It was nearly a decade ago that this project began, with the reissue of Space Hulk in a shiny new box with amazing new Terminators and Genestealers. I picked it up, swooned over it, and started painting. I made a few mistakes with this set. Firstly I painted a single Terminator as a Blood Angel, didn’t think much of my work, and painted the rest as Steel Guard. They look great as Steel Guard, but perhaps they might have been ever better as Blood Angels! Secondly, I was intimidated by the vast mass of claws and teeth and divided the ‘Stealers into two piles to make them more managable. The first were painted more-or-less at the time, the second have languished at the bottom of the leadpile ever since. Well, no more! I’ve been trying to clear my backlog by painting or selling on those things that have been waiting the longest for my attention…
I’ve been sitting on these for months waiting to have the time and energy to post. This horrible bunch are Fibrius Clustor and his warband. We’ve got Fibrius himself, which came from a Kickstarter, and is a lovely miniature. Fibrius could be a daemon prince, the magic using leader of a Plague Marine army, or a powerfully mutated human cultist well on the path to ascention. Then there is the big tube creature, from the same Kickstarter. These two are beautiful and were a joy to paint. Big Tube can be a Greater Daemon, a spawn, a daemon prince, or perhaps a Beast of Nurgle, depending on my feels. Up next we have some Oldhammer goodness, a Rhino and some original monopose plastic Plague Marines. The Rhino had already been converted towards Nurgle, I just tidied up the conversion a bit and repainted it. The Plague Marines are pretty limited but I made some conversions. In theory these are table legal in 10th edition, with a Plague Spitter and Plague Weapons modelled in addition to the missile launcher (Plague Launcher?) and flamer (Plague Flamer, i dunno). I think that they’ve come out alright considering how shonky the minis are. I hated them at the time because the Realm of Chaos branded Chaos Marines were so good and these are so basic. But they’re a step on the path that led us to where we are now, with amazing Plague Marines. The final bits of this warband I am not so happy with. Firstly, Newhammer Chaos Spawn, which were tricky to paint and unrewarding. In the end I did lots of layers of different shades to try and get a dusky bruised and rotting effect. This wasn’t especially successful. Finally a fansculpt Space Crusade style dreadnought. This was difficult to paint mostly because the sculpt is a bit of a stinker. It looked alright on screen but it doesn’t fit together well at all, and the detail is scrawled on with a point, and where it is sculpted on its pretty basic and has fingerprints in it and generally looks like a beginner’s piece. We all need to start somewhere, and I am happy to support enthusastic amateurs. It’s just hard to get a piece like that looking good, especially with my limited skills.
Yes, here we finish a project almost a decade in the making (and wait, have I been doing this blog for a decade… *checks* woah so I have!). Way back in 2015 I posted my first Battle Masters painted minis, a stand of Chaos Warriors. It was pretty basic. I wasn’t a very good painter (am still not going to win any awards but hey, you’ve got to have mediocrity to have excellence) and these are hard minis to paint well. Roll on nearly 10 years and I have finally finished painting the whole Battle Masters box. The last four stands are complete, and the armies are ready for battle! I will be taking photos of the armies laid out Ansell style sometime, but for now here are the final minis…. as I said before, these aren’t very easy minis to paint well. My biggest complaint regards the archers and crossbowmen – that the mold line runs down the middle of their faces, which are already poorly defined. Very hard to do anything there without losing all facial defination. The crossbowmen are sculpted so that where there should be a space between the bow and the body there is plastic, which is hard to paint in a way that hides it. The knights are a lot easier to paint in a way that flatters your painting skills just by adding some design to the barding. I was experimenting with different coloured undercoats on this lot, using paints from the various tiny pots of Airfix style paint. I then layered shades and contrast paints to see what I learned. I didn’t learn much but that’s part of learning! One final comment – I did pick up lots of BM Ogres as per that 2015 post, but never did anything with them! Might be about time to pull my finger out….
Up next we have a small force of Astartes, a combat patrol to use the current parlace, led by a Librarian, Brother Cheres Sprung. Brother Sprung is in disguise, wearing phobos armour and a cameoline cape, so he isn’t using the blue armour more normally associated with the librarius. Either that or some foolish chapter serf got confused during armour maintenance rites. Ahem…
So I pulled the tank out of my leadpile and decided to build a small force around it. I needed a leader, and at least one squad. Grabbing at random from appropriate piles gave me a librarian and a suppressor marine. This is all looking very newhammery so far. The patrol needed to be a bit bigger, so I selected a couple of minis at random from Space Marine Box A and Space Marine Box B, which gave me another squad and an apothecary.
Brother Sprung is ably assisted by Brother Ploug of the apothecarium. Clearly this is a mission where they are likely to need a field medic. The Repulsor (ably piloted by techmarine Brother Janni) is a bit big for just the two of them so a tactical squad is just the thing. Led by Sergeant Rucker, this tactical squad is about as oldschool as it gets. With a lascannon for tanks and a flamer for troops this lot are determined not to be overshadowed by their bigger brothers! Finally to support the Repulsor some suppressors. I am not sure about the physics of these guys, but flying men with giant autocannons is definitely pretty cool.
A while ago I noted that Avalon Hill’s revival of HeroQuest was on sale, and having heard that it is mechanically the same but with more modern production values, I thought this would be a cool thing to have. It’s pretty nice! I’ve painted all the minis from the box set now so here they are. these are quick and dirty, to get them on the board asap. The minis are pretty good, but not great. They look ace from a distance, but the moulding isn’t fantastic close up. So we get minis that need detailed work that you can’t give them. A similar problem to the original HeroQuest minis! Sorry about the bad lighting. I have also included a photo of them snugly stored in their tray, which is a great addition to the box and one that GW should think about! Also, its great that this game is priced for a family game rather than a collector game, and it been enough of a success that all the original expansions and some new ones have been added. I bet GW are kicking themselves for giving up the trademark! I’ve since picked up two of the new expansions so will be painting them one of these years!
The final miniatures from the Leviathan Starter set have been finished. The new monopose Terminators are very pretty, scaled well to earlier Terminators, and are nice and dynamic. Pleasure to paint, as Space Marines often are. It’s always nice to finish a box set, I feel a sense of achievement, and pride knowing that if someone came over for a game (if I had any friends in this city :rolleyes:) we could play using a fully painted army. Next up: the new HeroQuest…
The two Space Marine characters from the Leviathan Starter Set. Both lovely miniatures, but I hated the scenic base on the Captain. I tried to paint it to look like one of my Tyranids and it looks crap.
Up today we have the Tyranid half of the Leviathan Starter Set. Now Tyranids are not really my thing. They’re kind of boring. They’re not my least favourite 40k faction (waves to Necrons) but I don’t really care about big faceless monsters and hordes of identical smaller monsters. Although I do dig on Genestealer cults. GCs are amazing and are full of character. I don’t have a GC army, but I have the cults part of Deathwatch Overkill and a GC chemist guy and a GC rockcrusher so maybe I do. I also have the majority of the genestealers from Space Hulk painted up, so I could run all these together as a big army or something. That might be fun. Normally I paint genestealery things in the traditional oldhammer colourscheme of blue and (titillating) pink, but I wanted these painted quickly using contrast paints and basic techniques. I flicked through the starter guide and looked at the different Hive Fleets and it was Kronos that stood out for me. I liked the idea of them being Chaos-eaters, developed to function in areas of high psychic activity and specialising in fighting daemons and eating daemonworlds. The dark red-bright blue-brown colour I thought would make an interesting scheme to paint and was different to anything I had done before. Plus all the colours were available in contrast so I didn’t need to mix or shop around.
These were both fun and frustrating to paint. My lack of experience in the miniatures or scheme definitely showed, but I was aiming to get them done so that I could play the game out of the box, not win golden demon. I didn’t enjoy it so much that I will be staying in the Tyranid game, and I’m not especially pleased with the result, but just painting a big batch of miniatures and completing the box set is a victory in itself.
I picked up the new Noise Marine when it came out. I loved the old Noise Marine, had one the first time round, remember Warhammer records and was a tweenage metaller and all that stuff. Even though glam or hair metal wasn’t really my bag, I prefered Metallica and Iron Maiden until I discovered Nirvana and that changed everything… but yeah I love that the old noise marine was painted as a glam-metal type, and that maximalist silliness was definitely a certain type of Slaaneshi worshipper. I tried to paint the new one according the box art. This is not something I normally do because I have ideas in my head that I prefer to the box art. But the box art was full of ideas and tricky techniques and I wanted mine to pop as much as possible and didn’t trust my own aesthetic sensibilities to come up with something as good as theirs. According to the 8th ed. dataslate in the box, Noise Marines come in a squad, of which between 1 and All must have sonic blasters and 1 can have a blastmaster. I decreed the Noise Marine to have the sonic blaster, the Space Crusade marine has the blastmaster, and the rest have the standard boltguns. I thought that the 6th ed. Chosen and the SC chaos sergeant made good Slaaneshi marines, and I think the other one comes from the baddies for Blackstone Fortress.
I don’t expect to post again this year, so have a good holiday season and I hope 2024 brings you joy! Thanks for reading and looking at pictures of my averagely-painted minis, I appreciate you all!
I bought the Leviathan box set when it came out under the impression that it had a rulebook in. Normally I wouldn’t buy a set unless I collect (or want) both armies, but I must have been feeling weak and pliable over summer, perhaps the tottering piles of plastic and lead weren’t feeling overwhelming so I jumped onto a new project, as you do. Anyway its here now so lets do whats in front of us and pretend I dont already have hundreds of pounds of unpainted models sitting waiting to be painted… sorry Mortarian, sorry Ork Stompa, sorry Horus Heresy, sorry Nurgle and Chaos Space Marine Battleboxes etc etc.
This little squad inches my Steel Guard collection closer towards the 10,000 point marker. The pyreblasters are beautiful looking weapons, chunky and utilitarian. I have to admit that I like the ‘Primaris’ Marines. There’s just the right amount of detail, but the nice clean lines that you associated with Space Marines. I tried to make more of an effort than usual on the Sergeant’s face, because we’re always being told to emphasise the faces as that’s what people look at. I don’t think that it comes out in the pictures. Its all practice!
Doris Plunger's Lead Mess 