This is the first in a new, hopefully monthly blog series I’ll
be doing called Last Week’s Painting, where I’ll document what I’ve been
painting over the last month. They’ll mostly be Games Workshop models; it’s extremely
rare for me to paint anything else but I’m open suggestions! I’ll initially try
to get these out on the first Thursday of every month but I’m already late for
the first one, so let’s just say I’ll try to get it out at some point in the
first week!
My painting for this month has focussed on the 2009 Space
Hulk boxed set. I’ve owned this set for over a decade and even managed to play
the game a few times as detailed in some very early editions of this blog, but
I’d never quite got around to painting them. There were a lot of reasons for
that but the main one was that there was no expectation that I had to. I
acquired the set when I was a member of Games Workshop’s staff; they’ve released
a few board game-style games over the last several years but rarely support
them post-launch in favour of their core games. And in the shop, there was an
expectation that if you were going to use your models in the shop, you had to
paint them – or at least show that there had been some progress on them. So, when
painting, I prioritised models from those games at the time, and as my backlog
of models I need to paint has only grown since then, the Games Workshop boxed
games haven’t been painted.
But when lockdown hit, I’d run out of models to paint for
the Chaos Space Marine army I was working on, so I proceeded with the Space Hulk
models I’ve been putting off for over a decade. I started with six of the Terminator
models and tried as much as I could to paint to the reference on the back of
the Mission book. For the most part it worked reasonably well, although I might
try to mix the red a little thicker next time because it was a faff painting
multiple thin layers on a black undercoat. (I’d never have known until I tried,
and I’d like to do Blood Angels at some point so it’s well worth remembering!)
Where I deviated from the reference was the Power Sword, which I’ve never been
good at doing, and the gems, which I had idea how to do. With the sword, I
painted it a deep blue to begin with and then tried a lightning pattern
freehand across the sword. I don’t think I did a particularly good job of it,
but by that point I hadn’t painted for over a month and wanted to finish them
off without getting bogged down. The gems, under the advice of Steve from
Warlords and Wizards, were painted silver initially then coated in the purple
paint that I think is supposed to go in an airbrush. It seemed to work!
Here we see the Genestealers I’ve been working on in the last
week or so. This has been an interesting challenge because I’m definitely not used
to painting Tyranids; I tried it many years ago when I was still in school, and
I think once when I was staff I painted a model for the shop, but I’ve never
collected a whole army of them. I think that’s largely because their complete lack
of humanity made them very difficult to relate to, so I wasn’t tempted to try. These
days, of course, I know that’s the whole point of Tyranids – to create an
unstoppable force of alien creatures to scare the life out of anybody
unfortunate enough to have to face them; and the human element is the one they
create – not the one they have. I’m following the guides available on Warhammer
TV and painting them the classic Genestealer colours. The one at the front is
the one where I’ve attempted to do the highlighting on the flesh; I ran out of
time to do any more, but it worked relatively well and will probably take up a
bigger portion of my time next week!
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