Given how dark the days are at the moment, it's far too early (or late) to be talking about 'spring cleaning'. Nevertheless, while tidying up some draft posts at the start of the week, I realised there were a few 'stubs' for standalone projects that I hadn't got around to sharing. Rather than writing them up individually, I thought I'd pull them together into on look over a wee collection of marvellous miscellany.
First up is a Space Ork Tin Borg from Meridian Miniatures.
I picked it up back around April time because it hit all the right early 40k nostalgia vibes for me. Sculpted by Kevin Adams, the mini came in three pieces, (body, left arm and right arm) and was part of a limited casting run in resin. It required almost no clean up whatsoever other than removing casting tabs and a tiny amount of flash in a couple of places. Assembly took a matter of minutes and most of that was me drilling out the barrel of the shoota. Although no longer available individually, a set of five cast in metal are currently up for order, and look likely to ship in January 2026.
When it came to painting the Tin Borg, I couldn't resist drawing inspiration from the Blood Angels that adorn the cover of the Warhammer 40,000 2nd edition box. In my mind, the Tin Borg was built on Armageddon during Ghazghkull's first invasion of the planet and the Mekboy who put it together has been inspired by the crimson livery of the Space Marines he's seen descend from the heavens and blunt the Ork's attacks. The flames around the oversized pauldrons of the Tin Borg were taken from an Aeronautica Imperialis decal sheet and it took quite a few applications of Microsol to get them to lie flat, but I it was definitely worth the extra effort to get the finished mini.
Up next is a mini from Fenris Games:
Based on the style of his armour, weaponry and clothing, I ultimately decided to paint Roykius as one of the feared 'Belliger Samnis' or Warrior Samnites who lived in south-central Italy and gave the Roman republic such a run for their money in the last couple of centuries BC.
Dressed in a simple pale blue tunic, armoured with a bronze cardiophylax (heart protector) and Chalcidian style helm and armed with a xiphos (a double edged, one handed sword) and caestūs (a leather gauntlet augmented with metal plates), Roykius is out to ensure that someone has a bad day and he'd definitely prefer it wasn't him.
Painting Roykius was a lot of fun, the simpler sculpt offering a nice balance of details that I could focus in on while not being too cluttered overall.
Much of the artwork depicting Samnite warriors that I found while I was doing my research depicted them in pale blue tunics with brighter colour accents around the trim and across the shoulders. I opted to lean into simplicity, going for a blue on blue design that wouldn't distract from the rest of the mini. I think the most enjoyable aspect of painting Roykius was working up the polished bronze of his cardiophylax and helm. The Samnites are believed to have been quite a militaristic society, and I wanted to reflect that by having his wargear look clean and well maintained.
Jumping from antiquity to the future again is an Anvil Industry Light Assault Mech:
The Light Assault Mech is part of Anvil's print on demand range, which brings a curated selection of their digital designs to those without 3d-printers. Consisting of 12 printed components (body, arms, waist/pelvis, hips, legs, feet and two weapon options - more on them in a mo!) the kit comes with all the supports removed and goes together very nicely. The separate parts of the waist, legs and feet means there's scope for different posing if youre so inclined, though I went for a more static pose on mine.
This mini has been lurking in my pile of opportunity for quite a while, but the perfect opportunity to slap some paint on it came after a wee chat with @Mol on Instagram about a mech focused tabletop game called Scrap Metal
that he's working on. The game is miniatures agnostic (any appropriately mechanical mini on a 60mm base will work) and invites players to tell the stories of human "jockeys" and their metallic mounts on the ragged edges of charted space.
In addition to an energy weapon, the Light Assault Mech comes with an autocannon as well, and since the two are fully interchangeable even after assembly thanks to the clever design of the kit, so I painted up both options for tactical flexibility on the frontier. Speaking of frontiers, I found a fantastic video on painting alien bases in the ever helpful Hobby Cheating series by Vince Venturella which proved incredibly helpful in figuring out a suitably exotic scheme for the Mech's base.
Part of another limited casting run, I grabbed the Dead Knight back in early 2024, but it wasn't until spring of this year that I figured out what I wanted to do with him. Heavily inspired by @unwantedleg's gloriously gruesome 'fools' on Instagram, it occured to me that it's not entirely clear what's armour and what's organic so U thought I'd lean into this and paint the Dead Knight look like a flayed body. This was particularly interesting as normally I try to figure out how I'm going to paint minis in advance, but in this case I just winged it.
I’m really pleased with how this wee quartet of minis turned out. Each one offered an opportunity to do something a bit different, but the one thing they have in common is that more than anything else, painting them was great fun - which is just as well cause I've a few more miscellaneous minis planned for the new year.
Until next time though, as always, thanks for reading and happy hobbying!
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