21 Thursday May 2026
Posted in Finished Work
I impulse bought a resin multipart drill vehicle on ebay a few years ago and was intending it to be Orked. However it was a bit too small for Orks in the end, so i decided that it was ideal for a scruffy bunch of industrial saboteurs who can enter the battlefield from the sewers. This was mostly about practice making the metal bits look old and worn, and I was reasonably pleased with the result. The Imperium of Many will emerge from underground to strike at its enemies!
03 Friday Apr 2026
Posted in Age of Darkness, Finished Work, horus heresy
Given that the new edition of Age of Darkness has been released and I do fancy painting some Saturnine Terminators, I felt that I ought to complete the previous box first. Of course, it looks like a new edition of 40k with Orks as the protagonists is coming out, so that might have to be bought. I never did complete the Blackstone Fortress set either… oh my. So yes, these little bunch represents the other half of the set that I painted recently, the Sons of Horus. I decided to paint them as Ultramarines because in the initial Horus Heresy Calth boardgame I painted the minis as Death Guard and Imperial Fists instead of Word Bearers and Ultramarines. I just did what I wanted, what an anarchist! But since then I have come to appreciate the painting cue aspect of boxes. Having never painted smurfs before, apart from some Space Crusade marines when I first started painting again, I fancied a go as these guys. I am reasonably pleased with what has come out. I don’t think the edge highlighting is very good, but as a quick and dirty paintjob for the enjoyment of doing blue power armour for a change, yeah, its ok. Now where am I going to get the money for Saturnine….
Oh, and the other week I took the opportunity to visit Warhammer World and look at the exhibitions. Were some very cool dioramas there, including some lovely early ones. Needed more early minis tbh, and it would have been amazing to have one of every miniature ever made, but its definitely worth £8.50! I didn’t find the hidden assassin though.
25 Wednesday Mar 2026
Posted in Chaos, Finished Work
Tags
Oh man, the Unmade. These are some of Citadel’s gnarliest miniatures. My missus loved them and kept talking about getting me some to paint, but we both missed ’em being quietly retired. GW should have Last Chance To Catch mail outs so we know when we’re about to lose stuff! Because of how awesome they are, second-hand prices are also a bit gnarly, so when we got the chance to grab a scrap lot at a decent price we leapt in. These Disability Icons don’t let lack of arms, legs, or faces get in the way of laying the smack down on their enemies. Of course, what we know and what they don’t, is that their local goddo, the Flayed Prince, is just a facet of Slaanesh. Whoopsy!
This was a fun bunch to paint and give some minor repairs and conversions too. What Necromunda is to 40k, Warcry is to AoS – a deep dive into the weirdnesses and grotesqueries of the universe. There are so many bits here to enjoy, from the flayed faces worn about their bodies, to the eye teeth in the helmets. The Blissful One (her on the stilts) is really one of the strangest miniatures I’ve ever owned. Fantastic! My favourite though is the lad pushing his helmet back to give his enemy a view of his flayed face!
10 Tuesday Mar 2026
Posted in Finished Work, Orks, terrain
One of the things I love about Space Gits is the terrain. A tellyportaloo is such an obvious joke that I am surprised we never saw it before. In the game it zaps your gitz to a random part of the board. It was a pleasure to paint, and I channelled the spirit of every shitty festival portaloo I have ever been in. Random aside: when I was young it was considered de rigeur at certain festivals on Sunday nights for the portaloos to become fair game. This meant that anyone using one, especially the end ones, was at risk of having the toilet pulled over with you in it. You might find yourself trapped in a tumbled toilet with only the spilt jobbies for company. Whilst it never happened to anyone I know, I still wish terrible karmic retribution on anyone who did that to another person. I imagine Orktown to be a kind of eternal Reading-Festival-Circa-2000, with random riots breaking out all over the place and stuff burning and other people just doing their thing.
The vending machines also have an in-game function, for getting you random gear for your gits. These were a bit harder to paint, I struggled to get a working scheme, but fortunately its Orks so yeah.
12 Sunday Oct 2025
Posted in Chaos, Finished Work
…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!
08 Monday Sep 2025
Posted in epic, Finished Work
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!
04 Thursday Sep 2025
Posted in Chaos, Finished Work
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.
30 Saturday Aug 2025
Posted in Age of Darkness, Finished Work, Space Marines
Tags
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!
15 Saturday Feb 2025
Posted in Age of Darkness, Finished Work, horus heresy, Space Marines
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.
10 Tuesday Dec 2024
Posted in Finished Work, Space Marines
Tags
40k, citadel miniatures, invader atv, land speeder, newhammer, outriders, sci-fi, space marine bikers, space marines, Steel Guard, warhammer, warhammer-40k, WH40K
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***
Doris Plunger's Lead Mess 