My Top 12 of 2022

It's that time of the year again, so fire up Paul Hardcastle's The Wizard and read on!

Another year, another bunch of minis and scenery have passed across my desk (and the kitchen table, depending on how messy the spare room was at the time). Despite my output dropping towards the end of the year thanks to me getting a job, I still managed a whopping 102 posts in 2022 which totals, to use the technical term, a shedload of figures. Talking of jobs, let's take a second to mull the irony that I now have enough disposable income to buy more figures and paint, but I have less time and am too knackered to actually do anything with them. Oh, work, how I missed you...

But without further ado, here's my Top 12 of 2022:

12: Space Station Zero

The game that finally answered Alicia's question "you're really good at painting these things, but what are you going to do with them?", Space Station Zero is a ton of fun despite my original seven-member pirate crew being reduced to two — one of which is now a plant — by aliens, black holes, mutagenic gas and environmental hazards. Whether Packman and Axon last much longer remains to be seen, i.e. as soon as I get the scenery done for the next mission.

11: Masque of the Killing Joke

I bought the Harlequins box set and put it to one side as I thought I could never paint the intricate diamonds and stripes that these murder clowns are famous for sporting. But then inspiration hit and I painted them as the Joker, Harley Quinn and four gang members. Bright, colourful, dynamic, and filled with an overwhelming desire to kill anything that moves, they were a pain to paint but look great.

10: Fungal Queen

At the time I painted her, the Fungal Queen was the biggest mini I'd slapped Vallejo all over. A great sculpt by Reaper, she spent a while in the Magical Box of Unloved Lead until I freed her and set about trying to make her as mushroom-y as possible. I was very happy at the result, and I also had a lot of fun making her base, for which I even sculpted my own mushrooms out of greenstuff and wire.

9: Lordsguard

Etsy has become the main benefactor of my weekly pay, and the Lordsguard figures — part of the Calden Keep range by Bestarium Miniatures — are a good example of why I spend so much time and money searching through the thousands of 3D prints on the site. As I said in my original post, this is what Chaos should look like. There are lots more Calden Keep figures to come, so stay tuned!

8: Amazon Warriors

I don't own an actual army thanks to my aversion to painting a ton of figures the same colours over and over, but I made an exception for these Amazon warriors by RBJ Games. I saw them on Kickstarter and pledged enough dough to get the War Party, and I was glad I did. The Command Group, the top photo, has four really great sculpts and gives a bit of a better opportunity for painting. The warriors below are just as cool-looking and the red and black scheme suits them well. I was really pleased with how I painted them, and as I said back in June, I'd happily surrender to this army.

7: MDF buildings

I thought I made all these last year, but no! 'Twas earlier this year that I set about painting a bunch of MDF buildings for my zombie apocalypse, and I had an absolute blast making and detailing them. They're easy to assemble and once glued together I went to town (no pun intended) with paint, tufts and signage to make enough buildings for my Zombietown.

6: Sci-fi minis

2022 may go down in my personal history as "the year I discovered sci-fi minis don't have to be 40k". I went on a real kick of painting space-age figures in the summer, and loved doing all of them. Robots, humans and aliens all fell victim to my brushes and I built up a decent collection in no time.

5: Squealers

I found these chaps on Kickstarter and immediately pledged money to get hold of them. They're awesome little sculpts by RBJ Games and I love how they're a great cross between slightly cartoonish and deadly serious. Keeping to a set palette, I painted them over a couple of weeks and they turned out looking great.

4: Chaos Renegades

What's not to love? Classic late-80s Citadel minis, these guys are among the best sculpts of the Oldhammer period. Twisted and mutated by the Warp, they're so much better than the identical ranks of World Eaters and Thousand Sons made today. With this being Oldhammer, colour schemes are basically whatever you fancy, so I went as 80s as I could with them.

3: Vandorendra, Snake Demon

I painted Van for the Fembruary challenge, and she certainly was a challenge to paint. Sculptor Julie Guthrie produced this fantastic figure who could easily fit into a Slaanesh army, and I used pink and blue as a homage to the Prince of Darkness' followers. I'm particularly happy with Van's skin tones, which came out really well.

2: Possessed Chaos Dreadnought

Monster May(hem) has always challenged me to up my game, and this year it pushed me to attempt something I don't do that often: take two models and smush them together to make something new. The fact that the first-edition Dreadnought and second-edition Keeper of Secrets are both large metal models upped the "how the hell do I do this?" factor but I persevered, using lots of greenstuff and superglue to get the look I wanted. Add a suitably Slaanesh paint scheme and a dead Blood Angel, and voila! A conversion that you could mug someone with.

1: Queen of Hell

The Queen of Hell was painted for Monster May(hem) back in — you guessed it — May. She's my No1 for 2022 because everything worked first time, from the primer and basecoats right through to the shading, highlighting and layering. Even her base came out looking way better than I hoped. She really is a stunning sculpt by Reaper, and her paintjob brings out all her daemonic majesty.

Feel free to chime in in the comments about my choices! And talking of comments, I really have to catch up commenting on other blogs as well as replying to comments on this one. Happy 2023, everyone!