be a roundup!
Synthwave stylings
Back in December I saw an amazing synthwave-esque colour scheme on a Tyranid Tyrannofex and had to try something similar.
The first place I tried the effect was the shoulder ‘pad’ of the Lieutenant in Phobos armour from the Leviathan box set. He has a bit of Tyranid tied around his right shoulder which felt a safe-ish place to try first as I was already painting it.
Although the effect will work better on larger scale models, I still really liked the effect (having gone for a deep purple base up to bright pink highlights) and decided to try it on more models. It looks better in person, so needs photographing properly but we’ve got building work happening at the moment so that’ll have to wait until I’m set up in my new workspace.
The next mini I tried a similar effect on was an Ur-ghul from the Blackstone Fortress box. Again I saw pulled some inspiration from a photo posted on Reddit, this time an Ur-ghul painted by user Tychron.
Again I slightly changed the colours used, but for a similar overall effect and for a first pass I’m pretty happy. I still need to base this one up and then start on the other three.
Voidsman-at-arms
Next up on my ever-wandering areas of interest, I finally got enough enthusiasm built up to try painting one of my Imperial Agents minis: a voidsman-at-arms from the Elucidian Starstriders kill team, which I got as part of the Ordo Xenos Imperial Agents battleforce box set.
The stylings of these minis, along with the navy breachers and similar, always remind me of those art-deco-inspired steampunk worlds like Bioshock or the super-old Starship Titanic game from Douglas Adams.
As such, I wanted to lean into that feel, with warm champagne-esque metallics married with rich colour blocks and so I went with a navy blue uniform and built up a Canoptek Alloy base for the metallics alongside some white accents.
The Canoptek-and-white combo worked pretty well (again needs better photography than these quick iphone shots) and I like this alien basing style I pulled from yet another different Reddit thread.
Some progress on a dragon (wing)
A while back I had the idea of combining the high-contrast kind of effect seen on that Tyranid to similar models and having acquired some Stormdrake Guard, began on a dragon. The main purple body got started when I first had the idea before I stalled for a while.
Recently I had another little burst, largely around building confidence with paint thinning consistency, where the many scales on the wing gave me lots of practice!
Looking again now, I’m tempted to try finding a way to add a little metallic/iridescent sheen to these scales. Perhaps simply with some thinned metallic medium; perhaps with one of the ready-made two-colour metallics from somewhere like Turbo Dork?
It might take me a while to build up the will to tackle all that detail again though!
Wolf Lord kitbash
Lastly for now — I take so long writing these updates I have to keep going back and adding new bits — I saw a comment in a thread discussing the (amazing looking) new Space Wolves battleforce box and the box art.
Someone in the thread suggested that the Lord-Terminos model from the recent Stormcast Eternals releases could be used to kitbash the pose for Logan Grimnar in the centre (with the red axe) and I immediately had to give it a go.
Because I’m ridiculous and keep buying up job lots of things on ebay, I had a spare Lord-Terminos on sprue I could play with, and set to.
Even better, I had two Lord-Terminos models on sprue I could play with.
… which allowed me to sacrifice the axe from the second sprue in order to create the double-headed axe Logan has in the painting.
Like the Stormcast Blood Bowl conversions, I’ll do a proper write-up article separately, so for now here’s a (bad, again with caveats on my lack of photography setup at the moment) photo of the ‘finished’ mini.
The banner most certainly still needs work as I’m not happy with it as-is, but broadly I think this turned out very nicely.
I won’t quite claim it’s specifically a Logan Grimnar kitbash as there are too many details that are off for his character. Instead, I’m simply referring to him as a Wolf Lord for now, but the inspiration was most certainly that Logan Grimnar pose in the painting.
Signing off
I started writing this as a painting update for March and now we’re in mid-April, so time to stop and get this thing published!
