The Hammers of Sigmar are not a ‘serious’ army for me – I really only started them because I wanted to paint up Yndrasta and she sort of came with an entire Spearhead box set. However, the Hammers are, in a happy coincidence, one of the featured Stormhosts in the Thondia campaign which I think I am working towards building up forces for, so I will toodle along with them for a short while before the new edition of Age of Sigmar comes out – at which point I might have a deep moral think and start a force of Hallowed Knights with the new miniatures.

That is all for the future though. For now… some new Hammers of Sigmar models!

The models in this little group of reinforcements were very cunningly selected to bulk out the force but with the least amount of painting effort. First up was something I have always wanted to do but never quite got round to – a battery of Celestar Ballistae, headed up by a Lord-Ordinator.

We’ll ignore the fact that, a week or so after I picked up these models, GW announced they would be leaving the game – a big problem for Matched Play gamers, a minor inconvenience to those of us who are deep into Narrative Play.

These were actually the most time-consuming models of the entire group as those padded tabards disrupted the ‘flow’ of painting, as did the Ballistae themselves and the Lord-Ordinator, being a character, would always have a few more details than regular troops to deal with.

Still, they turned out okay, were not too much of a time sink, and easily compensated for by the next unit – a group of six Annihilators.

I think I am going to officially declare that Annihilators armed with Grand Hammers (thus avoiding the shields) are pretty much the fastest models to paint for the Stormcasts. No cloaks, no shield, nothing to disrupt the flow of painting steps, they are even faster to do than the old Retributors. A full five star rating here to get elite troops onto the table superfast.

I knew the Praetors would be a slight pain because of their cloaks (and I am still not really happy with the White Scar/Apothecary White/White Scar approach I am using for these – it is not slow, but still a bit fiddly, and the final result is… well, let’s say it looks ‘army ready’ rather than any great display of art.

Still, with only three of them to do, it was not much of a chore. I have some Vigilors coming up in the near future and, with ten of them in a unit, I am not massively looking forward to that…

With those done, I have some (literal) trees on the painting table right now, and then I am going to be diving back into the Hammers of Sigmar to pad them out a little more before I finish this army off with a unit each of Vindictors and Vigilors – neither of the latter are on the painting schedule as yet but I am going to see if I can properly finish this Stormhost off before the new edition so I am ready to embark on all things Hallowed Knight and Skaven…