N-gauge Railway Shed

 Not for the faint hearted. N-gauge railway scenery for a friend. But it's done, complete with weighing station out the front. Fun as a one-off for a friend's burgeoning railway board but I won't rush to paint more - it's just too tiny! Nice brass etched kit though.

Hard to convey how small this model is, even using paint bottles and coins for scale. There should be two weights, but I lost the smaller of the two. You can understand how. There was much cursing. Especially after I'd painted 1kg on it; only one side, not two - I'm not a madman ...

There's no value in painting fantastic detail on models at this scale, you simply can't see it. You have to paint blocks of colour, then add a little differentiation. Too much subtlety and it isn't readable as the piece you intend it to be. Colour and value alone do enough to make visual distinction. 

    

Learning oils

 I've never painted with oils before. Sure, I've thrown black and brown on miniatures as panel lining or weathering, but never actually painted with them. There was a workshop in early 2025 run by Jakob Skovgaard Villien (https://www.instagram.com/pink_label_studio/) in St. Albans, and it was a real blast to try them out for model painting.

 

 I tried to pick a base and a theme that gave a feeling of nature attempting to bring warmth to someone. There's lots of different ways you could interpret the piece and meaning, but I was aiming at temperature and texture contrast really.

Such a different piece to my usual choices, and a beautiful scupt by Leila Khalili (https://www.instagram.com/leila_khaliliart/).

Zombicide: Black Plague redux

So what's been painted over the last year? Quite a few things. I remain mediocre at photographs, but here's a little group shot of the Zombicide heroes painted to-date. There's been an accidental focus on a lot of blues of late. Unintentional, but what I happened to have on the palette at the time.

  

A few of them were done as speed paints for a one-hour challenge on a painting Discord I'm part of. It's great to concentrate the mind in frantic action. I found that painting a couple in the same evening helped to get a feel for the colours on the palette and what areas to focus on.

 

 

 

 In addition, I've spent a little longer trying to produce an effective-at-scale NMM for tabletop. I don't want to spend too long on these, because it's literally for gaming and throwing around a table with the kids, and it's going to take a beating. But it's fun to see what works.

 

Dusting off the blog

Social media has very much taken a backseat for the past couple of years. I've posted here and there, but with no regularity or intent. But I've ignored my blog! Poor blog. It didn't do anything wrong and didn't deserve to be shoved in a corner like that. Let's see if I can do better ... again.

 (blog reboot number 7, or whatever) 

Milo, Xuya, Klom & Bob

Over Christmas we played a lot of Zombicide: Black Plague. It's beeen a favourite of mine for years, but the kids are old enough to play and enjoy it now too. Through the year I'm aiming to paint the heroes we play to a tabletop level. Nothing fancy or too precise, but just better than bare plastic - so a couple of hours at most on each piece, and approximating the card art.

Happy new year

 Here we are in 2024. We made it, well done.

2023 was probably the worst year of my life from both a personal and professional perspective. I won't dwell on the negatives, other than to say we're through it and I hope never to repeat the experiences, but it was a year where I was reminded how fortunate I am to be surrounded by so many wonderful people.

With that done, let's move onto the goals for this year ...

40k: Saim Hann Eldar

Yes, it's finally time to get these moving! After spending time in 2020 and 2021 collecting all the old metal Eldar, I started them in early 2022 then put it on hold in a fit of pique when GW released new plastics and suddenly everyone was excited by Eldar, and I sulked. Apparently I'm a grown man.

Kings of War: The Midden, Dwarfs

I spent a lot of time building these but painting halted and I'm excited to get round to finishing them. They are repetitive sculpts, but with a few donations from good friends I've mixed up a few elements to break up the monotony of the seven sculpts in the box. The fact you can field a legal unit of 20 with only 16 models, and don't remove a model from the unit, gives great scope for vignettes.

Age of Sigmar: Hammerhal Aqsha, Cities of Sigmar

I was enamoured with the release, and ... well, you know the story. Man buys box, man builds box, man stops and moves to another project.

I have other plans as well, but with far less structure currently. So let's start here and see where it takes us.

Ork Nob

This was painted across two evenings after coming back from SMC. It's not a coincidence that my enthusiasm for painting waxed after three invigorating days with thousands of fellow hobby enthusiasts. 

The interesting part of this is probably the shoulder pad. After a friend showed me an old ork artwork, I added some hieroglpyhs. The surface isn't big, and my painting isn't that precise, but it was fun to add and has given me ideas for other models in the future.

Biel-Tan Farseer & Weapons Platform

This was a Secret Santa on our hobby Discord. Trying to match the recipient's scheme was incredibly difficult. I only had two blurry pictures of models in a transport case to work from. Are they Biel Tan? Mymeara? Damnit. 

Educated guess took me toward Bien Tan, but I noticed my recipient had used more teal colour on cloaks, so I leaned into that, added some gold and yellow details and there we go.

Rank and file dwarf army

Recent quietness is simply that. Quiet. Work has been time consuming, as have a number of real life activities. While I've been working on projects, there isn't anything finished to share yet. But in the spirit of posting something so I don't forget ... I've started a dwarf army for Kings of War. The system appealed to me for a few reasons:

• I had a hankering for a rank and file army, and with no Warhammer Fantasy system available at the moment, this came to the fore.
• The rule set is well regarded for pick up and play - it's one rulebook for everything.
• The units' damage isn't measured by removing models, so every unit can be its own diorama! How exciting.
• Last point is worth reiterating again. Every unit can be a fun story.
  

This is the progress to-date of the unit bases (and spares) and the scenic bases they'll all sit on when not in play. It's going to be a ruined dwarf town. Here's my work in progress in reverse order and you may wish to scroll to the bottom and walk up to the latest.

Bottom left corner is my test piece that's usally a step or two ahead of the rest to try out ideas before committing them to the rest of the pieces.

Browns on the earth. There'll be a lot of static grass added later, but it still needs colour underneath that.

Zenithal priming just to help with tonal variation.

I love the Rubble City basing from Fenris Games, but wanted to add a little more detail on steps and around bases to make it feel integrated. Lot of cork, gravel and sand thrown on over PVA and superglue.

With the display bases done, onto the unit bases. Also a few spares made up.

There's a simply joy to priming everything and unifying the materials. Also helps to bind the finer textures together.

Keep adding PVA and sand until happy. With hindsight I went a little OTT here, so a lesson for future display boards.

Can't have too much PVA!

More texture with cork and gravel to hide the flagstone edges.

Texture and different surfaces is important, so I used a patterned roller to add flagstones.

Found some nice civilian fantasy village terrain pieces which will make an appearance on the board when everything's finished.

Balsa wood edging around the tiles to keep them in one piece. 123 blocks just to get nice neat edges. You can see me testing a couple of the unit base sizes to ensure they'll fit properly.

PVA the whole surface then glue the resin scenery on top and leave overnight to stick properly.

Basic foam squares of 24x24cm contstructed. Three will fit in a nice row on a double-width bookshelf.

Ogryn Slave Gang

 

 

 

 

 Well, they won't win beauty competitions any time soon but I really like these models. Another project that's been sat on the desk for months in a state of half-completion, and it was nice to see them finished. It's a slimmed down version of how I approached the Ogryn from my Golden Demon entry last year, and a much more tabletop level as a result - but it was fun.