After finishing the Khorne team for the NAF GT least year, I hit a bit of a low patch in terms of motivation. There were a few teams I had ideas for, but nothing that I was inspired to work on.

I took a bit of a break and then had a look through the models I had already built. Crazy Igor/Mad Max was last star from the crp/lrb6 era that I still had to paint. There was very little to go on for him, he’s a weird mix of chaos marauder and vampire thrall. I’d converted a ghoul to give the impression of someone who has been drained of vitality often and added some chaos bits.

I went with a very pale flesh tone and added some grey to make him look even more unhealthy. For the uniform I went with black armour, with gold edging and some red details since these colours suit both vampires and chaos. Overall I am not very satisfied with him, probably the most lacklustre model I have done in a while both in terms of conversion, painting and even the photos ended up looking rubbish. At least with him done I just need to paint a vampire team to have done all the teams/stars from the pre BB16 era.





The next project was actually for a contest. I have got myself a little addicted to a 40K mobile game called Tacticus and there was a contest on their discord to paint up a character from the game. There was a new Blood Angel Mataneo, just released for the game and although I didn’t have any Primaris models, I did have plenty of Firstborn to convert. Even hit upon the idea of having him landing on a grot to represent his special move from the game.

A lot of the conversion was just kit bashing, but I did need to sculpt or cast some of the details like the rope and should pad decoration. I also had to carve up existing parts to shape to make the small shield and blood drop on his belt. For the explosion around the Grot I used leftover bits from the Eldar Yncarne that had been turned into a treeman. This was the first time I’d painted a space marine in decades and ended up looking for inspiration on how to paint shiny looking armour as well as adding glowing light for the plasma pistol.

I was really happy with how his armour and the freehand turned out. The pics did end up a bit dark and don’t really show off the detailed shading of his armour, I maybe should have made it more extreme.





The other model I managed to get done was Glotl. I’d converted him a few years ago and spent a good month getting him right. Trouble with this was it ended up being quite intimidating to start painting him as I wanted to do my conversion justice. I waited so long that a forgeworld model came out, based on the BB20 rather than BB16 illustration.

I finally had the time to devote to him and there was a local painting competition I’d won with a BB model in 2023, so wanted to use him to defend my title. His colour scheme was pretty standard for Lizardmen, blue skin, with a paler underbelly, dark blue scales and red armour clothing with white details and gold edging and decoration. I’d already got pretty good at painting skin, so didn’t have much difficulty with this, did paint on some smaller scales near the edges of his arms, legs and chest as I like how this looks rather than just stopping. Initially I went for a much lighter underbelly, but it was too much of a contrast to his dark scales. One of the hardest parts ended up being the ropes holding his armour on, added some brown to make them look more natural, like dark vines, but was tricky to keep them dark with just sharp highlights.

The part I am most proud of is the gold. I’d been experimenting with NMM techniques for a while and even started mixing gold paint with brown and yellow. Results had been varied and sometimes ended up looking too “muddy”. This is the first time I have done pure NMM and have it look like actual gold to me. The other part which worked out well was painting on details rather than trying to sculpt them on. The decorations on his chest plate, “earing” and chin jewellery were all painted and ended up looking much better than the sculpted detail on his should pad.





Sadly I wasn’t able to enter him into the local painting competition as he didn’t qualify for the category I’d been aiming for and I didn’t win in any of the other sub groups either with Mataneo in 40K nor the Kreek conversion I used for AoS.