warhammer-40k – Lair of the Lagomorph

If you’re at all associated with the Warhammer side of our miniature hobby, you probably came across the sad news that John Blanche passed away earlier in the month. Needless to say he had an incredible impact on our hobby, his artwork inspiring many of us and laying the course for much of what Warhammer and its dark future counterpart became. It’s easy to see his impact by the number of excellent posts on the topic around the internet (I’m partial to Azazel’s post on the subject, which focuses on the impact of John’s miniature painting articles). For myself, one of my first proper experience of the hobby was reading through the 3rd edition Warhammer 40,000 rulebook, and soon after getting Mordheim and playing that for quite a few years. If you’re familiar with both those books, you’ll understand that John’s art provided a lot of the context as I got to grips with these worlds, and therefore has stayed with me throughout the years as I paint models and play games. On the news of his death I spent a bit of time looking back at those books, taking in at the art that inspired me all those years ago, and deciding that I should channel this energy into some model painting! Luckily for me I picked up the Canoness Veridyan model when that was released quite a while ago (I saw 2016 somewhere), and that being a direct interpretation of one off John’s most famous paintings that seemed like a good way to go.

I initially decided maybe I should try to paint this to display standard, as it’s been many years since I tried my hand at that, but ended up going with the flow and that resulted in a model that’s more like character standard (i.e. slightly better than army painting!). I think I’m just too impatient to paint display models these days, or at least not used to it anymore!

I left the model as is, adding a few elements on the base to recall the original painting (i.e. adding a stack of bones, and a white rat scurrying away).

If you’re unfamiliar with the painting, here’s a photo of a nice print of it I have hanging near my games table.

I really enjoyed painting the model, it was nice to take a bit more time than usual on a single figure. I find painting reds and blacks quite satisfying, and I have to say I had a bit of an urge to do some more Sisters of Battle/Adepta Sororitas models after this one, so who knows maybe that’ll start something!

As you know I’ve been painting away to meet the 1 Million Miniatures challenge, where I pledged to paint 100 miniatures at my local GW store. Last post saw me get to 91 miniatures, and with a little over a week left I decided to paint up this squad of Steel Legion Imperial Guard troops, which would take me up to 101 miniatures.

I only have 10 of these old metal models, but I decided to paint them as if I was painting an army of them, which suited the speed painting I needed to do for the challenge anyway. With the new Armageddon Warhammer 40,000 set coming out, one has to hope they’re re-releasing Steel Legion miniatures one day, which means I might be able to add to these!

Painting-wise, these were extremely simple and quick. To get a head start on the trench coats, I undercoated the models with Vallejo German Dark Yellow/Dunkelgelb airbrush primer. I then picked out what is visible of their skin in Pro Acryl Shadow Flesh, followed by covering all the leather areas (Masks, straps, books, ammo pouches… there’s a lot of leather on these models) in Wildwood contrast paint. The bedrolls are Vallejo German Fieldgrey WWII, the helmets Vallejo German Camo Dark Green. The gun casings in Vallejo German Grey, and finally the metal areas in Scale75 Black Metal.

I then went for my usual all over wash, but instead of my go to Agrax Earthshade I decided to try something a little bit lighter as Earthshade can be a little dark over colours like the trench coats. Instead I decided to experiment and went for Army Painter Soft Tone. It worked really nicely, giving a nice gradient over a lot of the models. It led me to think that I might get away with minimal highlights on the models – great for army painting. For highlights I simply picked out the raised areas of the helmets, trenchcoats, and metallic areas in their respective basecoat paints (upside of using airbrush primer, you can paint it on when you need to), did a few line highlights on the guns with the German grey mixed with some AK Ivoryand that was it. The final touch was painting the glass on the goggles in Citadel Contrast Blood Angels Red – couldn’t help going for that Fallout New Vegas NCR Ranger look, too iconic!

The basing was simple as well, a thorough covering of AK Sandy Desert texture paint, followed by some MIG Brick Dust pigments. The base rim is Two Thin Coats Druid Flesh.

So with these done, this takes my tally to 101 models, completing the challenge! So what do these 101 models look together you ask? Well I couldn’t resist finding out so I laid them out for a family portrait.

The answer is… eclectic! That’s quite a few model ranges represented there, but I’m proud to say only the Amazons were purchased during this challenge, all the other models I already had and were sitting unpainted in boxes, some for many many years. This then was a great excuse to get some paint on these older models and put a dent in the backlog!

Having the challenge finished is a bit of a weight of my shoulders, I enjoyed painting all these models, but the focus on speed definitely influenced the models I picked to paint, and I look forward to being able to pick and choose what I paint more freely!