Hello there fellow spacefarers. Welcome back to Hammer the Backlog, the weekly, mostly Warhammer mini painting, productivity and accountability blog. You are probably just as shocked to hear this as I am, but we are well into December 2025, meaning Christmas break is rapidly approaching, and I have just two weeks left of Year 4, Quarter 2. Am I making the most of my freedom post Assault on Black Reach completion? Or am I squandering it? Read on to find out!
SCORECARD
Well look at that! For the first time in weeks we have a bit of red in the ledger. But why, you ask? Well, nothing to worry about. I’ve done plenty of painting and modelling this week. (Hobbying, as GW and certain influencers seem to insist on saying.) It’s just that all of that worek has been on getting my Arvus lighter to about half way painted.
Painting up my Predator tank a few months ago really reignited my excitement for doing vehicles. And since the Predator and Arvus are roughly comparable in terms of size and detail (roughly!), doing the Predator also taught me that a mid sized vehicle like this is a two week, or ten hammer the backlog points project.
Nothing much else to report on the scorecard this week, so let’s have a chat about the little spaceship that could.
(SOME OF) THIS WEEK’S MODEL
So, I am a lover of spaceships. Always have been. The Enterprise. The galoob micro machines star trek ships. The Normandy SR2. The X-Wing miniatures game. The Rocinante. The Star Trek ship battle board game I made as a kid and subjected my family to. The Event Horizon. Can’t beat a spaceship.
I am also a lifelong scale model enthusiast. I must have made 20 or 30 kits my youth. In my adult years, fear and perfectionism got in the way of me marking any kits. I’ve only made 3 real world scale models kits in the last 20 years. I’ve had a 1:48 Tamiya F-16 Kit for about 20 years that I am too afraid to make for fear of ruining.
That’s all changing thanks to painting up the Pred a few months back. I learned how to airbrush. Perfectly? No. But perfect isn’t the goal while I’m learning. And having to weeks to work on a spaceship kit, I decided to built it and treat it like a scale model rather than a Warhammer kit. That meant slightly different approaches to building, finishing, painting and detailing.
First of all, I fully built and painted the interior. I went for a grey primer, through a spray can, and then an Interior Green Air paint by Vallejo, through an airbrush of all things. SInce I’m going for a “scale model” vibe rather than a warhammer vibe, I went with interior green and brown leather details like a WW2 bomber or cargo plane.
I gave the interior an oil wash! AN OIL WASH! My days. It was done by mixing white spirits with brown and black oil paints, slushing it over the model, giving it about 30 minutes to dry a bit, then cleaning it up as best as I could. It’s a very realistic and subtle accumulation of dirt and grime, since it is is basically a real world analogy of the accumulation of oily dirt in the crevices, rather than a painted approximation.
I didn’t seal it with a varnish or clear coat since it would be all interior and never touched again once the model was built.
Speaking of building. My god. These modern kits. The tooling is soo good. They feel practically snap fit. After the last four years of fudging about with decades old kits trying to get them looking perfect, this stupid thing practically built itself.
Once I’d finished masking off the interior and filling the couple of gaps that I had caused myself by building out of sequence (in order to get the interior painted), I blasted the whole thing with a Mr. Surfacer spray can. I then sanded down the rough spots and hit it again.
Then the fun part. First of all, Mr Hobby Chrome all over the model. This is a super smooth, super fast drying paint that went on better than any metal I’ve ever airbrushed before. Mixed 50:50 with Mr Hobby levelling thinner. Once those two coats were dry, I went over some of the panels with Super Iron 2. These paints are not super different in tone, but having variety definitely takes away the simple, toy like look of the single metallic colour.
I had to turn off some lights to be able to see the difference in camera.
The next steps will be decals, gloss coat, all over oil wash, satin coat, warhammer details. Wish me luck next week!
SPEAKING OF NEXT WEEK…
So painting time for next week is pretty much going to be getting this ship finished.
But the rest of next week will likely be spent getting into the recording studio and doing the Quarter 2 Review and Quarter 3 planning session.
I am in the almost unique position of being equally excited / scared by both choices. So I did a hammer the backlog first and threw it up on Youtube as a poll.
Is that the decision made?
Watch the video next Thursday to find out!
Best of eggs!
Hammer the Backlog 
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