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Regular followers will know last year I purchased a mint, still in shrink wrap copy of Warhammer 40,000 2nd edition. So far I’ve painted all 20 Space Marines. With 40 Gretchin (known nowadays as Grots) and 20 Orks left to paint I thought I would try and concentrate on this project and finish it. Read on to see what’s going on in my brain today…

I really enjoy painting boxsets. In recent years I’ve completed Dreadfleet, Warhammer Quest, The Hobbit and Tyranid Attack. I would love to complete the 2nd edition boxset and then maybe paint the 6th edition boxset. If I could do this before the 7th edition box set is out that would be great. The problem is I don’t collect Dark Angels. I guess I could paint the Dark Angels as Ultramarines, but I don’t need anymore Terminators. Maybe I should just paint them as Dark Angels and treat them as allies for either my Ultramarines or Grey Knights.

Back to the Gretchin, these were quick to paint with a total of 17 steps. I painted a test piece and lined up all the paints in the order I painted the test piece. Then I looked at which paints/steps I could drop and combine to speed things up. This corner cutting will really help me get through all 40 of these little buggers. Initially I was going to batch paint all 40 in one go, but I’ve decided on four batches of ten models. Each batch paint will be slightly different as I move the cloth colours around to add a slightly random rag-tag look to the unit. 

As always, I have a question for the readers who made it this far. The box set includes a cardboard Ork Dreadnought (contemporarily known as a Deff Dread). I plan on playing through the three missions in the box with my painted models and I don’t want to cheapen the hard work with a cardboard cutout. So my question to you is do I try and source the original nostalgic Dreadnought model or shall I buy the awesome new plastic Deffdread model? I really like the Deffdread model but it might look out of place with my retro Orks and Gretchin. What would you do?

Garfy's Get a Grip - now available on ebay