I guess I'm painting Emperor's Children now...

Its been a few weeks since I've posted on here. Honestly I've just been pretty lazy and struggled to focus enough to write anything. 

I had fun at the Old World event though. I had three great games and my birthday luck seemed to be with me as I somehow came 6th! I did get some pics, but in the interest of not bogging down this post, I won't upload them here. You can check out the blog's Facebook page if you want to see!

I thought I'd be having a bit of a rest hobby-wise after the marathon of getting nearly 2000pts of Dark Elves ready, but it turns out I've been pushed in a direction I wasn't expecting in a pretty major way.

A friend of mine wanted a game of 4th edition 40k the week after the event. It's no secret I highly dislike 10th ed, so seemed a fun change of pace. Also, like most Chaos players of a certain age, I absolutely loved the 3.5 codex, so I relished the opportunity to break that out and have some fun with it.

We had a blast playing and immediately scheduled another one a few weeks later. That sent me into a frenzy of painting Emperor's Children, a project which I hadn't touched since getting burned out playing them in the local club league a few months after their codex launched last year.

I'd converted up some Havocs a while back, so I finished those up. Havocs with Sonic Weapons haven't been an option since the 3.5 codex, so it was a great opportunity to actually use them for their intended purpose instead of needing to do 'counts as'!

These were a joy to paint up, even if a bit slow with all the freehand and patterning I like to layer onto every model. My attitude is that if your eyes don't hurt just from looking at them, they're not really Emperor's Children!

It feels so good to be working on the army again. They're my favourite legion and have been my main army in both Heresy and 40k for so long. I really need to get them finished. Finally finding a way to play 40k which I actually enjoy has definitely turbo-charged my enthusiasm for them again!

I even made some new models for my 3rd Legion. After our first game I converted a new Champion for one of my units.

May I present Dio Kyrios, 'The Denied'

He's actually got an illegal loadout for 10th, so he's exclusively for my 4th edition games. It feels weird to be building a new model for a ruleset which hasn't been current for about 20 years now!

He got the title of the 'The Denied' after he spent the entirety of his first game fruitlessly trying to get himself and his unit into combat with an enemy Tactical Squad, who very unsportingly kept backing away, before watching him get gunned down in a hail of Plasma Cannon fire!

All good fun though and I'm looking forward to him having his revenge next time!

On top of that, I've also got a pair of Rhinos on my hobby desk right now.

They're looking distinctly un-Slaaneshi at the moment, but that will change soon enough. I'm going to be going for the classic black and pink look for them, something which I haven't used a whole lot in my army, but it should be pretty quick to do and adds some variety across the army.

Obviously all this is helping my backlog clearance massively too, but really I'm just enjoying this massive outpouring of creativity and productivity. I'm hoping to get these done in the next few days, then I've got a few Necromunda Weirdos to do for the club campaign. After that I'll turn my attention back to my EC's. I won't go as far as to say I'm going to get the whole army done this year, but I'm fully intending to roll with it for however long my fickle attention span lasts!

I'll let you know how I get on. Until next time though, happy hobbying!

More Elves!

I've spent the last few days finishing up the Dragon and Dark Pegasus I need for this weekend’s Old World event. 

It actually ended up being a lot easier than I expected, finishing them both over the course of three long-ish painting sessions. I think the rider actually took more effort to do than the Dragon itself!

I really like the conversion I made for the Sorceress on Peg. I had originally planned for it to be simply a case of sticking the second rider from the Dragon kit on a kitbashed mount, but it it didn’t fit the saddle very well, so the project evolved massively until I’d basically cut up, filed, trimmed and rebuilt every part of the model!

It was a hell of a lot of  work and honestly I’d have probably been better off just giving in and buying an old metal Morathi model from ebay, but at least I’ve gotten a fun and unique model out of it!

While both models are far from perfect, I think they look decent enough and fit nicely with the rest of the army. Honestly, I actually don’t think the Dragon could have ever lived up to the image I had in my head for it. It’s been sitting on my hobby desk half finished for so long, I’ve had plenty of time to imagine how it’s going to end up. Done is better than perfect in this case!

That’s the bulk of my Dark Elves done now, or at least everything I want to be getting finished in the near future. I’ve still got a couple of units and characters I need get round to, but my hobby ADHD is definitely nudging me looking for something else to do, so it's time to switch things up for a while.

 I think I’m going to try and get some good pictures of the army as a whole at the event this weekend, then call this chunk of my backlog finished. The army is looking better than it ever has and I’m really proud of what I’ve managed to get done in just a few short months. I’ve even managed to break into positive painting figures in the process!

I’m not sure where my backlog-busting journey is going to take me next, but I’m feeling super energised right now. I’m on holiday this week too, so hopefully I’ll be able to launch myself into something fun. You’ll have to check back later to see what that might be though.

Until then though, happy hobbying!

Back to the Elves

I'm a little proud of this one. Not the models themselves, more the fact that I've managed to actually swing my attention back to an ongoing army project.

It's normally something I really struggle with. Once I’ve gotten the dopamine hit from completing a few units, my Hobby ADHD and actual Neurospicy distraction usually kicks in and I don't return to it for months, if at all. It's most of the reason I have so few painted, playable armies, despite having been in the hobby for over 20 years now!

The fact that I've got another event coming up has definitely helped, but I'm still taking it as a win!

So yeah, I've managed to get another unit of Dark Riders done across the last couple of evenings:

I also started on the Dragon I mentioned last time. Not too shabby a start, although still a way to go on it:

I'm hoping to harness my current streak of productivity and get him done by early next week, to avoid the usual last minute rush to sort stuff out, but we'll see what happens there. I'll keep you updated!

Another bunch of weirdos

I've really gotten into the groove with these random Inquisition dudes. I managed to finish up a few more over the last week or so, including the Inquisitor conversion I built in 2015!

It's so nice to be able to finally get these finished in a way which does justice to my original vision of them. It really shows me how far my standard of painting has come over the years. There's no way I would have managed this back in the day!

That said, I just realised as I'm writing that I forgot to finish off the coils on the Plasma Pistol and the lenses on the Servo Skull. Oops! I'll have to fix that at some point!

Just a quick update for today. I wanted to post this before I move into prep for my next Old World event in two weeks. Should be less of a slog this time, with just a Dragon rider and a few horses to do. I'm quite looking forward to it though, especially as the Dragon was a present from a friend the Christmas before last. 

Anyway, happy hobbying and I'll catch you next post!

A bunch of weirdos

After the slog of getting my Dark Elves finished, I wanted to paint something quick and simple before diving into my next big project, but wasn't sure what. I always have a bunch of random unpainted or part-painted models scattered round my desk, so I literally grabbed the first one I saw and spent an afternoon finishing it up.

It was a Servitor from my old Inquisition army, which naturally led to me digging out a bunch of my other old Henchmen models and getting them up to scratch.

Not bad for a day or so worth of work! I kind of got myself into a groove after that, so I kept grabbed a few more random bits and pieces and knocked them out too. 

That's a fresh Wyld Runner and a few Phelynxes for my Eschers, swiftly followed by a pair of Dead Marsh Spectres for Middle Earth.

It's felt pretty good just going with the flow and tackling little micro projects like this. I think I'm going to stick with it for a week or two. Every model done is another out my backlog and it's great to have some variety. I do need to turn my attention back to Elves soon though for another event, but that can wait a little bit.

So yeah, a quick but fun one today. I'll hopefully be back soon with more!

Pretty awesome moment!

I've been so busy getting my Dark Elves sorted for the event I mentioned in my new year post, I haven't had time to post updates on here!

Well I managed to finish up what I needed to, even though it was a bit of a scramble at the end. Obviously it's brilliant that I got the event list done in time,  but what's even better is that it led into a pretty big moment for me:

I can finally say that for the first time since i started the army 16 years ago, I have a fully painted 3000pt Dark Elf army!

I've still got loads to do and add to it, but I'm so happy right now. I bought some of these models when I was 18! Dark Elves have always been my favourite fantasy army and I've always had a very strong idea of what I wanted the force to be like. Long time readers of this blog will know that the army has been reworked, stripped and redone a few times over the years in pursuit of that vision. This is the first time it's all come together painted up together at once, to a standard I'm really happy with. It only took nearly two decades, three editions, the death of the setting and subsequent resurrection to achieve!

Honestly it's stuff like this which really cuts to the core of what my backlog busting is about: finishing up projects I keep getting wildly distracted from. Hopefully I can have a few more moments like this in tbe next few months!

The event itself was really good fun. I walked away with a single win out of three games, which is pretty much what I was hoping for. I met sonevgreat people and had a great time, so a win all round.

Not sure what what I'm going to work on next. I need a bit of a break after the slog of my Elves, so I'll probably do something small as a pallete cleanser. I'll see where the mood takes me.

Until next time, happy hobbying!

Goodbye 2025. Hello 2026!

I’ve not been in a very productive mood recently. I don’t know what the issue has been, but I’ve been struggling to sit down and focus on getting anything done for more than about ten minutes at a time. So after a few weeks of chipping away at them, I finally managed to get some Dark Riders done for my Dark Elves just before Christmas. I was really hoping to get the post about them up before now, but it seems that my low executive function decided to be a bastard again, so I’m going to have to roll them into this end of year post.

So yeah, these are my newest Dark Riders. They weren’t planned to be my next thing, but they were in my backlog anyway and I’ve signed up for an Old World event in January, so they got bumped up my list of priorities.

I reckon they turned out alright. Certainly not my best work, but they look decent enough as a unit and help to fill out my Core units. I’ve got a bunch of other bits to get done too. I’ll cover that later though, as that’ll be in my plans for early 2026.

So those are my last models of 2025, which means it’s time for my traditional end of year group photo!

As you can no doubt see, I actually got a fair amount done this year, raking up a respectable 278 points. It's certainly my lowest total since 2018, but when it's laid out like that, it actually turned out to be a lot more than I thought! I think it’s because I painted a ton of infantry, which means lots of models, but lower points totals. I’m pretty happy with that. Its a huge chunk moved out of my backlog, even with my hefty purchases of Emperor Children and Ork stuff earlier in the year and I managed to paint for four different game systems across the year!

It's been a pretty good year of gaming too. I’ve dipped back into 40k in a big way, soend 6 months playing in my local club’s league and following summer tournament. It was good fun and somehow I ended up finishing in 4^th place. Unfortunately it also reminded me of absolutely everything I hate about the current edition of the game, so I’m probably not touching it again at least until 11^th Edition comes out. Hopefully itll refresh the game enough to draw me back in. If not, I've got plenty of other systems to grab my attention. On a much more positive note, I’ve become part of the committee running the club and been hosting a bunch of ‘niche games’ nights, which is basically anything that’s not 40k. The main one has been Necromunda campaign and it’s turning out to be really fun. Everyone seems to be having a blast and everything seems to be kicking off, so I consider that to be a roaring success!

So that was a brief look back on my hobby year. It’s not the most exhaustive, but I’ve been typing for quite a while now and I only wanted to do a fairly short post anyway. 

I really don’t have many solid plans going forward into 2026, beyond continuing to chip away on my backlog and getting about 700 more points of Dark Elves ready for the event in January. After that, it’s just a matter of going where the inspiration takes me in terms of what I work on and what I do.

 I’ve been really enjoying being in ‘Backlog Busting’ mode, so I might see how long I can stay in that groove, even beyond my +300 point goal.  I can’t see myself being able to refrain from model purchases all year, but it’ll certainly be fun trying!

So yeah, that’s my end of year rundown. Feels nice to put one out after skipping it last year. Even nicer is the fact that I actually managed to get it out before the New Year for once! Hopefully I’ll be back soon with more lovely progress to show you all soon, but until then, I hope you all have a fantastic New Year!

What are your hobby plans for 2026?

 Whatever they are, happy hobbying and I’ll catch you next year!

A whole bunch of 'Munda

I haven't posted for a few weeks, but don't worry. I haven't fallen off the blogging wagon already, I've just not had a whole lot of energy to paint, so I've had nothing to show off.

Then I hit a huge productive streak in the last couple of days, so I suddenly have enough to show off out of basically nowhere. It's weird how the hobby motivation ebbs and flows sometimes!

As I predicted last time, after the slog of finishing up my Orks, I turned my attention to Necromunda for some low effort wins.

I got the set of Malstrain Genestealers from my Secundus box done over a couple of evenings, despite not having any particular use for them in my immediate future:

I think they turned out brilliantly tbh, far beyond my wildest expectations! So much so that I'm actually tempted to get some more of them, as I'm a little sad the project is over already!

They were mostly done using watered down washes, then picking out a few few interest points like eyes and blisters, then adding some Tesseract Glow to their bases. I probably spent longer waiting for washes to dry than actually painting them!

I was on a bit of a roll after those, with my creative juices flowing nicely. I decided to use that to finally get my Orrus Spyrers from the same box knocked out too, meaning that I can cross off everything from a boxed set from my backlog. A bit of a rarity!

Anyway, I got those done pretty quickly too. Here's the results:

I don't think they turned out quite as well as the 'Stealers, but i think that's more an issue with the models having no clear focal point than anything else.

I went for a metallic scheme with them, based loosely on Iron Man's colours. I've had the idea knocking about since I bought them to have each Spyrer type be based on a different Marvel super hero, so this is the start of that. I'll buy the others later, but I think this makes a pretty good start to that plan.

So that's a good chunk knocked off my backlog, netting me 21 points towards my total. I'm not sure where I'm going to turn my attention next, but I should actually get some decent free time over the next few weeks, so I'm expecting to getting a good chunk of hobby done. We'll see if that actually happens though.

Until next time, happy hobbying!

Off to a decent start

The great de-backlogging is off to a pretty good start. I managed to get the last of my Speed Freaks units for my Orks done over the last week, with a Shokkjump Dragster and trio of Deffkoptas ticked off my To Do list!

The Shokkjump in particular I'm really glad turned out well. I converted it basically from scratch using a kids toy i found in a charity shop as as base. It fits in pretty well I reckon.

The Boomdakka I showed off in my last post, but decided to photograph it again, as I love it so much.

The Koptas are the last of a batch of 15 I've been painting recently for the summer tournament at my local club. I ended in 4th Place, which really wasn't bad considering I'd hardly played 40k for the better part of two years! I originally joined as a way to boost numbers and have an excuse to paint some Orks, but it turns out there's a lot of armies out there which can't cope with massed whirly death machines being slammed down the field turn 1!

As I said, these are the last of my 'Need to do' Ork stuff. There's still plenty of Ork stuff in my backlog, but they're less of a priority. Im going to take a break from painting green for a while and probably turn my attention towards some Necromunda stuff. There's a few bits I want to get done for the local campaign I've started running and most of it should be relatively low effort pallete cleansers. 

I'm definitely finding it easier to focus now i have a goal to aim for and a place to document it all here on the blog, so I'm hoping my productive streak continues.

Until next time, happy hobbying!

Back from the dead!

I haven't posted on here for over a year. Most of the reason for that was the dwindling or non existent interactions on my posts over the last few years. Compared to how active and vibrant the hobby blogosphere was 10-15 years ago, it just felt like i was shouting into the void. As you can imagine, it kind of killed my enthusiasm for posting.

But now in a fitting move for Halloween, I'm bringing it lurching back to life!

I'm still under no illusions as to how dead a medium blogs are in this age of social media, but I figure that posting on here regularly again is the best way to document the big self-imposed hobby challenge I'm about to embark on. If there's anyone here reading this, then you can come along for the ride. Say hi if you are!

 I mentioned a hobby challenge, so you might be wondering what I'm up to? Well, if you've read this blog over the years, you'll know that I've been locked in a never-ending war with my massive pile of shame, tracked using my points system.

Well that backlog's gotten a bit out of hand again and it's driving me completely insane, especially after finding a ton of half-finished projects when clearing out the shed the other week. As a result, I've put myself on another model purchase ban for a little while, but with a bit of a twist this time. Rather than just doing damage control and barely pulling my head above water like I normally do, I want to build up a bit of headroom with it this time and make a meaningful dent in my ridiculous pile of unfinished stuff.

With that in mind, I've set an end goal to work towards, rather than just stopping once I'm in positive figures. I want to reach +300 painting points by next summer, from my current total of -115. Its a bit of arbitrary goal, but my thinking is that it should put a hell of a dent in my 'to do' list, whilst not being so impossible to reach that i get discouraged.

Next summer as an end date is a good and (in my mind at least!) well-reasoned goal though. All rumours and logic place 11th edition 40k as coming out then. I'm not going to fool myself into thinking that I'm not going to buy anything when that drops, so that seems a good point to have a healthy, much-reduced backlog ready for!

I'm also not going full cold turkey on my hobby purchases. I'm going to treat myself every now and then, again mostly so I don't get discouraged. I've been cataloguing everything I need to paint, dividing it by army and game system, then further sub-dividing it, listing the stuff which I most want or need to get done. Once everything on one of those sub-lists is finished, I'm going to treat myself to something I want, with the caveat that it's got to match that category. 

For example, for my Necromunda stuff, I've got the following on my 'Need to do' list:

- Secundus Genestealers

- Spyrers

- Necromunda Weirdos 

- Arbites 

- Escher cats

Once those are done, I can treat myself to a Forgeworld character pack I've had my eye on for a while. Likewise, once I've cleared my Saturnine box from my list, I can can buy something for my Thousand Sons.

This might seem like I'm making this far too complicated, but ive learned over the years that my Autistic brain needs structure to stuff like this to keep me focused. This is basically a very long-winded way for saying I'm going to hopefully have a very productive 9 months or so of hobby ahead of me!

To start me off, I've been working on my Orks the past few weeks. They're by far the shortest category on my list and the ones I've been lost engaged with, having been playing a summer league and tourney at my local club. I've painted most of a Speed Freaks army over that time, with just a few things left to finish up.

Most recently I've gotten a Boomdakka Snazzwagon, converted from a Taurox done:

That's been sitting unfinished in various forms since 2017, so its good to get it finished at last! It was originally bought for my Inquisition, but I haven't done anything with that army since 8th Edition, so it got a new home my Deathskulls. Reckon it turned out pretty well. It was hard to get a good photo as it doesnt fit in my light box, but hopefully it looks good anyway!

The other thing I finished was some Rogue Trader Boyz i bought off a mate on a whim a few months back:

I didn't really have a use for them, I just have a fondness for old sculpts and poor impulse control. That probably goes a way to explaining my need to do this backlog-busting challenge! These were great fun to work on though and will probably end up finding a home in my Kommandos, which need a few extra bodies.

Next up will probably be a converted Shokkjump Dragster and some Deffkoptas to finish off the Ork part of my 'Need to do' list. I'll keep you updated on how I do.

Its good to be back!

Happy Hobbying!