The Stormcursed Eternals
“Introducing the Marlboro red smoking crappy boyfriends of the mortal realms”
The alpha and the omega. The beginning of the end. Sigmar’s holy warriors have fought endlessly for millenia. Each rebirth removing more and more of their humanity (but in a cool way).
Stormcast! Why paint the space marines of ye olden times?
Well, having impulse bought a Dominion box set somewhere around the original release. I waited a cool year until I cracked that sweet plastic wrapper. I had really bought it for the Orcs (still unpainted) and thought I would probably sell/hide/give away the stormbros.
But inspired by a friend of mine @bearded_painting and having watched one too many @squidmarminiatures challenge videos I decided to try and paint a small army in under 5 days. There were many more orcs than stormcucks and so I decided to bit the bullet and paint the tinfoil hammer bridge.
So is speed painting an army like in the videos?
Unsurprisingly, it turns out that whilst this is possible, it is kind of rough. Like Micky Rourke in the Wrestler. Rough.
Cutting, building, basing and attempting to paint (with any kind of consistency) 20+ models in 3 days dispelled any secretly held notions that I might become a commission painter.
To add to proceedings – I had a notion to paint every one of the miniatures bareheaded and with a bunch of small, tasteful kitbashes and conversions to make them into “Stormcursed”. The final output was a mixed bag:
Positives: I went really HAM (urban dictionary can explain this acronym) on the glowing bad person weapons – shout out to Paulo (and Darren) over at MEX podcast for telling to just “commit to airbrush”. The weapons results ended up looking striking – IMHO.
Negatives: The minis overall were drab, with very plain basing and almost no embellishments. I was all kinds of exhausted and had basically ignored my family for 3 days over the Christmas break.
But, for the first time ever, I had 500 – 650 pts of playable Age of Sigmar toys.
It was an awesome feeling.
“Painted” in the loosest sense of the word. Photographed with a potato cam.
Smug with the feeling of having finally painted some units. I promptly put them all in a box and didn’t touch them again for over a year.
Until…
One Page Rules stormed into my life.
Starting at the backs of this shittily painted gang of Stormy Daniels (group noun for stormcursed), I decided:
a) it was awesome that they were being used and
b) I would immediately try and find some time to paint them a tiny bit better.
My newest painting flex is the humble purple low light. It makes almost anything look better. It gives volume, draws thine eye and generally makes everything look a bit less rubbish.
A bit of freehand, some purple and add a tuft and we are away.
Hopefully, you can see what a difference adding a bit of depth can make. Adding purple to the recesses and picking out the raised areas adds a bit more visual interest alongside all the glowing bits.
Hello Angel! Oops sorry, didn’t spot your skull stick, glowing sword and fangs…I will just be on my way
I went back and finally neatened up the glow effects on Yndrasta wings. She really is a magnificent model and I was kind of put out to have to speed paint her the first time. I think she works really well as an ambiguously vampiric champion and was an absolute surgeon on the table (in the OPR games we used her in).
Things were really heating up at the Lumberjack’s guild AGM.
A quick pass on the axe wielding Palladin-whatever-they-are-called-ationists and the big hitters were done.
A final family group shot for the Christmas newsletter.
“Not too shit for a 3 day speed paint + 1 evening of touch-ups. ”
Conclusion
Yes, it is possible to paint an army in under 5 days. It makes you feel competent and smug if you don’t look too closely or compare them to anything else you have ever painted. Would I do something dumb like this again? I kind of already have – but that is for another post.
Finally, I don’t think Stormcast are entirely unlikeable. Their lore is creep AF, and even if you are only in it for the hammer bros and badass angel you are getting something out of it.
I hope you enjoyed reading.
Stay shameful,
