monsters – Grimmleigh's Lab

The Workbench: Finished Models for September 13th, 2026

With last week being dominated by Trench Crusade, I thought it would be good to check back in with the overall backlog and see how things are moving along!

Black Templars Project

My friend Jackson is just about the best person you could hope to know. I’ve been fortunate to have quite a few friends like that, which is great for me! Jackson has a huge Black Templars army and I was happy to get in there and start painting them up. It’s funny, because this batch is the latest in a project that has been going on for about 7 months, I should probably post the rest of them sometime!

The Battle Standard Bearer is a fun one, still a little over-wrought with fiddly detail for my liking but I can’t deny the final product looks pretty spiffy. (Jackson has his own basing scheme that he likes to do, so that’s why the bases are unfinished)

I have no idea what this tank is, it’s a transport of some sort, but I stopped paying attention to what worked with Space Marines when Primaris stuff came out and made Rhinos useless. Getting rid of Rhinos would be like taking Space Mountain out of Disneyland. I’m against it. Still, the transport does look cool, it’s floaty, and reminds me of my Uncle’s El Camino.

Also not sure on the rest of these dudes, they have swords and shields, and I like knights. So I guess they are knights now? Fun to paint regardless.

And this last guy looks like a Chaplain. A big, grumpy chaplain.

Dracula’s America

Still plugging away at this warband, which I’ll be using Gangfight rules for when they’re ready to rock. There are two Draugur gunslingers and the vampire boss, all are 28mm metal casts from Northstar Military Figures in England. After painting a metric ton of Space Marines, I am really loving the opportunity to paint a classic feeling sculpt. I know they’re lacking in detail, but they just ooze personality, and I love knowing someone sculpted these by hand and cast them the old way. Not a knock against modern production methods, but I love the old method. It puts me in a very happy place!

Marvel Crisis Protocol: The Living Mummy

This guy makes me so damned happy. As previously discussed, I am a sucker for the old 70’s monster craze that hit Marvel and DC. The Living Mummy made his debut in I think 1974, and had sporadic releases for a few decades. He’s never been anything more than a minor character, so getting a really good miniature for him is part of why Marvel Crisis Protocol keeps me in its thrall. Fun stuff.

Warhammer 40,000: Orks

This is the project I’ll be working on the most for the next week or two, just getting the Orks from the new Armageddon boxed set finished. The New Antioch warband project from Trench Crusade was really satisfying to finish, and now I’m thinking that I’ll be approaching most of my projects like that. Just getting into a squad or two and getting them done, and being satisfied that they’re not sitting in the queue waiting forever for me to get to them.

I’m painting these guys up as Deathskulls, which will be fun since they steal everything they can get their hands on. That will help me keep off the boredom once the box set is done, I’ll be taking bits from other armies and adding them to kits to make it look like they’re just booting around with looted gear.

As for 11th edition 40k, I owe it a little debt for the freedom it gave me. I played a couple of games, bounced right off of the rules, the terrain layout, and the constant re-rolls (constant re-rolls feel like sloppy writing to me). This led me to pull out my old 4th edition books, and I remembered what I liked about 40k at the turn of the Milennium.

I like choice. I like fussing about with a list, buying wargear, building out the flavor of the unit. I could care less about meta, I just want to tell a story when I play a game. There is not a single person I know that’s interested in trying 4th out, so I’ll be doing anything I do with these minis on my own.

Which is freedom, frankly. 4th edition is far from perfect, but it’s fun for me, I know what I need to fix to make it work a little better, and I can build narrative lists that tell the kind of stories I want to tell with dice.

I have some Red Corsairs, Space Wolves, Inquisition, and Eldar Raiders that I’ll be building out to help tell those stories, but since this is just for me and NOT something that has to chase new rules collections, I’ll just be taking my time and getting this stuff together as the urge hits me.

After the orks, I’ll be tackling the new Trench Crusade two player box, and rounding out my Konflikt ’47 groups as well.

Until next time, friends! May the point of your brush remain ever sharp!

Miniatures

Warcrow: Orc Evoker

I’ve been continuing my obsessive build-out of my Warcrow Northern Tribes group, and the Evoker may end up being my favorite miniature of all time.

*Just like the Alborc mini from earlier this month, the Evoker was given a purple and red underpainting, which you can see peeking out from the finished paint job.*

It’s not just the details, which are plentiful. She has so many cool things on her kit, with fertility idols, vials, and other cool tools. She also looks mysterious and full of schemes.

*She’s literally pulling a spell out of a skull’s eye sockets. That wasn’t something I noticed until I started painting, which was a happy discovery!*

Also, the fact that the orcs just tromp around with giant tusks and bones strapped to them is amazing. I love it!

*The little details on her kit are fun, as well as the idols and statues that she’s standing on. I would love Corvus Belli to release some simple terrain bits that match this!*

I’ll have her favorite battle friend, a giant stone troll, ready soon. It’s a really fun model, and I can’t wait to show it off!

*Teapot? Check. Fertility idol? Check. Skulls and a mammoth tusk? You bet your ass!*

Miniatures, Warhammer 40,000

Let’s Throw That Color Scheme OUT THE WINDOW

When the 10th edition of Warhammer 40,000 came out, I fell into a trap that I tend to set for myself. I jumped head first into a horde army, knowing full well that my sensibilities are far more skirmish game sized.

I painted up a Carnifex to test a color scheme I had percolating in my head for Tyranids, and it’s pretty neat, right?

Thanks. I loved it. And then, 25 minis into that scheme, started to hate it. Loathe, even. The type of loathing that I tend to reserve for B Movie villains and bad barristas.

I moved on to another color scheme, and while it was spiffy to look at, I was faced with the same problem. Painting the same color scheme, over and over and over and over and over a hundred times is no longer something I have any patience for!

Slowly, something began to dawn on me. Why on earth was I painting a horde of space bugs a uniform color scheme? How about if the colors the bugs end up has more to do with what biomass they consumed than some Grand Color Scheme from the stars?

So, here we are, with my new, easy to follow and replicate color scheme for Tyranids. Yes, it’s ALL THE COLORS. And I think I love it, hahaha!

More to come as this project comes along!

Malifaux, Miniatures, skirmish games

Malifaux: Woe Crew

You know, the kind of guy that planned things and had a strategy for his blog posts would have realized that his December crew for Malifaux would have made an amazing post for Christmas day, but I am not, nor have I ever been, nor will I ever be that kind of guy… so here’s my Woe crew, led by the always charming Pandora!

This crew has everything. Freaky Scarecrows. Dememnted Teddy Bears. Evil, stabby babies.

Baby Kade was a challenge, babies are not a thing that come across a painting desk that often, and I wanted his skin tones to be smooth and buttery, which is kind of the opposite of how I paint!

Iggy leads three Aversions, and they’re a ton of fun! Puppets, brain removal, and nose picking, woohoo!

The sorrows are also pretty neat, and really lend themselves well to oil washes.

The Poltergeist is last of the traditional Woe crew, and I painted it up like the Aversions and Sorrows:

Now, because Baby Kade needs a teddy, one is allowed in this crew!

And we’ll round out the Woe crew with The Carver, one of my all-time favorite sculpts from Wyrd!

This crew has been successfully re-home through my wildly popular catch and release program, which allows me to keep painting miniatures without filling the house to divorce levels of crazy little figures.

Miniatures, Workbench

Malifaux: December Crew

I’ve had to institute a “catch and release” program to keep the massive collection of miniatures that I’m amassing in my studio from overwhelming my house, so I’ll be keeping a keeper warband from each game I like, and setting the others free via Ebay. Don’t shed a tear for me, though, the painting is almost 100% of what I love about this hobby, so being able to paint a group, capture it on film, and then move on to the next without stressing out about storage is pretty liberating!

This December crew has some older models from Wyrd, but I love the overall vibe of the crew! This Rasputina in particular is pretty spiffy, and captures a lot of that mid-2000-teens steampunk energy that Wyrd was leaning in to!

The rest of the crew is December Acolytes and monsters!

The Ice Gaimin are transparent blue plastic, so they look pretty neat when the light hits them right. As is the giant ice golem!

Snow Storm is one of my favorite models out there, it just screams menace and intrigue!

I’ll be sharing quite a bit of Malifaux over the months to come! It’s probably my favorite game IP, and I’ve been painting a literal metric ton of these amazing models!

Miniatures, Workbench

Tiny Orcs Still Go Dead ‘Ard!

More from the lab from the 15mm Fantasy project! I’ve been feeling a bit green lately, so I figured I would mark the occasion with a little greenskin action. And when I say little, I mean really little…

As I mentioned in a previous post, 15mm has become my Goldilocks scale for miniatures. Stuff just prints up lovely, and there’s a ton of options out there from some independent miniature companies.

This particular Green Menace started out as a subscription set of STL files I got from Forest Dragon Miniatures, but my doctor says I need to avoid printing with resin, so I have been ordering the rest of the army from a company on Etsy that does a pretty nice job!

The first finished fig is an Orc Warboss on a Wyvern, and I seriously love this mini! There’s a print defect on the wing, but he’s pretty small and it’s hardly noticeable:

I also finished up a small group of grunts, which were mounted to #10 washers for bases. Those work out to about 1/2″ wide, which allows a pretty solid balance between functionality and display needs. I originally had 3/4″ washers on there, but that made the miniatures hard to place on terrain!

I plan on using these guys for skirmish games, and there’s a travel board in the works that will have some pretty sweet terrain packed into it! More to come soon! (pay no attention to the ratboi in the basement!)

Miniatures, Workbench

One Scale to Rule them All

I have a problem. It’s not quite all consuming, yet… but I am finding myself more and more drawn to a philosophical conundrum that I’m afraid will never resolve itself in my mind.

That conundrum? I want to find my “Goldilocks” scale in miniature wargames. I am primarily a painter, and will more likely than not drop a smoke bomb and disappear into the ether if confronted with an actual game. So, the age-old adage that smaller (than GW) scaled minis won’t work for me doesn’t quite apply. I really don’t mind if most of the people I hang out with in the hobby sphere only game in Heroic 28mm scale, since I hardly play games in the first place!

Lately, the thought of smaller scale miniatures has been really appealing to me. They take up a lot less space, and there are plenty of options out there to fill out just about any genre for a collection. Sure, I can’t really put together an Age of Sigmar list from most of the options out there, but I can do plenty of fantasy stuff!

Now, the biggest question ends up being which scale works for me? With that in mind, I worked on four dwarf minis in different scales:

From left to right we have a 10mm, 15mm, and 20mm Dwarf from Forest Dragon Miniatures. The stalwart chap on the right is a standard GW Beardie Boy, which I have a metric butt-load of at the moment.

The classic Heroic 28s look great, have tons of detail, and are a lot of fun to paint. But they DO take up a bit of space, and they take some time to paint up, especially if you’re putting together regiment sized collections of figs.

20mm minis had me pretty pumped up for about a week, since they translate to roughly 72nd scale in models there are a lot of cool scenery and terrain options, just not much for fantasy. They also paint up a bit faster than the 28mm figs, but not so much faster that they have a clear advantage. Also, while taking up less room than the GW figs, it’s not that much less room!

Now, I have to be really honest right now. I’m already a sucker for 15mm, which you can see above. They’re small enough that they don’t take up much space, terrain is also pretty small, but they’re still big enough that they have a good amount of detail! Plus, they paint up pretty quickly because of the size. Downsides are that they are small enough that I’m concerned about eye strain, but at least I’ll go blind doing something constuctive!

the less said about 10mm the better, this scale broke my brain. Cool as hell to see put together in a battalion, but at 55 my eyes and hands just aren’t up to that challenge. I might come back to it later, because it’s really tempting from a storage perspective, but I did not enjoy the experience one bit!

My personal favorite after all of this comes down to 15mm! There’s a ton of options available, and I just love how a group of troops looks massed together. This group of Dwarf hunters would work well for just about any skirmish game, and I’ll be back in a bit with some tips on how to put together a group for rank and flank games!

What’s your favorite scale to work with? Let me know in the comments!

Miniatures, Workbench

Nighthaunt Project (part 2)

The second part of the Nighthaunt project is this pair of ponies, which turned out waaaay better than I was hoping for!

I used my airbrush to blend a nice earth tone brown into an eerie green, then pulled out some ethereal highlights with a light blue gray. Then some rust effects for the metal, and I’m calling them good to go!

Next up, I’ll share the leader of this motley group! I have a ton more Nighthaunt I should finish up, they really are a lot of fun!

Workbench

Beastmen for Warcry

Something fantastic happened when I went back into the behavior management field—- I am suddenly in a position to just paint for fun!

When my friend Brody was getting excited about some Beastmen for Warcry, I told him I wanted to paint them. I got to paint some cool minis, and there wasn’t any worry about commission. I was doing this for fun!

The Leader is a lot of fun, it’s just the standard build out of the box.

The Warcry cards have quite a few Ungor options, but the base Beastmen box only has Gors. I kitbashed the spear carrier to match the card, but the unit is a much beefier Gor unit.

The Citadel Contrast line really excell with units like these!

The Warcry cards call for two Ungor options. I took some old plastic bow bits and converted some tougher looking Gor versions.

I just love the facial expressions on these guys. They look like they take things way too seriously, especially for goat dudes. It was also a really great excuse to play with patina and corrosion on the gear!

I’m working on a Nighthaunt Warband for Warcry, too, and I’ll make sure to share the carnage when these two forces face off!

Workbench

The Wurmspat Warband

I have developed a deep, unflattering love for Warhammer Underworlds. It started about a year ago, but I denied my love and managed to fight it off. Then I met Fecula Flyblown and her boys, and I was lost for good:

I’ve always had a soft spot for the Nurgle stuff in Warhammer, but I really don’t want to paint a whole army of rotty stompers. But three figs? Sounds like a plan!