Strategic Painting: A History
Strategic Painting was founded back in 2015 when Smaugonite was in London and wanting to channel a more creative outlook on his hobby. He decided that the best route would be an Instagram account which he could post photos of the models he was painting at the time. In its early days, Strategic Painting had a very simple logo, and was only aimed to be a personal blog for one young hobbyist to showcase his collections!
The very first post on Strategic Painting Smaugonite put up, was of a Tau Riptide and was taken in his room with an iPhone 5 camera, and him holding it by the base; fingers and thumbs being on show with no care in the world!! Since then, we have developed, got a studio space for more professional photography of the collections, complete with permanent displays and gaming tables!
However, Smaugonite’s hobby of painting Games Workshop miniatures started many years before when he ‘dunked’ a Gandalf the Grey model in a Codex Grey paint pot. First model: Complete!
That being said, the first model Smaugonite showcases as the “first” fully painted model, is a High Elf; who was named Palneir. As Palneir is painted with at least three colours and based, he is tournament ready and therefore counts more than the single colour Gandalf! For a while, The Lord of the Rings was the only game system from Games Workshop that Smaugonite played. He used to bring models in to his school so that he and a few friends could spend their lunchtimes, free periods and any other free time playing as many games as possible!
Originally Smaugonite wanted to stay with Middle Earth, and as the gaming system looked as if the end was coming, the miraculous reinvigorated love for the game came back with the release of the Hobbit trilogy. From this, the possibilities seemed endless! Would we get a Smaug model?! Would we get a Erebor scenery piece?! It seemed that anything could happen! And then... IT DID! Games Workshop started to create models that were key in the films, like Bard the Bowman and Radagast the Brown, iconically showing off the themes that Luke Evans and Sylvester McCoy portrayed in their characters, and Radagast’s model included Sebastian the hedgehog too! Alongside the original Smaug model, Bard played loads of games.. and it was awesome; surely it couldn't have been made any more awesome.. could it!?
Then, three days after Smaugonite’s 20th Birthday, Smaug himself was put up for Pre-Order on Games Workshops website; which the first run was announced that it was limited to only 500 of this model.. Smaugonite knew he had to be one of the lucky ones and get this ordered before it sold out. However; there was one problem. At this point Games Workshop’s pre-orders went live on a Friday evening at 19:00, and it just so happened that Smaugonite was travelling up north to visit his parents and would be on a train at this time. He had to pray to every god he could think of that he wouldn’t be going through a tunnel or out of signal of his phone so that he could get his preorder in as soon as the clock hit 19:00! Everything his hobby had been building up to had lead to this moment, from having 3 Mumakil to having 9 Ring Wraiths on Fellbeasts; it all would be made complete with having the chiefest and greatest calamity of the age!
... and then, the stars aligned...!
As you can imagine the release of Smaug and the possibilities of having this magnificent miniature for the tabletop meant that Smaugonite could defeat his opponents with ease! (Not to mention, give him the inspiration for what came to be his nickname!) Smaug proved to be the biggest model Smaugonite had ever built (so far... we'll get to that!), and would be such a labour of love to him that he would spend hours and hours trying to perfect his painting and skills to complete such a wonderful miniature.
Currently, the running total of hours that Smaugonite has spent on Smaug stands at 124 hours and he’s still not fully complete! Soon, we will upload a picture of Smaug as he is at the moment, but for now we have included some close ups of the Arkenstone and the One Ring that feature on Smaug’s base! (and yes, it took Smaugonite longer than he’s proud of to find the One Ring, due to it being such a small detail amidst all the gold!)
After getting Smaug to a level that Smaugonite was happy with he was put onto the Gaming Table and obliterated everyone with ease! After load of games with Smaug, Smaugonite fancied another challenge, and the friends he was spending time with at Games Workshop: Covent Garden all were pushing him towards Warhammer 40,000. All Smaugonite needed to decide was what army? It took a few days of research and planning, but the army he chose... was Dark Eldar! Smaugonite chose these because he like the look of the Venom Transport and the old Archon model, not to mention the 7th Edition Spliter Rule! To develop his skills, and also as Smaugonite had taken a fancy to the Harlequins and their God; Cegorach, he decided that he would paint his Dark Eldar in a black and red scheme, with the red being diamond freehand. A great miniature Smaugonite decided he wanted to add to his collection was the Dark Eldar Razorwing, which he had been mustering up the courage to tackle and paint freehand diamonds on to, after practicing on a smaller Venom transport. However; after partying and drinking for a friends birthday, Smaugonite must have thought ‘no time like the present!’, and he woke up the next morning to this:
OK, so it wasn’t fully completed like the photo above, but the diamonds have only been slightly highlighted since that night, the edge highlighting and the pilot have all been done since; when Smaugonite was sober! But it gave him the confidence to try and tackle other models with this same scheme, which then lead to Smaugonite moving on to the Eldar with the wraith models, allowing for further creativity when it comes to painting blank panels with freehand.
As every other hobbyist out there may know, the hobby doesn’t end with just one army, and as a natural progression into Smaugonite’s hobby came when Games Workshop released the Tau Stormsurge which he really liked the look of! And who wouldn’t?! A massive gun suit with a gun so large it had to be mounted on the shoulder?! With this newfound love for Tau, Smaugonite then expanded his collection to grow this army to his first 5,000 point army. Nothing suited the army better than Forge World’s Manta, or even the Tiger Sharks, adding points and power to an already powerful army! Again, the stars then aligned... with the unexpected release of...
THE TA’UNAR SUPREMACY SUIT!
Oh, we know. HOW AWESOME IS THAT?! Now that is a cool miniature, if it can indeed be called a ‘miniature’! From here, the ‘bigger is better’ rule suddenly started to make sense to Smaugonite.. why bother constantly bringing a knife to a gun fight, why not bring a BIG gun?! After a few false starts (looking at you Astra Militarum...) Smaugonite finally hit his stride and found that the best thing he could put his pocket money towards would be the Warlord Titan from Forge World...
And that is exactly what he did.
After saving for nearly a year, and buying the weapons and his favourite head option separately he finally had managed to get the money together to invest in the best thing that the Imperium could take...
Based on a well known artwork of a Princep and his Warlord, this photo is one of our favourites of the old paint scheme that Molliret Ad Mortem (The Emperor of Death) had. After a while, Smaugonite grew his Titan Maniple to a Warlord, Reaver and a Warhound, all painted in a Legio Ulricon (red and black) scheme!
As Strategic Painting started to grow, Smaugonite was joined by his two best friends: Minion, and Croydon; who both took to the page with their own approaches. Croydon joined the hobby with the release of Dark Imperium, and Minion has been in the hobby nearly as long as Smaugonite! Every so often, you may catch us at Warhammer World, where we love to hang out for a game and a meal, or take a nice stroll through the exhibition. One of the most fond Team moments was when Croydon, Minion and Smaugonite visited and decided to go around the exhibition; and after spending a good amount of time searching, they found the elusive assassin on the huge diorama! (The jury is still out on who actually found it first, but Smaugonite insists it was him!) When you find this sneaky hidden assassin you win yourself a very own assassin model, and here the three of us are after finding him:
Back to the Strategic Painting collections!
It would be a while before Smaugonite developed the Titan Maniple to what they are today, and in the meantime it would be the Legio Custodes that would steal his attention, and for nearly two years straight Smaugonite focussed solely on developing his love for an army that was finally getting its time being given new models from Forge World and Games Workshop! It also helped that The Master of Mankind by Aaron Dembski-Bowden had just been released and peaked Smaugonites interest in creating a force that would be something right off the pages of this amazing novel! We could be wrong, but we think Smaugonite has one of the worlds largest collection of Custodes Miniatures in his army (not all of them are pictured here as since this photo a few more Shield Captains and a 10 man Hetaeron Guard have also been added to the ranks too!)
However, with the passions of Smaugonite developing and him finding his true favourite army; The Legio Custodes it only felt right to repaint the Titans in service of a different Legio. He couldn’t be seen fielding the Emperors Finest with Titans that were supposed to be painted in a Traitor scheme, could he!? So, Smaugonite took the plunge and cued the music, getting to work on redoing each Titan’s paint scheme from the Traitorous Legio Ulricon, to the Loyalist Legio Ignatum, re-enlisting them in service of the Emperor!
Since all but one (looking at you Sinister-Pattern!) of Smaugonites Titans have been re-painted into Legio Ignatum, all of us have been working on lots of different Projects for Strategic Painting including: a Vostroyan army, a Loyalist Thousand Sons army, another Custodes army and a few secret projects... all shall be revealed soon!
So from all of us here at Strategic Painting, ‘Thank You!’ for taking the time to learn a little bit about our history and where we’ve come from, hopefully we can add to this in a few years time with what we’ve been up to since!
From,
Smaugonite, Croydon and Minion!
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