Something stompy this way comes…

12 Sunday Oct 2025

Posted by in Chaos, Finished Work

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…and its not green!

Up next is a conversion that I’m pretty pleased with. It’s a chaos giant that has taken a form surprisingly unseen in the Warhammer Worlds since the very first days… an ettin! Chuckles here was bought originally as an unfinished conversion very cheap on ebay, which rolled around my To Paint pile for a while, fell apart, became part of my bits box, and finally, years later, re-emerged in a whole new form. Originally the heads were rubbish as they didn’t have a neck at all. Remodelling the neck so that one of them had a long stretchy neck and the other had no neck created a greater sense of movement and difference. He was missing a foot so I found something weird and fleshy, and have tried to give the impression of amorphousness – this guy is in the process of changing. A tail was essential, because chaos. Finally I rebuilt the arms, using some spares from the Cygor kit. He seems like he’s moving fast and pulling up stones as he comes. I tried to paint his skin tones as close to my own as I could! I wanted to give him a farmers’ tan, but couldnt work out how to do it. His face is scarred, as is his unmutated foot – it seemed obvious that his foot would attract a lot of sword hits. Places where the previous conversion left encrustations of green stuff I have tried to turn into scar tissue. He’s been hit with a flame weapon at some point. I am very pleased with how this turned out. I hope you like it!

in which we hide as quickly as possible.

Steel Guard Razorback ‘Peace Is Tyranny’

16 Tuesday Sep 2025

Posted by in Space Marines

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With this wee fella another landmark is complete – I have worked my way through a pile of broken old vehicles, repairing, restoring, and returning them to life. I have no idea if Razorbacks are legal in 10th edition – the last time I played a game was 8th ffs (if you’re in South Wales and want to play a game of 40k, any edition, and don’t mind that I am a complete novice and that we have to take some infection control precautions, I would be up for a game, drop me a message). But in 8th Razorbacks were a thing, even if no-one ever played them. One opponent was so amazed by my antique models he called all his friends over to examine these weird things! He tabled me in 3 moves with his Dark Angels and was terribly embarrassed about it, but really it was an experience and style of playing mismatch. I had very little, and he was a tournament player. No shade to the guy, as long as he’s enjoying himself, there are no wrong ways to play as long as you’re not cheating or being a shitty opponent. I think I enjoyed the game more than he did though, it was no challenge for him to table me and he wouldn’t have learned anything along the way. I learned a lot and had fun and saw some cool models and got to show off my minis from a time when the grim far future seemed so very far away.

Oh yeah, so this Razorback has been converted a bit. It started life as a Looted Rhino, rebuilt and orkified. I prised off the most orky bits, but kept the basic frame as the previous owner had left it. I thought it looked quite good and different, whilst still being acceptably Imperiumy. The Razorback turret was all in one piece in my bitz box, fit into the hole in the roof, and looked alright. A bit of filling and plasticard, a couple of bits of copper wire, and pow! All that was left was to paint it. This one is painted as a first company support vehicle. I named it ‘Peace Is Tyranny’ because I have been thinking about Megatron a lot today! Enjoy!

Chaos Warlord Titan of the Legio Audax

08 Monday Sep 2025

Posted by in epic, Finished Work

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The title says it all really. This Warlord was kicking around in my pile of potential and I thought I had better paint it up. Picking a colourscheme randomly from lexicanum’s list of traitor titan legions (it had to be a traitor because, well, it is a traitor, just look at it). I think this is the third old Warlord I’ve painted. One of the most fun things about painting things in different scales IMO is that you can use the bases to tell stories in ways that are much harder in 28/32mm. So here we have a brave knight facing off against some nasty plaguebearers… My favourite bit about this was adding the whipping tentacle coming out of one of its weapon mounts. I tried to make it look fleshy!

Rhino Restoration: Death Guard transport

04 Thursday Sep 2025

Posted by in Chaos, Finished Work

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This is it! We’re getting close now. Yes, I’ve nearly cleared a backlog of restoration projects. With this rhino there is only one more oldhammer vehicle sitting in parts in the small wooden trunk that hides my shame. Once a variety of badly converted Ork vehicles, these have gradually become, well, other badly converted Ork vehicles, a chaos warshrine, and another Death Guard rhino! No more will I buy damaged rhinos and pile them up waiting for inspiration to strike! Actually I probably will, although the price of damaged rhinos these days is incredible. I maybe should have just sold all these and called it a day. But that isn’t the oldhammer way! So you may remember I did some Death Guard last year and included a rhino. That was fun, so I did another! I used lots of glazes and layers of browns and greens and filth and rust. This was kind of necessary – the previous paint job didn’t want to come off in places, and the plastic was affected by the paint remover in others. All very Nurgly. Happy with my work here.

Honoured Brother Tabascus, Ultramarines Legion Dreadnought

30 Saturday Aug 2025

Posted by in Age of Darkness, Finished Work, Space Marines

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We return today to the Age of Darkness, and my first batting on the other half of the (previous now) Age of Darkness boxset. The new one has now been released, and I am forbidding myself from buying it until I have completed the last one. Well, I’ve done the Sons of Horus and now I am doing the Ultramarines. But Doris, I hear you cry, the boxset was Sons vs Imperial Fists, why are you doing Ultramarines. Well, there is a slightly boring story there that I will tell you because that’s the sort of guy I am. The first Horus Heresy boxset was Betrayal At Calth many years ago. I bought it, but lacking interest in Ultramarines vs Word Bearers I painted them as Imperial Fists vs Death Guard. This time the Fists are getting a proper go, but I have some 30k Fists already, why not do something new? So I am, and as Fists got to be Ultramarines last time round, Ultramarines get to be Fists this time.

We start with a Dreadnought. I had fun building this guy, I wanted to see how much motion and action I could get in. Admittedly its not very Ultramarine, but this is one angry dread, he’s a pretty spicy guy as his honour-name suggests. So he has a tendency not to act as a mobile artillery piece but get in close and stompy. I don’t know what the chap on the base did to get stomped so hard, perhaps he is a cultist of some sort. Tabascus has been built so that most combos of weapons are possible, which is good, as too often I glue stuff in place and then wish I hadn’t!

The rest of Tabascus’ force will show up eventually, I am sure!

The Man Comes Around…

21 Wednesday May 2025

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Having previously featured Bumblebee and Megatron, my brush turns eventually to the man himself, Optimus Prime. A fantastically drawn hero, Optimus is, like God and Jesus, all things to all men. Thus he can be an inspiration to me and to this guy, as morally and politically opposed as it is possible to be. Of course, there are many Optimus Primes, often within the same part of the franchise. G1 Marvel UK Optimus and G1 cartoon Optimus are quite different, and IDWverse Optimus is different again. The Optimus of the Bayverse movies is a brutal killer wrapped in an American flag, whilst Aligned Optimus is literally a god of community and unity!

This Optimus is the G1 cartoon version, painted slightly off schema. Instead of using the cartoon colours I have used an actual original Optimus toy as my reference material. This only really means that the silver bits are silver rather than grey, and that his eyes and mouthplate are yellow and silver rather than light blue and grey respectively. I don’t like the ethno-implications of Optimus’s blue eyes in the cartoon (and don’t get me started on Spike and Carly and Daniel and their little aryan nation).

Uh yeah so Optimus Prime. I’ve tried to paint some animation-style light reflection on the windows, with middling success. Enjoy!

Inquisitorial Sisters of Battle army

17 Saturday May 2025

Posted by in Inquisitors, Sisters of Battle

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I have often thought about a Sisters of Battle army. They’re delightfully gothique, and have some wonderful miniatures. I would have thought that the whole sexy goth nun thing was kind of a generational trope, maybe beardlings don’t really have that whole late night telly – Bizarre mag – plastic trousers cultural foolishness axis. Perhaps these days Sisters of Battle stand for nothing more or less than Ladies Who Purge The Heretic. So anyway, when Imperium magazine had some Sisters that seemed like a good time to jump in. I bought possibly too many, but they were bargainishous. So this is the first round of Sisters, to see how they feel. I think the future ones will be converted, possibly heavily to make them chaotic. Meanwhile these have been both fun and frustrating to paint. Fun, because I tried some new techniques, frustrating because there is SOOOO much kibble and detail on these guys that just don’t really fit with my painting style [skills].

My big thing with these guys was an attempt at pearlescent armour. I got it wrong, but next time will be better. I chose Wraithbone as my undercoat and Flayed One Flesh mixed with Irridescent Medium for the armour base coat. Next time I will use Pallid Wych Flesh and more Irridescent Medium and then glaze with pure medium over the top and see if that looks more like pearl. Or try another of the colour shift paints I bought a couple of years back – I used one on the Chaos Knight and liked it a lot. Either way this was an acceptable first attempt but you can’t tell really. No complaints though.

The Inquisitor was really an excuse to paint a mini I liked. This is Athera, The Blade Of The Matriarch, who is an Escher Gang character from Necromunda. A little digression about Necromunda. Necromunda is where so much of the cool shit is happening right now. Almost every mini released for Necromunda adds new colour and character to 40k. It’s all full of amazing levels of characterisation and drama – GW have taken the opportunity to zoom in on a single planet out of a million (or more) and fill it full of grotesqueries, monsters, and humans trying to survive in a psychotic fascist death machine. I could buy everything because its all amazing! And I don’t even have the boxed game! For no good reason. One day…

Finally, there are some female space soldiers from god knows where. Drew Williams, I think. I thought that these would fit in fill up some gaps as well as creating a new heavy weapons squad for a bit of long range oomph.

Descend into the Age of Darkness with the Sons of Horus

15 Saturday Feb 2025

Posted by in Age of Darkness, Finished Work, horus heresy, Space Marines

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The other year I realised that I had a build up of GW vouchers and so I jumped on Age of Darkness when it was released. This is a good example of Getting Over Excited Because Other People Are and Not Reading The Instructions Properly. Not that its a bad set or owt, this is a great set. The minis are fantastic and for GW it’s a decent price (interjection: have you seen Rogue Hobbies’ video on Gundam? I am not a GW hater but goddam when the relative prices of plastic sprues are compared it makes me piss blood. I cheered myself up by reminding me that I recommended that my father-in-law buy GW shares, and he is well pleased with the return and regularly praises my stock tipping skills so what comes around goes around and all that). No, not that at all, but because I don’t especially collect Horus Heresy minis and already have a massive pile of shame dreams. In point of fact, I actually thought that a) this was a game in itself, like Betrayal At Calth; and b) that this would be a limited edition boxset like Betrayal etc. Whoops!

When I did Betrayal At Calth I decided, foolishly in hindsight, to paint the marines as Imperial Fists vs Death Guard. This was because Imperial Fists are great and Ultramarines are dull, and Death Guard are super interesting and never get any love. Since then of course Death Guard have become their own Thing and I have loads of them and they’re a bit boring (in an entertainingly squishy sort of way). It was clear that Sons of Horus vs Imperial Fists was fun, but I’ve already painted a load of 30K Fists, did I want to do more? Well, I will worry about that later, I’ve never painted any Sons of Horus and considering I’ve got some Lupercal Green and Sons Of Horus Green sitting here crying out for use, let’s start there.

What can I say about these? I really enjoyed painting them and I think they came out well. I am very pleased with the Spartan because tanks are so hard to paint well if you’re a hamfisted spanner like me. The marines look good. I think I should have added some battle damage and dust to the marines, but its not a problem really. I am also pleased with the freehand Sons logos. All in all, a success.

Space Marine Motorised Attack Team

10 Tuesday Dec 2024

Posted by in Finished Work, Space Marines

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Another batch of Space Marines finished. These are mostly newhammer with some older bikers from the Dark Millenium (or was it the Dark Imperium? fucked if I can remember) boxset and some really battered Land Speeders from my junk pile. A solid slab of grey and red moving swiftly and angrily towards aliens and heretics! The hardest part of this lot was working out the points values at 10th edition! I had to fudge it, there is no way of doing it! You might notice a lot of Dark Angel kibble on these guys.. well this is the fluff for it. Steel Guard aspirants are trained according to the perceived disciplines of all the (loyalist) primarchs. Within the chapter each of the primarchs are honoured in the formal name of one of the companies (the first company is The Emperor’s Company, whilst the second company are The Lion’s Company. Whilst all Steel Guard are expected to be equally proficient in all aspects of battle, some are more attracted to certain styles of battle or philosophies. They are able to express this through trinkets, gewgaws, and honour marks that are associated with those primarchs or their legion. Thus Ancient Ypsima who leads this group is clearly a devotee of Lion’el Johnson (they so should have retconned that name at some point) and has probably picked for the job a few others who feel similar.

I’m pleased with these. Should have used a different green for the company colours, should have used a different colour for the bases as grey on different-grey doesn’t work. I experimented with a different way of painted the red flashes on the backpack, which works for the newmarines but not the old ones. I have decided that any future newmarines will have the new style of red but the oldmarines will stay the same. Steel Guard are flexible enough to be able to handle different paint jobs on different styles of armour… this might alarm the inquisition, who have already had to deal with this chapter’s flexibility when ***REDACTED***PLEASE REPORT TO THE NEAREST INQUISITOR FOR RE-EDUCATION***

The Dark Mechanicum strikes! Tech-Geist haunt.

07 Saturday Dec 2024

Posted by in Chaos, Finished Work, Uncategorized

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From the moment the Nighthaunt range began I was struck by the urge to make weird Mechanicum chaos creatures out of them. I picked up a load of Nighthaunt models in one of the Hachette partworks series, which I have come to think of as GW sales, and then I left them for years! Eyes bigger than my stomach, as my dear old Mum would have said, etc etc. Anyhoo, throw in some spares from various Skitarii and other bits from my bitzbox and here we go… I tried to use a blanchistu set of tones too, just to pretend like I knew what I was doing….