The Beard Bunker

I may have moaned on the Bunker about how much I hate painting Guard infantry.  I have definitely moaned to my fellow Bunkerites about it in person, extensively.  But I worked out a method to paint them moderately quickly, and churned out three infantry squads, a command squad and a couple of heavy weapon squads.  Grudgeingly.  I upped my “infantry” quota with some more interesting Ratlings and Ogryns, although it was pointed out to me that this really doesn't count.  And then the new Caidans came out and they look gorgeous and I love them and…  they’re so much more difficult to paint . I got my way through one command squad to give Captain Founder a much deserved glow-up, and got as far as building and spraying one infantry squad and just burned out, as the layers and layers of Castellan Green I had to apply just burned out my already tenuous enthusiasm.  I think I got as far as painting the green on one dude.  Hobby enthusiasm moved on, and I’ve...

A simple little guide for taking relatively good quality photos of your minis with minimal effort and resources.  This isn’t a guide for photography experts, it’s for anyone and everyone using only things you already have in your home (eat your heart out Blue Peter). Things you will need: A few sheets of plain paper Your model painting lamp A moderately decent phone or digital camera A computer Why? Why bother to take photos?  Well, we all live online these days and sharing photos with your friends (and/or followers?) is a great little source of micro-endorphins, and the desire for those is a great motivator to get models finished.  Personally I’m not on Instagram or whatever, so I just share photos with my friends on WhatsApp. Model backdrop First thing to set up it your backdrop.  I use a few sheets of plain white printer paper (multiple sheets because one sheet is a little too transparent).  Plain black paper is often better, depending on the colours of the m...

What is an adult? Ordinarily I'd say it's a person of any age who has both empathy and responsibility. What is an old person? I'm starting to suspect it's someone for whom the passage of time has become frighteningly fast. As a child, the timescales on which adults do things seems like watching an ent moot deliberating over whether to sack Isengard. All of which is ambling its way to the conclusion that I have spent about two months making an 8-part series on producing a modular urban terrain set for Warhammer 40,000, and those two months somehow stretch from now (the end point) to May 2021 (the start). Why did it take so long? Primarily because in 2021, almost all my terrain projects were solo efforts. Since then we have learned the value of team play, and that's what finally got this large and repetitive urban project to bear concrete fruit. 6'x4' of modular paving Ooooo, paving. Mmmmmm, beige.  It feels very, very good to have got this done, since drybrus...

Charlie: We’ve all imagined having actual glass in the tiny plastic windows of our ruined dollhouses. What a fun idea! How utterly impractical! The idea is sensibly consigned to the most conceptual of wishlists and left there to rot next to concepts like successfully painting one’s entire backlog. But in the distant, mist-wreathed valleys of Snowdonia, there is a man - well, a collection of 52 caffeine-addled squirrels in a trench coat with the name of a man - who wanted to know: just how does one make stained glass windows for 40K ruins? That squirrel collective is the lovely Boris, one of the most far-flung members of our gaming group. At any given moment, one of the squirrels can have an idea that sets off a hyperfocus cascade. In today’s guest post, he is here to explain what he did and how he did it. We are not asking why he did it because the answer will be a sleep-deprived eye twitch and a giggle. We are simply here to enjoy and understand the fruits of his labours. Boris: ...

A disturbingly long time ago, I was very excited to finally be owning an army I had wanted since I was ten years old . The full story of my adoration of this army is contained in that link so feel free to join me in misty eyed reminiscence, but suffice to say, I owned damn near the entire third company of the Blood Angels. Then something both wonderous and terrible happened: Primaris. The new primaris marines were so gorgeous . The sculpts were great, the scale was finally correct, everything was great... except that my firstborn lads looked like children next to them. And at the time? There wasn't a "primaris army", it was more like auxilliaries. Not enough to excite me. Plus, y'know, I'd painted a 100+ Bangles... that's a lot of Bangles... So I resigned myself to my beautiful boys being a relic of the past and got on with other projects.  [Cue Galadriel voice] But then time passed, and Primaris got more and more units and felt more and more like a real army....

Who's got John Williams on in the background? Just me? Fast terrain projects seem to be becoming a bit of a specialty of ours. About a year ago, Charlie, Drew and I went in for a pair of boxes of boarding action terrain and painted it as a team . It was a success and renewed my own enthusiasm for terrain projects. I previously completed a very rustic non-imperial human settlement we lovingly dubbed Shit Town , but was annoyed at how interactive the terrain set wasn’t: while it was effective at blocking lines of sight, looking thematic and framing a board of miniatures well, the buildings were essentially impassable obstacles that models could not easily interact with, due to being closed off with awkward domed roofs. A normal response might have been to not sweat it, to enjoy the terrain I had, and to consider a future project in vein other than outer-rim settlement. Nonsense. The Necromunda team are putting out some absolutely glorious terrain, and one set we had all admired at di...