Hail The Fallen - The New Year Approaches

In 2025, I have painted more miniatures in one year than I have ever painted before. Today I capped the year off by painting two of the same model - Erika Chappell's Scrungaloid 01, "Tag and Release". The Scrungaloids are quite clearly variations of the Rogue Trader Space Marines from the RTB01 set and the associated metal models produced around the same time, and as a result I looked to Rogue Trader for the colour schemes. Obviously the Crimson Fists needed representation, and then I wanted a nicely wild option for the other one, and what better than the original red-and-yellow dazzle pattern Minotaurs from the famous spread of Chapters represented in the Badab War?

Brother Greg, of the Crimson Fists Red Hand, and Brother Pax of the Minotaurs Angry Bull-Men (both legally distinct names and concepts thank you). I used different bases to see which looked better; I think the larger base does actually suit Marines more than the 25mm one, but the 25mm one is the proper period base for the 1980s and well into the 2000s too for that matter

I leant into the graffiti bit from Rogue Trader - both Greg and Pax have various things written on their armour; Pax has LUV and HATE on his kneepads, and Greg has KIL on his right greave and DIE on his left hand

You can't expect a Space Marine Scrungaloid to know how to spell

You get a good view of Pax's dazzle scheme here. I did it a lot more crudely and simply than the last time I painted this scheme, just in case I'm unhinged enough to turn this one mini into a proper force...

This model is a really really good interpretation of the 1980s beakie Marines, and I'm very excited to see what else Erika's made for Scrungaloids: The Lowest Form Of Life

So with that, my painting spree for 2025 has come to an end. Over the course of the year I painted over 500 models for a total of 548 Painting Points! On average I completed one and a half Painting Points' worth of models a day, so my goal for 2026 is to equal or beat that. Coincidentally, Games Workshop has a promotion on where they're trying to get a million miniatures painted in 2026, and if you paint 100 between Janury 17th and May 9th you get a whole bunch of swag, which I'm very keen to get my paws on! Obviously that has to be 100 Games Workshop miniatures, but I do in fact have at least 100 of those unpainted kicking around... and I can buy some new ones as well, mwahahaha.

Other than "paint 100 GW models between Jan 17th and May 9th" my wargaming goals for 2026 are as follows:

• Open and run the LUNAR Club in Llangefni
• Run a Mordheim campaign at LUNAR Club
• Finish the Maiden Guard and participate in the Old World Escalation League with them
• Complete (or continue) the magnetisation and storage of my collection
• Finish at least the ruined buildings from my 40K terrain collection

I wonder how successful I'll be!

Painting Points:
Today: 2
This Week: 2
2025: 548

 

All Systems Nominal

Today I managed to finish the Falcon Guard mechs and, to all intents and purposes, the Canopians as well. On top of that I got some paint onto a couple of the figures I've recently 3D printed, and managed to get the Alacorns and Shreks done for C, too. A pretty productive day, really:

L-R: Warhawk (Cluster Command Star), Vulture (Alpha Trinary Fire Star), Vulture (Bravo Trinary). Note the anti-glare panel in front of the Warhawk's cockpit glass

Just visible on the "cheeks" of the mechs here is the Falcon Guard emblem of a Jade Falcon in flight with a sword clutched in its talons

All three of these omnimechs are in their "prime" configurations - four ER PPCs and an LRM-10 for the Warhawk, two LRM-20s, two large lasers and two medium lasers each for the Vultures

From this angle you can see the Gamma Galaxy emblem - a Jade Falcon flying over a moon - on the "cheeks" of the mechs

After getting those mechs squared away, I started in on the Canopians:

2nd Company, 2/1 CANCUIR - Mech numbers 49 to 60

An Archer from the Company's command lance, with the chassis number 52, and a Wasp from the scout lance with the chassis number 60 - the Wasp is therefore the last 'mech in the company

Like the larger Phoenix Hawks, the Wasp's medium laser can be jettisoned in an emergency

Although originally designed and built by Kuritan factories for Kuritan units, the -2K variant of the Archer is an easy conversion popular with many across the Inner Sphere

The size difference between the 20 ton Wasp and the 70 ton Archer is very noticeable here

 Finally I picked up my 3D printed version of Everqueen Alarielle of Ulthuan, and the 3D printed version of an Imperial Army trooper, and slapped some paint on: a basic undercoat for the Queen (soon to be a Level 4 mage) and some base coats for the Imperial Army trooper. I reckon I'll paint a small force of Rogue Trader style Imperial Army figures as a PDF unit to populate my desert world for 40K games. Very basic weapons, basic vehicles, essentially there as a speed bump against the enemies that they'll face. As for the Everqueen, well, I have plans for her:

I have a horrible feeling that I've printed Alarielle a little too small. I'll measure some High Elves tomorrow and see if she's out of scale - she's correct for 28mm, but are GW High Elves from 4th Edition 28mm or 30mm... as for the Imperial Army woman, despite casting off her body armour she retains the identity disc which will eventually denote squad, platoon, and company

Tomorrow I'm going to make some repairs to the misprinted GEV infantry I printed for C, and then package it all up and post it to him. About 54p per piece, which is pretty good investment to be fair. Other than that I'm hoping to have some progress on the Everqueen as well as finish off the PDF trooper.

Painting Points:
Today: 5
This Week: 5
2025: 546 

Printing And Painting

Yesterday for a variety of reasons I totally failed to get a blog post up, but I did do some painting. Nothing huge, but I got the Warhawk and Vultures most of the way finished, and put a coat of Iyanden Yellow contrast on the Wasp and Archer for the Canopians. Today was spent printing (and failing to print) things for myself, P, and my friend C:

Falcon Guard heavies (and an assault), Canopian light and heavy

The Falcon Guard stuff basically needs the canopies and green accent panels highlighting, the details doing on the markings, and then a bunch of dirtying down. The Canopian mechs are probably halfway done, I basically need to do the black bits, any silver bits, and then dirty down. If I actually sit down to paint tomorrow I can crank all five of those mechs out no bother.

In terms of things I printed today... well that's a bit of a mix; some of it was successful and some of it wasn't. I've releveled the print bed and cleaned the FEP, so hopefully the Battletech scale tanks I'm printing for C will be done overnight without issue. 

A terrible photo of an Elf Queen and an Imperial Army trooper

Don't look at the rotor blades... these are Warrior VTOLs from Battletech for C

 What can that High Elf be for, with her big 25mm base? You'll have to wait and see!

Call Forth The Honoured Dead!

After a couple of days of light painting (blog updates scuppered by technical issues), I have completed the Ork Lobba and started the process of changing the red on the chaos cultists' clothes to yellow. I also did some of the other bits on the cultists. That was Wednesday's work, anyway, and Thursday saw P and I go to the little Empire Cinema in Caergybi to watch Wicked For Good which was a decent film, but didn't quite stick the landing.
 

A very unassuming little artillery piece, but it was fun to do and nice and simple as well

 

Not the best of photos, but you can see the yellow on the cultists at the back, and if you look at the wrists on some of them you can see the cloth wraps have been blocked out

 

Tomorrow I have my first game of Warhammer Fantasy: The Old World arranged, with a chap called N at the university of Bangor's wargames club. Some of you may remember my Tomb Kings army which, it turns out, is pretty much spot on 2,000 points even without magic items. I'm going to take it over to Bangor tomorrow morning and watch it get stamped into bone dust by Chaos Warriors, but I'll have fun and maybe even remember some of the rules (I won't)!

On the Tomb King front, I also still have the bone dragon from the starter set that I picked up when The Old World was released, and although I can't find the base for it at the moment (no idea where it's gone) I did put it together and kitbash a Tomb King to sit on top of it from parts of the Tomb King, High Priest, and a piece off a random Vampire Counts sprue I had floating around in my bits box:

Not the best photo, but you can see the Tomb King sitting on his saddle and the sheer size of the dragon's skeletal form

I envisage this particular mummified corpse-regent to be the consort of the Queen of the Red City, who goes off and performs various heroic acts to gain her favour while she stands with her Scarab Guard in the centre of the army. He needs a sensible name, but the dragon will probably end up called something like "Biscuit" but in ancient Egyptian. That's "𓇋𓀁𓅡𓏤𓈙𓏏𓅱𓈀" ("jbšt") or "𓊪𓅮𓄿𓈎𓆁𓈀" ("p3q")if you're interested. Anyway, once I find (or get) a base for Biscuit and his rider, I'll get them and the Casket of Souls painted up.

Painting Points: Today: 0 This Week: 1 2025: 499

The Dark Powers Call Once Again

I have a small selection of stuff inside the house that's in the painting queue, and having finished the Firestarters and the grots the other day I had to have a think about what I felt like picking up today. In the end I decided to get moving on the Chaos Undivided cultists for my Iron Warriors force. Made up of the quite recent GW Chaos Cultist models (which are, I think, inspired by the late 1990s metal cultists sculpted by Paul Muller which were only for sale for a very short period of time), this group of 20 has a leader, a flamer, and a heavy stubber. It basically has two units within itself - a group of 10 with close quarters weapons, and a group of 10 with longer ranged weapons - enabling it to either sit on an objective or move up and get slaughtered by the opponent so that the actual Iron Warriors can do something more useful.

They may look like not much has been done, but there's four colours on those models at the moment!

Colour wise, tonight I just added the brown for their leather - belts, straps, and boots - and tomorrow if I have time (P and I are going to the cinema) I'll do some work on their various cloth wraps and pick out any other metalwork that's been missed previously. I'm not completely sold on the red and black colours, as it seems a bit Khornate rather than Undivided. I might swap the red for another colour - grey perhaps, or maybe yellow. I should quite quickly be at the point where I can slap a wash over them and move towards completion, but I'm torn between an overall Agrax wash or a mix of Agrax on the fabrics and Nuln Oil on the metalwork. 

Oh, and I also popped a Nuln Oil wash on the Ork Lobba that I have kicking around which can stand in for a Kannon in a pinch, theoretically giving me four Kannons (or two Kannons and two Lobbas, if I use the Kannon without a gunshield as a Lobba...) for the Ork Waagh. Again, that should be dry enough tomorrow for me to finish off with a Leadbelcher drybrush and some black, white, and red detailing. 

I was meant to have a game of Necromunda tonight at the inaugural meeting of the LUNAR* Club, but alas, I didn't feel well enough to go, so a quiet night in was had instead. I still have the Old World game at the weekend and next week I'll definitely be off to LUNAR on Tuesday, if I can find someone to have a game with.

* Llangefni United Nerds And Roleplayers **

** I'm the only one who calls it that... so far.  

The Arsonists

For my own little Battletech mercenary company, MacLeod's Light Horse, I gave each lance a name. So for example the 3rd (Striker) Lance of the First (Heavy) Battlemech Company is called the Stormbringers. It only seemed right to name the 3rd Lance of the Third (Light) Battlemech Company, comprised entirely of Firestarter FS9-S variants The Arsonists. It helps that the callsigns for the pilots are also fire related:

Still trying to figure out the colour balance for the photos, but this is better than the unedited image

L-R: FS9-S or -S2, FS9-S1 or -S3, FS9-S or -S2; FS9-S1 or -S3 (depending on time period)

Jump jets are big, clever, and funny

I did want to do some more freehand on the mechs but I couldn't find any good places for teeth or eyes

As well as finishing the Firestarter lance, I also finished the Gretchin, and dug out the rest of my Ork army's grots. Or most of them, at least. I miscounted, or misremembered, how many grots I actually had, and I think I'm still one short of a full group of 30. But I do now have a full battery of three Kannons:

Four grot krew, and a kannon - nothing special, but great sculpts full of character

The kannon itself has a lot of detail on it which works really well with drybrushing

Da Big Gunz - three kannons and krew. I actually had another grot that works for krew, so there's three grots per kannon, which should help keep them firing a little longer

 
Quite a productive day, really. I also dug out my Necromunda stuff, because I have a game booked for this coming Tuesday at the Llangefni wargames club's inaugural club night - Enforcers versus my Redemptionists! That should be interesting - I have a lot of stuff to set people on fire with, and a little bit of ranged punch, but the Enforcers have a lot of gucci kit... like armour. Still, faith in the divine Emperor will see me through I'm sure.

Painting Points:
Today: 9
This Week: 9
2025: 498

Green, Green, Nothing But Green

Well, not quite. A fair bit of brown, and some gunmetal, and a bit of a sort of canvas or cream, too, but the title was too good to pass up. P has gone to Birmingham to see friends and play D&D, and T was supposed to be visiting this weekend but a signal failure at Stafford last night sank that plan sadly. So today I did a lot of various things around the house and then sat down after dinner to do some painting. 

It might not be only green, but it is quite a lot of green

The first thing I did was drybrush the Firestarters with Waaagh Flesh, before giving them all an overall wash of Biel-Tan Green. I think (I think) that the next step is another drybrush of Waagh Flesh and then a lighter drybrush of Loren Forest, but we'll see. While the Biel-Tan Green was drying, I got out the Gretchin gun crews and the two grots who, when done, will bring my battery of Big Gunz up to three Kannons and my mob of grots up to 30 grots. 31 if you include the Special Forces Grot from the new Kommandos box GW put out for Kill Team.

The grots are great - Brian Nelson sculpts, I think - and they ooze character. I particularly like the grot covering its ears while the other one yells at it. Their kannon is somewhere in one of the boxes of minis in the garage, unless I'm misremembering and they in fact came with a lobba. I'll have to check the picture from the sales post I bought them from.

I'm going to try and get the Firestarters and the grots all done tomorrow. There isn't really a great deal left to do on either, really, so once the washes (Biel-Tan and Agrax Earthshade) dry I should be able to get all of them sorted without too much issue.

Back To (Black) Battlemechs

I'm sure that's a reference to something. Anyway, today while at work I put together the Armiger Warglaive Knight Titan that I had the parts for. I also realised that the reason I can't find the torso element for the second one is because it was used as part of a conversion that P did where they took the legs off a Dunecrawler and the body and arms off an Armiger and put the two together. So I may do the reverse and stick the turret off a Dunecrawler onto the legs of an Armiger and Chaos-ify it. Or Ork-ify it. Who knows. I need a 100mm diameter base first either way.

This cheerful chap will end up in the colours of House MacLeod, my Imperial Knight House, and fight alongside the two Helverins I already have

After work I did a little bit of very simple stuff: first I undercoated the four 3D printed Firestarters I have for my Battletech mercenary outfit, MacLeod's Light Horse, and then I finished the bases on the four Light Horse mechs I've already got painted:

The lighting is poor so these look very much like silhouettes here but they are, in fact, four Firestarter variants: two -S2 and two -S3 machines, making the lance a formidable scouting and light strike asset

Taken in the light box. I tweaked the photo afterwards to enhance the details: this is pretty close to how they look in real life. The rear of each base has the mech type on it (a Stalker, Black Knight, and two Orions) rather than the specific variant designation (STK-3HM, BL-6-KNT, ONI-KMs) mainly because I haven't yet settled on exactly what designation to use for my custom machines...

Tomorrow I'm going to see if I can get the Firestarters done. I was supposed to be popping along to the proposed location of the Llangefni wargames and roleplaying club, but alas I have an appointment that clashes that I can't miss, so saying hello to those people will have to wait.

Who Needs Arms Anyway

Well, today I finished the organising of the garage - mostly - and it is now a usable space for 3D printing and storage. While doing so I dug up some partly-built stuff that P didn't want any more, so I put together a Chaos Knight Desecrator (I think - big ol' laser cannon, giant power claw thing, apparently that's a Desecrator) and am looking at a bunch of sprues that I think will produce an Armiger with melta cannon and chainsword. Maybe two of them if I can find some of the parts that appear to be missing. 

The workspace - on the left, armies and unfinished kits and unpainted models, on the right, boxes of sprues and scenery. In the middle, the washing station and Mars 2 Pro 3D printer, still in the little plastic bags that they came in

 

I made a bit of an error building this. I didn't realise that the arms won't fit on once the should plates have been attached, and so now in order to get the arms on I will need to cut away the attachment lugs on the torso and glue the arms in place. Mildly annoying but not the end of the world. I also attached a spare Mortifier onto the upper carapace for a bit of Evil Flair

I also put some bases on the painted mercenary battlemechs I did a while ago, although they do need flocking and the like. At the moment they're just bare black plastic:

It's a terrible photo but it doesn't really matter, these four mechs are now the proud owners of bases and a better photo will appear tomorrow after I've properly completed the bases with flock and infoplate details such as STK-MAC and so on

Actually a very productive day. I have a little list of stuff to get before I can get printing properly (not least of which is resin!) so I'll be ordering that once I've got a little more disposable income and then it'll be off to the races. Or at least the trial-and-error stuff before the races. 

Organising And Experimenting

Another day of no painting, but instead I did a lot of unpacking and rearranging and organising within the garage. Now all the Really Useful Boxes full of magnetised (and un-magnetised...) toy soldiers are safely in there, along with all the other things. They need to be sorted out and tidied away, of course, but by the end of tomorrow I should be able to set up the 3D printer and washing station, ready for ordering some resin and any other bits I need so that I can get printing by next weekend. Exciting stuff! I have also arranged a wargame with a local chap over in Bangor on the 29th, and there seems to be some movement towards the development of a local wargames club in Llangefni, which is a nearby town. So who knows; maybe soon I'll actually be able to get some games in again.

 

It's a lot more cluttered now, but it'll become tidier by the end of the day. The RUB towers will eventually expend even more to provide homes for armies like my Old World Tomb Kings, my Raptors Space Marines, my Iron Warriors, Orks, and so on. A project for the upcoming few months I think

I also found the lightbox that my partner P got me for my birthday last month, and I finally had time to get it out and have a play around with it. First impressions - a great little bit of kit! It's a 30cm cube with lots of backdrops out of the box and a pretty self-explanatory process to use it. I think it'll take a little effort to really get used to, but it's already producing some quite nice snaps just with my mobile phone's camera:

This is the Dire Wolf from my Falcon Guards Cluster Command Star, and you can see how crisp the photo is and the colours actually look much like they do in real life

The way the lighting illuminates the panelling and the details on the rear is really good too!

Ad-hoc mixed Star of light omni-mechs and Elementals

After playing around with the Falcon Guards, I dug out one of the oldest Games Workshop models from my collection - not in terms of date of manufacture, but in terms of its relationship to me and my time as a customer of GW and a painter, collector, and gamer of their stuff:

 

Battle Brother Major of the Ultramarines! Purchased for me by my Dad in late summer or early Autumn of 1996 from Games Workshop Oxford and painted by me with a mix of Humbrol Enamels (the blue and orange) and Citadel Acrylics (everything else)

Yes, the Chapter badge and Tactical marking are on the wrong shoulder pads, and I think the skull on the knee should actually be in the yellow circle on the greave...

The power pack has black vents, but I can't remember why now

I was nine, nearly 10, when I painted this model and the rest of the Tactical Squad that he came with. I'm not entirely sure where the rest of them are these days

And that's that for today - tomorrow, more organising, and maybe some painting. I found my various Blood Bowl teams today, and part of me is tempted to finally finish my High Elf / Pro Elf team, the Tor Sethain Thunderbolts, but I do have some Grots to paint too, so we'll see what I end up doing.

 

Exploring The Surrounds

While I didn't do any actual modelling yesterday, I did make good headway on the project of turning the garage into a useable storage and workshop area; mostly by reassembling the second of two large IKEA bookshelves and starting the process of shoving about 2,000 books into them, freeing up floor space from many (many) banana boxes that had contained them previously. This will allow me - with a bit of reorganising - to not only make space for the 3D printer setup, but to store my various figures either in their long-term homes of Really Useful Boxes, or shorter term homes such as carboard boxes. 

Today, P, T (my son), and I went to Bangor to have a nose around before T had to get the train back to the Midlands. After a bit of excitement where we discovered that what seemed to be a road was, in fact, a dead end at the bottom of an extremely steep hill, involving a badly overheated clutch and a quick call to the fire brigade, we found the nearby Hobby Shop. No, that's actually what it's called - The Hobby Shop. It's currently most active on Facebook, but having had a look around it's not a bad little place at all. A good selection of paints, some board games, some Airfix, Tamiya, and the like, a bunch of Games Workshop stuff (Blood Bowl, Necromunda, Age of Sigmar, 40K, a little The Old World, a reasonable selection of Black Library), some Warlord Games stuff (almost all Bolt Action), Star Wars Legion, a range of CCGs and some various other things as well. I got some paints to replace some of the 30-odd that had been killed off by the summer heat earlier this year, and a bottle of Mig Ammo Extra Thin poly cement.

That poly cement came in handy for what I got up to when I got home, which was to put together a couple of Chaos Knight War Hounds. These are essentially the exact opposite of my loyalist Armiger Warglaives, but with a more aggressive loadout. While my Warglaives have nothing but autocannons, these Chaos machines have a mix of close combat weapons and chunky guns. I suspect these will, eventually, form a small allied contingent to go with a vaguely thought out Word Bearers force I want to get to oppose my Raptors/Argent Shroud/Paradisan Guard Imperial forces that are, by and large, intended for games of [current edition] 40K.

Here they are:

As I understand it these are (L) a Huntsman and (R) a Stalker. The Huntsman has a melta-cannon and a massive chainsword, with either a Havoc launcher or heavy stubber, while the Stalker has an avenger chain cannon and a huge power claw - again with either a Havoc launcher or a heavy stubber. I couldn't resist giving the bird faced Huntsman the little chaos bird-thing on its shoulder armour plate.

 For comparison's sake, here's the loyalist ones:

These are both Armiger Helverins, with autocannons and either heavy stubbers or meltas on their carapaces. Notably the pilot's cockpit isn't chained shut...

Also, if you go back a post, you'll also see the photo I took of my 3D printer workstation area. Currently it doesn't look like that at all, but hopefully within the month I'll be producing all sorts of silliness. Tomorrow I hope to do some painting after work, maybe get to use some of my new paints, that sort of thing.

 

Where Have I Been? SPACE!

I have been absent for a week, which is - I think - the longest gap in posting this year. Mostly this has been because of the heat, which has left me barely capable of thinking, let alone painting, but it is also because over the weekend I went to Death Unto Darkness Event 11: HERETEK where I spent a weekend as Sister Superior Humility of the Order of His Sanguine Tears. Many foes of the Emperor were slain, and much fun was had by all. Here are some photos:

 

Here I was having an argument about whether or not criminals were stupid; my position was that as crime is an offence against the God-Emperor, only stupid people would commit crime and thus criminals by definition are stupid

Here I was being exorcised after getting only a little bit possessed

This is a really good portrait of me - many kudos to the photographer!

Right at the start of the event, before I started to melt in the 27 degree heat and 60% humidity and discarded the wimple

 In terms of painting, I have some medieval civilians and an old Wargames Foundry Scrooge model on the way which I hope to get done tomorrow. On Saturday myself and my friends C, D, and H are going to have a day of wargaming - 4th Edition 40K! So expect many photos from that.