The Beard Bunker

An 80th birthday present is not be the realm of book tokens or a pack of socks. With my mother reaching this milestone last year, and my father getting there this month, it seemed apt to go at least somewhat further. Making something felt more meaningful to me than an acquisition. But what to make? Then I hit upon the notion of making something for each of them that would symbolise what they'd chosen to do with their lives. Today's post will be about the process of making them. It's not exactly our usual content, but hopefully you'll enjoy the diversion. So, Mum's present first. She has been known to enjoy painting (this is an understatement) and has spent much of her life appreciating and aiding wildlife, so a painting representing that in some way felt right. However, to keep things a bit comedy (and within my skillset) I decided I would make the painting preposterously tiny, requiring a level of detail and precision entirely at odds with her preference for looser...

When we decided to hold the first ever Beard Bunker painting competition, we needed a neutral figure, since we all painted different armies, but we wanted someone suitably powerful and impressive.  So who better to choose than the intergalactic space warrior, leader of the Recyclons from Sigma IX, Count Binface! Ok, well, maybe that's true, or maybe with all the recent hype about him we found out about his official mini and decided it would be fun to all buy him and paint him and thus came up with the idea of a Beard Bunker painting competition.  Tomayto tomahto. If you have been living under a bin rock , and don't know who were are talking about (not unlikely for our non-British readers), the good old Beeb has done a good summary here . Tom Starting with myself as probably the least interesting entrant, it didn't really occur to me to do anything special here.  I just wanted a tiny Binface painted accurately to his r...

Paint the perfect tiny face in only twelve hours! Paint a hundred miniatures to tabletop standard in a day using this simple trick! Hone your tournament build by avoiding these underpowered units! Actually I'm fine, thanks. Online discourse has a tendency to cater to extremes, and I find this to be a common presence even with hobby content. Things are frequently either about getting the best possible result, or the fastest possible result, but here's the thing: neither of those approaches are actually fun . Unless you're a competition painter, optimising for extreme detail means dying of old age before you finish your army, and optimising for extreme speed will usually produce an army that you don't feel quite so satisfied with. The overwhelming majority of wargamers spend more time building and painting their miniatures than actually gaming with them on the tabletop, so it's pretty important to find what makes you enjoy the ride the most. I suppose partly it comes ...

When I was a kid, Forgeworld was churning out Imperial Guard tank variants and other vehicles in all sorts of delightful flavours.  At the time, I wasn’t collecting Guard, nor did I have the money, but I always looked at them with great envy.  By the time I finally started collecting Guard, many of those kits had become plastic GW models (Baneblade, Valkyrie, Hydra,...) but alas some of them disappeared from the lineup.  My all time top favourite of them, perhaps of any Forgeworld kits, is the Destroyer Tank Hunter.  And now I have one. Ethics Ok, let’s be clear, this is not a Forgeworld original.  I have looked, and I can see on eBay they go for £200-300 painted and I’m pretty sure those are also fake.  I could have converted my own out of a Leman Russ, I’ve seen people do it, but in general you don’t get that unique Destroyer Tank Hunter shape.  Freddy Mercury put it best: “Fat bottomed girls, you make the rockin' world go 'round.” I’ve also seen ple...

I find it amusing that it's taken us so long to complete a miniature city building project that it would have been possible to construct a  real building (albeit a small one) in the same time. Ladies and gentlefarts, may I present a project chronology: Christmas 2024: public consultation Sector Imperialis ruins reappear on Made to Order on the GW website, and the terrain-enthused subsection of our gaming group known as Deep Space Nein do something financially responsible. July 2025: planning permission granted A courier drops off some huge boxes at my house. Harvey, Drew, Tom and I consult our calendars looking for dates all four of us can do. We swear a bit. November 2025: main construction Construction of the main buildings is completed . April 2026: detailing The buildings and main sections of rubble are built and primed from plaster, sand, offcuts and plasticard. Tom points out we're going to need more rubble, and I realise I'm going to have to figure that out before o...

Phew, it’s been a while since I posted about the Nightfall 31st, the Eridani Sector’s answer to “What if Gaunt's Ghosts but scummier?” I’ve been painting a hell of a lot of Tyranids recently thanks to Charlie and I getting stuck into our joint army project , and eating so many greens has necessitated some dessert. What better way to beat the monotony of endless contrast and drybrushing than with some detailed cavalry and layering? I’ll also go over how I do the camo for the 31st, since that’s their distinctive thing and there are now... Three? Bunker dwellers who have wanted to do their own, be they for trophies or otherwise (Curse you Tom!). If you want trophies you've got to catch us first! A Note on Lore I’ve wanted some Rough Riders in the 31st for ages, canonically they’ve always had at least one squad per company, they’ve just always been relegated to the background since I’ve not had any miniatures to represent them. Nightfall Outrider squads, therefore, have always had ...

I’ve mentioned a few times in previous posts about being back into the Guard in a big way, and I wasn’t kidding.   To recap, I built my guard army originally as some infantry to accompany my Imperial Knights, back when soup was a thing.   Having a core of three infantry squads and two heavy weapon squads (plus a a few characters) gave a sense of scale to the Knights.  But having done the hard part of making a Guard force (the infantry) it seemed rude not to add a few more things so I could field the Guard on their own.  In came three Leman Russes, three Sentinels, and to try and bulk out the non-vehicle section without painting even more guardsmen, a squad of Bullgryns and a squad of Ratlings.  Suddenly I was sitting on 1,500 points. But now, starting to treat it as its own army project, the main issue was... its relative lack of infantry.  Frankly, this was frustrating given how much effort had gone into painting so many men, but Guard really do ...