Painting table update: November 2024

Since my last update in September, I’ve only managed a little progress with painting - the only new completed mini being the very quick ‘Skitarii Claus’ festive scheme I recently shared. ‘Orktober’ totally passed me by.

That said, while I’ve been recovering from a minor knee op recently, I have made progress on the three Deathwatch infernus marines as well as a Haldor Icepelt/Battle Leader mini I picked up on ebay.

One of the few things I managed in October while the weather was still warm, was to prime a decent batch of minis ready to paint: a Norse Blood Bowl team, some Blood Bowl star players, the Elucidian Startstriders, a selection of space marines and a couple of the Skaventide Stormcast characters.

Speaking of Blood Bowl, I got halfway through painting up my Stormcast Vindictor ‘lineman’ conversion, to go with the others I’ve already completed.

Space Marines

I’ve mentioned before, but in this first year back in the hobby, I’ve really struggled to be motivated by painting Space Marines — my favourite faction first time round as a teenager.

Deathwatch

Inspired a bit by the exclusive infernus sergeant that got released in the Combat Patrol magazine, I converted it and a couple of the Leviathan infernus marines to Deathwatch marines. A while later, I got the time to prime them up black and then have a go at black armour.

Black armour certainly is tricky to get right! I think I’ve made a good start with these three, though I probably need to go lighter and crisper on some of the edge highlights just to improve that tabletop view.

What I’ve been most pleased with on these three though, is something I’ll need to photograph properly when they’re finished: the silver left arms. I really didn’t want a bright silver for the Deathwatch arms but a darker metallic, so I loosely dry-/over-brushed Iron Warriors on the black undercoat, leaving plenty of black in the recesses (almost a metallic slapchop/zenithal), then simply picked out a few point highlights in Stormhost Silver. 

In person, it works really well and I now want to refine this and see if it’ll work for some of my Grey Knights too. Still plenty of detail work to go on these three, but I’m very happy with my progress so far.

Space Wolves

With the Deathwatch going well and two of them as Space Wolves, I was happy with the yellow shoulder pad effect I’d managed and so followed that over onto a Battle Leader/Haldor Icepelt mini I’d got on ebay a while ago. I built up the grey armour similarly to the Dreadnought I started a few months ago

I still love Space Wolves as a chapter but have come to prefer a darker, more neutral grey than the bright blue-grey of traditional Space Wolves armour. I’ve also started on a Space Wolves aggressor:

Stormcast Eternals

I briefly also had another go at mixing the slightly-metallic-bone colour I’ve been trying to nail most of this year, on a Drakan Celestus Stormcast model.

Still not quite there. This one’s a little too dark as I also tried a slapchop approach, working up the base bone colour before heavily drybrushing a layer with a mix of Vallejo Ivory and Vallejo metal medium.

The drybrushing with the metal medium mix definitely got more of the metallic sheen I’m after though, so I’ll try that again but on a more properly-light base layer of Wraithbone next time.

Plans

As ever, I have more plans than I could possibly ever start, let alone finish, but…

Finish some marines

Obviously I need to get these 5 marines finished if I can. I’ve also got the Phobos lieutenant and Sternguard sergeant from Leviathan to complete, both in Space Wolves colours.

Van Saar gang?

Necromunda has been a firm favourite since the first edition came out in the mid-90s, though I was never keen on the Van Saars — those spindly models always felt so weedy — so even though I’ve been picking up some old metal Necromunda minis, I haven’t been interested in the Van Saar sets available.

Rejoining the hobby this year though, I’ve slowly discovered that the newer generation plastic Van Saar minis are much better proportioned. The tek-hunters from Hive Secundus got me interested a few months ago and the main gang isn’t too bad either, though the pallid faces aren’t my thing.

A joy of this hobby is that I don’t have to paint my minis the way Games Worksop does, however. Again with a little downtime after my knee op, I picked up playing some Halo Infinite again and some of the armour load-outs and colour schemes got me thinking of a TRON-/Halo-inspired scheme for a Van Saar gang.

Around the time Hive Secundus was released, I picked up a set of the tek-hunters on ebay for an absolute bargain price and have since bought the Hive Secundus set itself, so I’ve got a good few minis I could build and try out colour schemes with (if I can manage to prime any in our finally-wintery weather).

Norse Blood Bowl team

Already primed in Wraithbone, I had vague thoughts of trying to speed paint the Norse team. If I clear some space on my painting desk, I may try one or two and hope that I build some momentum. I’ve also got some Amazons mostly-painted I should get back to.

Whatever other random thing takes my fancy and jumps ahead of all the above

Let’s be honest, I’m not great at sticking with one set for painting and tend to flit around. So who knows what will actually get done. It’s all good fun though.