I love a good group shot.
There’s something incredibly satisfying about getting all of your miniatures for any specific project and arranging them together on a surface. It’s a reminder of all the blood, sweat and tears that it took to get to where you are. It lets those miniatures that you bought, assembled and painted for the sake of completion and fluffiness get some time to shine, outwith the confines of a realistically playable game.
And heck, it just looks really cool.
This is my complete set of full-sized ‘family photos’ that I have for my various projects for various game systems. The images will be downsized to fit on the page – if you want a closer look, you can click on them and it’ll take you to the image itself without any scaling.
I can’t promise that every one of these group shots will be 100% up-to-date (as some are either missing or out of date at the point of posting this), but I’ll try my best to keep them as up to date as I can. Note that this isn’t a complete representation of my collection either, and I may be missing a couple of older projects that I haven’t photographed yet, or any armies that I’ve since sold off without capturing in photograph.
All that said, onto the armies…
The Horus Heresy
Space Wolves – 10,000pts+
This army was started towards the tail end of my Warhammer 40.000 Chaos Space Marines army, after I discovered The Horus Heresy was a thing that existed. While my CSM army was a classic homebrew chapter project, I found myself surprisingly enjoying the more historical approach to the Space Wolves – that, the nostalgia factor (Space Wolves were my first Warhammer army as a pre-teen boy) and the abundance of high point super heavies available in the Horus Heresy eventually led to it becoming my main army project.
Since selling off my Chaos Space Marines, Space Wolves are now my go to army for games of 8th Edition Warhammer 40,00. Here’s how that looks.
Iron Warriors – 6200pts+
Probably the main reason that I went for Iron Warriors as my second Horus Heresy army was that they’re such a typical, almost Codex Astartes-esque Traitor Legion, which I just love. There’s no mutations, no psykers, no daemon engines, sonic weapons or Butcher’s Nails in this legion – just cold, hard Astartes. Given that my main legion, the Space Wolves are so individualistic in their approach for war for a loyalist chapter, it made sense to play something more typical for my Traitors. As such, I’ve tried to include as many standard 30K Legion elements as I could – such as Javelin Land Speeders, Legion Terminators, Rhinos, 20-man Bolter-only Tactical Squads and generic Dreadnought loadouts – in addition to the artillery and unique Iron Warriors units. Down the line, I’d quite like to replace the crap plastic Contemptors with some Boxnaughts for that classic Space Marines vibe.
Warhammer 40,000
Chaos Space Marines
This was a fun project that I loved working on – I was really happy with the scheme, and I tried a lot of new things on the army. Whether it was getting creative with my basing, kitbashing the Cultists – my amateurish attempt at Blanchitsu – earning how to magnetise everything from Predator sponsors to Terminator arms, or reposing my Renegade Knight, I really felt like l made strides forward across this hobby.
Between my Space Wolves legion and later Iron Warriors legion projects though, I just didn’t have any need for a third Space Marine army – both from a gameplay and a future hobby standpoint. In the end, it was sold to make the funds and closet space for my Warhound Titan, which was a pretty huge step forward for me.
Middle-earth
Rivendell – 1700pts+
The colour scheme was originally going to be as close to the movies as possible, but my tendency towards excessive highlighting on the cloaks ended up turning them into a scheme closer to my Stormcast Eternals army. This army is also the origin of my water effect bases – a visual effect that’s since made its way to just about all my Middle-earth armies.
Angmar – 1700pts+
My idea with this army was to have the basic rank and file look really grim and monotonous while using the bright blue spirit miniatures such as the Barrow Wights, Dead Marsh Spectres and Shades as ‘spot colours’. Similarly, my monsters were given spooky ruins to stand on for the same effect.
Moria – 1000pts+
This was a fun project, and surprisingly fun to knock out as long as you’re willing to make concessions on the quality of the individual Goblins. I like how the characters stand out in this force, and I’m pretty proud of how the flame effects came out on the Balrog. This was the army I decided to keep a cohesive basing style for all of my Good and Evil forces on, as it really helps with miniature re-use (those Cave Trolls in the back are straight out of my Angmar army).
The Dark Powers of Dol Guldur – 1000pts
Grey Company – 1000pts
Iron Hills – 600pts
Age of Sigmar
Maggotkin of Nurgle – 3200pts
Stormcast Eternals – 3000pts
I knew that I wanted to continue painting miniatures, but I was at a bit of a loss as to what direction to go in. This was back before Specialist Games had returned with Kill Team, Blood Bowl, Necromunda, Shadespire and the like, so my only real options were Warhammer: Age of Sigmar and Warhammer 40,000: Dark Vengeance. I remember being extremely torn about which direction to go in – Age of Sigmar was a little jarring for me to process as a fan of Warhammer Fantasy (and if I’m honest, still is a little), but the Dark Vengeance box set really sort of.. sucked. The miniatures were all pretty dated looking, and didn’t really do it for me at all. The Age of Sigmar box set, on the other hand, was filled with potential.
Around the time I bought the Age of Sigmar starter set, I had also bought my fiancé some Dragon Knights and a High Elf Dragonlord to have a play about with. Her engagement with the hobby was ultimately really limited, but she did leave me a whole bunch of High Elf bitz. This was the inspiration for all the High Elf conversions in this army – the swords on the Liberators, the head swaps, weapon swaps and ‘White Lion’ Decimators. Looking back, I don’t think that the theme and the conversions entirely worked 100% of the time, but it certainly helped the learning process along to have been ambitious (if a little out of my depth) at such an early stage.
I’ve got some real mixed feelings about this army – alongside my Bloodbound/Skaven army, it was my first full-scale wargaming project. The Bloodbound have now long since been sold off, which makes this my oldest remaining project. On the other hand, I find Stormcast as a faction to be unengaging, by and large, so they don’t see an awful lot of table time outside of demo games. Some of the paint jobs are really starting to show their age here, too – although it’s nice to be able to compare my early attempts at a Decimator compared to the comparatively recently painted Knight Incantor.
Blood Bowl
Orcs
If I’m entirely honest, I had only really wanted the box set for the core game rules, templates, game board, etc – I had little to no interest in playing the Humans, but Orc miniatures were undeniably cool sculpts that really captured the spirit of Blood Bowl.
Indeed, somewhere between my headswap and repose conversion work and coming up with the gaudy white/pink ‘tooth and gum’ colour scheme, I absolutely fell in love with this team. In their present state, they’re still a little unfinished though, and I really need to pick up a Blood Bowl Orc Booster at some point to finish them off.
Skaven
Warhammer Quest
Silver Tower
I was wildly out of my depth with some of these – the earliest skintones on the Fyreslayer and Darkoath in particular were absolutely dire, while the fleshy engravings on the Ogroid were an absolute disaster. The basing as well is a weird, overly gravelly texture that really didn’t work either. Still, I think that I did a pretty good job with these guys as a “first project.” It had been over a decade since I had painted any miniatures, and I wasn’t even as good as this when I had stopped. I think you can see a clear progression with some of them – particularly the skin on the Acolytes – as I slowly figured out what I was doing. My next project that would immediately follow this one – my Stormcast Eternals – were not exactly a work of art either, but they massively benefited from this first foray.
