About two months ago, I needed to paint a small unit of named character miniatures (5) for a small event I was going to participate in. And of course I then chose to start an entirely different project instead, because apparently, that's how I work.
So instead of 5 The Drowned Earth miniatures (which even included a minigun toting gorilla FFS!), I found myself really needing to paint a 'simpler' project; an entire regiment of Bloodletters. Yeah, I know...

I bought these about 10 years or so ago; as usual it was a second hand bargain, and they actually came with an MDF movement tray!
They were, however, not complete. Several arms and weapons were missing, and I had previously started on them, fitting the bodies that were lacking their weapons and hands with GW orc choppas, plastic rod and even a huge beastman axe that fit the bill. I had also based them, and that's where these bois stalled and were relegated to box-duty for the better part of a decade.
And now obviously was the perfect time for them to come out and play.
Do they fit into any army I currently have? No.
Do I have any purpose for them at all at this time? No.
Which I think is why I felt the urge to paint them all of a sudden; avoidance tactics at their finest for sure

I decided I did not want to spend long on them and with all the Youtube crazes and funny techniques doing the rounds I decided to give those a go. Kind of.
I did a black primer and a white zenithal spray, and then did the skintones with a red from the Armypainter Speedpaint range. That was not very pretty, but I did manage to plow on. Turns out I burnt out on them really quickly, and that's why it took a long time to finish them. I forced myself to keep going and this weekend, they were finally finished.
It's a combination of the speedpaint basecoat and regular washing and layering, all at a very brisk pace. I call this technique the Smack Twat, and if there's enough interest I suppose I will start my own Youtube channel and you can all become my patreons!

Joking aside though: these minis fought me every step of the way. I happen to have a smattering of each of the four Bloodletter iterations that GW has produced over the years, and these are by far the most fiddly and painter unfriendly and I'm glad they're finally done, even when the results are nothing to write home about..
Took me long enough for a quick distraction/side project...
So; on to the pics:

All of them on the movement tray

All of them without the tray. This is actually quite handy; I can now use them for both WHFB (or equivalent) and 40K (or equivalent). I even took this into account when basing them.
I base all of my scifi minis in the same style: a barren wasteland type of base, with some dead vegetation, and I do the same for my fantasy miniatures: a more verdant type of base, with both green static grass and mixed coloured flocking.
So I did their individual bases in the scifi theme, and the tray in the fantasy theme. Works really well together too


And what's that black and red stuff on the tray you ask? In a nod to the White Dwarf battlereports of yesteryear, I paint every movement tray of my fantasy units with their banner, so they can be easily identified on the field of battle, even when most of the unit has died already.
Truth be told; most of the times the tray will be removed long before it will be completely visible, but I like the idea, even when I'm the only one who knows (and now you lot too, obviously

).

This one got a Khorne symbol, which was complicated a bit by the circular openings of the tray (and the very thick paint
jobglob underneath which I could not remove); all my other movement trays simply have a full square to paint unit symbols on, like this Night Goblin one:

But I digress...
The more astute (or obsessed) amongst you might have noticed that the unit is 15 daemons strong, but the tray has 16 slots!
When I started out, I did not care about the one missing individual, but the more the unit neared completion, the more I realized I did not want to do this again, not even with just one miniature and the missing slot was kind of bugging me at this point.
So, instead of going onto the web and sourcing one additional Bloodletter and painting it exactly like its colleagues, as any responsible general would do, I did not. Instead I decided, after they were done, to create a simple unit filler of a single base: a pile of skulls with a Khorne symbol above it.
And this is what I came up with in about 30 frantic minutes: a framework of sprue cut-offs, a banner pole consisting of some 40K bits and plastic rod, a layer of greenstuff over the sprue bits and a few dozen skulls pressed into it.
It still needs paint, obviously, but this should be a really simple affair, and I'm actually quite chuffed with how it came out. And it can double as an objective counter too!

