Howdy folks, welcome back to the Collardhammer Special, the somewhat irregular blog of my hobby throughout the year 2026! As usual, a combination of busyness, bad luck (my laptop broke again) and poor health have conspired to delay this one by a couple of weeks, but I am back in the game and hoping to get at least another blog done this month. There is going to be a big reveal show in around 10 days, so that will likely provide some good reaction content. At any rate, let’s get on with today’s post!
For hobby work, I’ve been busy making progress across several
projects. For my Emperor’s Children, I (mostly) finished painting Fulgrim,
assembled another unit of Flawless Blades and have made a start on Lucius:
I still have the final unit of Noise Marines to assemble,
and I think after finishing Lucius, I’ll be painting the Flawless Blades. For
the more general backlog, I assembled the new Celestian Insidiant unit and the
Paragon Warsuits that had sat on my desk for over a year:
Finally, I have made
a start on painting the Boarding Actions terrain. Currently, there is no real
plan or timeline for the terrain set, but I am hoping to get it done in between
other projects.
As he is essentially complete, here is Fulgrim:
The big snake man himself
I haven’t worked on anything this big for some time,
probably since I painted a Kraken Eater Gargant around 4 years ago, or my
Knight Castellan. Compared to those projects, which had either lots of
flesh-tone to paint or large flat panels, Fulgrim is in a different class of
detail. There are so many different textures and materials on the model, making
painting him really fun and interesting. That said, there are some aspects I’d
like to improve on. The metallics are not quite hitting for me, and I think they
probably require another light silver highlight. My attempt at NMM on his right
sword is also not quite right, although I am less clear about how to fix it.
Finally, the base is a little barren. Patches of light green algae and grass
tufts worked fine for other models, but I think Fulgrim would benefit from
something more, perhaps barbed wire. If anyone has any ideas for details on a
large swamp base, let me know!
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| More angles |
I have also painted a test sample for the boarding actions terrain:
I think this works?
After priming the terrain black and applying a zenithal
highlight of grey, I applied a Frostheart contrast on the walls, Balthasar Gold
on the door and picked out the details in Khorne Red. I washed everything with
Drakenhof Nightshade and drybrushed to highlight each of the areas, finishing
with adding Nihilakh Oxide to the door. I would also like to add some rust
effect to the walls but need to pick up the correct technical paint. This
scheme should be easy enough to apply over the whole set and is relatively
effective, so I think the path forward is to keep batch painting the wall
segments. Let me know if you have any thoughts on the colour scheme or how the
terrain set will play in game!
Speaking of gaming, I’ve only played twice since the last blog post, both with Sisters. The first game I played was against Grey Knights at 1k. I tried an experiment with taking Vahl and Warsuits in Champions of Faith, but this unfortunately didn’t pan out. It obviously didn’t help that I failed almost all of my saves with them, but the bigger issue is that they just cannot be protected against deep strikers in such a small game. In the future, I think I’ll approach this matchup by loading up on screening resources and a few central damage pieces. Either this, or loading up on T10 hulls, which Grey Knights generally struggle to answer. I’ve been considering picking up a Castigator and I think it would be perfect for this matchup.
The second game I played was against Orks at 2k and went
considerably better. I’ve been struggling to manage this matchup, losing too
many resources on their Waaagh turn to effectively counterattack. I took
Bringers of Flame into the new Freebooterz detachment. I also tried out the new
Insidiants with a Palatine as a melee package to push back on their go turn.
This turned out to be very effective, with the unit taking out 10 Nobz and the
accompanying Warboss. Overall, I felt very happy with the list as a balance
between shooting, melee and objective play, so will likely roll out similar
lists in the future.
Returning to some thoughts on 11th edition, I thought it would be fun to brainstorm a release wave of 4 kits for each of my factions. Sisters honestly have a pretty complete range, and I’d generally prefer if they only got one kit, but if they were getting a full release I’d like to see:
- A Canoness or Palatine in Warsuit armour.
- A heavy assault vehicle, along the scale of a Land Raider.
- A refresh of the Crusader squad.
- Sisters mounted on bikes.
Emperor’s Children are more clear cut in terms of what I’d like them to receive:
- A generic leader for Flawless Blades.
- Phoenix Terminators, similar to Deathshroud.
- A Daemonette refresh (and the ability to take daemons in every list).
- A Dreadnought with heavy sonic weaponry.
Imperial Agents could do with quite a lot of stuff:
- A generic, multipart Inquisitor.
- Inquisitorial Storm Troopers.
- A multipart Rogue Trader.
- Imperial Navy troopers with heavy, anti-vehicle weapons.
Overall, given GW’s track record, I’m not confident in any
of this happening, but I do enjoy a bit of speculation, so let me know what you’d
like to see for your factions.
That wraps it up for this week! Let me know if you have any
thoughts you’d like to share. Otherwise, I hope you have a great fortnight of
your own hobby!
Much love,
Ben
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