The last couple of months have been rough for my creativity. I’d done comparatively little “hobby”, i.e. building and painting miniatures, despite having a massive backlog of stuff to work on. I had just lost a huge amount of my motivation and with everything else that was going on, was struggling to get it back and keep on keeping on with everything else.

Last Thursday, I played the 2016 Fantasy Flight Games DOOM board game with my dad. It’s a great game, and it contains thirty-two miniatures of assorted daemons from the 2016 DOOM remake (and four marines carrying silly weapons). It’s sat unpainted since I bought it at Salute 2017.

On Saturday, I bought some new Necron models as a reward for having started counselling and as I finished painting them I felt overwhelmed with creative possibilities in a way I haven’t in weeks. So I grabbed a handful of the imp models and started painting. And then I grabbed some more. And some more….

A lot of my non-work time recently has been consumed with keeping on top of getting stuff out the door for Fleet Combat and now that all the US orders are out it’s given me a little bit of breathing space. Which immediately got sunk into painting the daemons from DOOM. Many of the models almost felt like they painted themselves. They’ve got lovely amounts of detail that take inks and washes amazingly well and they’re largely a single colour which made the process “spray base coat, apply wash, quick detail pass, done”.

Others were more complicated. The Mancubi and Possessed Soldiers had complex paint jobs with a large amount of hand painting involves (the Possessed Soldiers were effectively entirely hand painted after the initial undercoat). The soldiers were also a rare opportunity to introduce some variability into it. Being vaguely human I attempted to introduce some variation of skin tone into them and my one regret was not doing more variation there.

The Cyberdemon was a boatload of fun too, especially the International Rescue Orange railgun arm. The combination of the gnarly organic parts riddled through with mechanical components was a joy to paint and it’s still one of my favourite models I’ve painted in recent years.

The easiest models in the box to paint were definitely the Barons of Hell. I regret not taking more photos but the whole process took about thirty minutes. Prime grey, pre-shade white, paint red, wash with ink, horns brown, teeth and claws white, hooves bone, done. And yet I think they look amazing.

One persistent problem I had whilst working on this project though was figuring out what colour to paint stuff. DOOM 2016 is an amazingly beautiful game, but it’s very atmospheric. That’s a polite way of saying it’s either very dark or there’s a ton of coloured light. Trying to figure out what colour to paint a tiny PVC model to look like what it looks on screen was a nightmare. So in some cases like with the Pinky and the Cacodaemon I took some liberties.

However, four days after I started all thirty six miniatures are complete. In a few days they’ll get some varnish once the paint has had a chance to set up, and I’ll neaten up all the bases. At some point I need to figure out how I’m going to display them all but that’s a problem for future Connor. I also want to get some decent photos of the miniatures, and properly hone my techniques for doing that.

In the meantime, I’m going to start tackling some more of my backlog. So expect some more miniatures oriented blog posts in the coming weeks.