Painting table update: November 2025

Blood Bowl star players and getting festive.

After last month’s update, I rolled straight into figuring out an ogre proxy for my custom Stormcast Eternals Blood Bowl team. Having successfully kitbashed a dracoline into a standing/rearing-up pose, I had perhaps worn myself out on hobby inspiration and went quiet for a week or two.

Things did pick up again though, and I’ve had a nice little burst of productivity on Blood Bowl star players, rolling this week into some more festive subjects.

Star players

For quite a while, I’ve had both a Yhetee and Skrorg Snowpelt sitting primed and ready to paint on a shelf. I’ve always been a bit torn between thinking the all-over fur should probably be quite an easy thing to get a good effect on, mixed with caution after some mixed results on much smaller wolf pelts.

Skrorg Snowpelt

At last, I bit the bullet and chose Skrorg Snowpelt to just try one evening. I wanted to go for a warm undertone and then a cooler white highlight to the fur, so did an all-over wash of Aggaros Dunes first and then drybrushed over with Ulthuan Grey.

That worked pretty well, just needing a few details tidying up with a normal brush in a few areas, particularly for the hair on his head. I also later went back in and added some more shading in some areas.

After that, the rest of the model came together pretty smoothly, using a mix of contrast paints and normal layering. Although it’s not a standout feature on the finished model, I’m happy with the effect I got on the horn on his shoulder pad.

Varag Ghoul-Chewer

Skrorg complete, I decided to buckle down and finally get at least simple base layers on the last bits of Varag Ghoul-Chewer that I hadn’t done yet. This model has sat mostly ready for over a year but I couldn’t build the enthusiasm to paint the unfortunate chap impaled on his shoulder spike. So I did that, put some basic grass texture paint on the base and have called him ‘tabletop ready’ for now. 

Willow Rosebark

On a little roll by now, I decided to have a go at another category of model I had been putting off: Wood Elves/Sylvaneth.

I got very excited by the Sylvaneth sculpts when I got back into the hobby a couple of years ago and began work on a Kurnoth Hunter 18 months ago. Having messed up the white primer spray and getting the ‘furry’ effect made it awful to start painting though and I gave up rather than go through all the hassle of stripping and re-priming.

Anyway, back then I had the ambition — fuelled by my love for landscape photography — to theme a set of Sylvaneth around autumnal trees and especially silver birch.

As I was getting ready to start on the Willow Rosebark model, I came across a really lovely example scheme from a user on Reddit, applied to a Treelord:

This really got me excited to try something similar and so I barrelled in to working on Willow Rosebark. 

The scheme itself is great, but what I realised quite quickly is that this sculpt doesn’t have nearly enough bark elements on it to really sell the silver birch scheme, while what is there is generally thin and spindly.

Still, I carried on through with it and I’m still reasonably pleased with the end result. It came together super quickly over just two evenings, leaving me with three star players newly ready to use without the bare plastic shame.

Festive minis WIP

Last November I got in a little early on the festive spirit and converted a Skitarii Ranger into ‘Skitarii Claus’. This year, I’ve brought out a pair of ready-made Christmas-themed miniatures that I had bought last year and not got around to painting: Da Red Gobbo’s A-Bomb-Inable Snowman and Da Red Gobbo’s Surprise.

After some quick, pleasing results on the pre-texured base for the snowman, it’s the A-Bomb-Inable Snowman mini I’m focusing on for now, while Da Red Gobbo’s Surprise is primed in sub-assemblies ready to work on later.

Still plenty of detail work to go, but I’m happy with progress so far and it’ll be nice to have one festive mini in the bank for the year. After this, I’ll look at the second red gobbo or perhaps have a think about another festive kitbash. One of our local Warhammer stores had painted up a Hernkyn Yaegir as Santa while I’ve just seen a Grimnir painted as an old-fashioned Santa too. Maybe there’ll be other ideas…

Incomings

I mentioned some upcoming Warhammer releases I was interested in last time and a few have become available.

Warhammer Underworlds: Spitewood has arrived although I haven’t cracked it open yet. Pre-orders went in for Blood Bowl Third Season Edition, which I’m quite excited about and hopefully arrives tomorrow (at time of writing), while I did place an order for Kill Team: Dead Silence despite not being massively enthused beyond the Space Wolves.

The Kill Team box is a bit disappointing as a package: it’s basically just two kill teams and I’m not super excited about the Necrons for now. At discount though, I did place an order on the chance I might value the Necrons at some point in the future and have been iffy on the decision since. While writing this update today however, the store I ordered from wrote to say they didn’t actually have the allocation for my order and so were sending a refund.

I can’t really say I’m disappointed to miss out on this one in the end. I can pick up the Wolf Scouts team once it’s released standalone in another month or two.

Stalled progress

This heading will likely be a regular theme for these updates, but I’ve made no further progress on my second Howling Griffon — which I’d started in the last update. I’ve also got a light-armoured marine on a painting handle as I’m really keen to come up with an off-white scheme but can’t decide what to actually do.

A Warhammer Community article this week showing off different schemes for the afore-mentioned Wolf Scouts had a nice palette from Darcy Bono where they looked a lovely warm off-white Wolfspear colouring. Having watched her Youtube video, I think that’s more in the photography rather than the paint but I’m pondering how to recreate it and will then decide which model to try it on.

Next up?

I’ll focus on finishing up at least the current Red Gobbo mini first, then see what comes next. Some Wolfspear would be cool, while I’ve still got actual Space Wolves to finish up. Trying the silver birch scheme again on a Sylvaneth model appeals.

Who am I kidding though, I’ll end up doing something I haven’t even thought of yet, as usual!