Painting table update: July 2025

Since my April update, we've completed some building work on the house and I now have a nice new painting setup in a larger room. The work put a halt to painting itself for a while but I'm just starting to get going again now.

New Space Wolves!

If anything was going to be an instant purchase for me, it would be new Space Wolves models and along came an excellent new army set.

I’ve generally missed these limited run army sets as you have to be ready first thing on a Saturday morning before the ebay scalpers buy them all up. For the Space Wolves though, I made sure: I was ready in the morning and then lucked out seeing someone on Reddit saying that Travelling Man had released their pre-order page early. I jumped on that order page as fast as I could and secured a copy.

In the end, GW had seemingly stocked up a bit extra for the popular wolves and a couple of days later there were still some pre-orders available at a couple of shops. I decided to grab a second copy to bulk out my new force and give me some more configuration options.

And a very old Space Wolf

Not on the painting table this month but completed since my last update, a couple of months ago I picked up an old metal Space Marine veteran mini (I think I found it at the treasure trove that is the fabulously-named Graham’s Wuerkshoppe).

I wolfed it up slightly, adding a wolf-tooth necklace and a power pack from the old Blood Claws/Grey Hunters box and decided to paint it in the more traditional blue-grey armour, rather than the darker, flatter grey I’ve been using so far.

The pink-for-yellow trick

Every now and then, I’d notice someone online making oblique reference to the ‘pink trick’ for painting yellow but hadn’t had any great need to find out what they were on about. Painting Space Wolves shoulder pads gave me an incentive though and I’m glad I did investigate, as it’s such a handy shortcut to strong yellows.

In short, basing with a mid-tone pink and then (optionally) working up volumetric highlights with lighter pinks towards white, then doing a heavy wash with Imperial Fists contrast, gets you a really nice strong yellow without fighting with white undercoating or basecoating and difficult, thin yellow paints.

Leading to… Howling Griffons!

With an easier method for painting yellow — and having been inspired by an excellent diorama from Bjarni Dali at Warhammer World last year — I decided to finally give Howling Griffons a go.

I picked up the Captain Justian model from the Kill Team starter set, which I already had primed black, and began to paint two diagonally-opposing quarters of the armour in Squid Pink from Vallejo.

Mixing in increasing amounts of AK Silver Grey, I worked up some simple highlights to the pink. I didn’t go that far on moving towards white with this stage — which would give a more pure yellow end result — as I wanted a slightly orange yellow for this test mini.

With the pink quarters done, I decided to add the red before doing the yellow wash over the pink. I’m still not entirely sure on the logic of that but it’s worked out this time. With the red down, I added a heavy wash of Imperial Fists contrast paint over the pink areas and, boom! Lovely, deep yellow armour.

I’ve made good progress since on painting up the rest of this model and am keen to build out some more Howling Griffons now, as I really like the colour scheme — especially in contrast to my more monochrome Space Wolves and Deathwatch marines.

Kitbashing a female space marine

In looking to source some transfers for the Howling Griffons, I remembered a recommendation for ImpatientTabletop on Etsy. They appear to do some really nice transfer sheets for a load of space marine chapters, though I haven’t actually tried them yet.

Upon loading up Etsy though, among the suggested items were some ‘female space marine torso’ 3D prints. While the prints themselves weren’t quite my thing, it did get me thinking about kitbashing a female Astartes and the obvious place to look seemed to be Stormcast Eternals: they’re effectively fantasy Space Marines anyway.

A quick rummage among my Stormcast sprues unearthed a Lord-Veritant from the recent Skaventide box, which looked a promising candidate — the shoulder pads being separate pieces one of the key things I was looking for. 

I’ll write this one up in a separate post, but for one of those kitbashes where I just went on feel without much of an up-front plan, I’m surprisingly happy with the result so far.

Back to Varag

With yellow becoming a bit of a theme, I most recently picked back up my unfinished Varag Ghoul-Chewer mini and finally began highlighting the yellow armour and adding a couple of details. 

Still a long way to go on this one but it felt good to even begin on the details as there are many of them.

New techniques

You may have spotted in the background of the above photos is now a spray booth. My new setup has allowed me the space to give airbrushing a go, which I am very slowly getting used to.

On the much cheaper end of things, I also gave the makeup sponge technique a go on some of the new Space Wolves, to block down the levels of grey on the armour. It worked pretty nicely, with a subtly different result compared to drybrushing/overbrushing that can deliver slightly smoother blends.

Nice to have a couple of new tools for the bag of tricks, though more practice needed with both!