Personalizing Your Army

By Titus Villanueva

Photos by Sophia Martinez

One of the first things they’ll tell you when you start miniature wargaming or anything involving scale miniatures is the fact that your models will never look like anyone else’s. It’s true. Every color you choose to blend, every stroke of the brush from the combination of techniques you like to use will contribute to you creating your own style. Even when you do follow the color scheme from the model’s lore, there will always be something unique about it that makes it yours.

For instance, there is nothing in Codex: Genestealer Cults that speaks of a tentacle-faced, alien god with a carapace of gold hiding beneath a lake resting on the severed heads of the cult’s enemies. I made it up, but it became real when I chose to fashion my cult after that image.

Sometimes you don’t make these things up. There’s a model that’s gained a bit of infamy at my local hobby store called Gregory ‘Goyo’ Vilkus. He’s a neophyte hybrid leader who got his nickname from a ‘Katipunero’ hat that I placed on his head to set him aside as the leader. In a Kill Team campaign that lasted four months, he led his squad of soldiers securing us the gold medal at the end of the campaign. Unfortunately, Goyo, like in the history books, was shot through the eye by a sniper on the final mission.

To commemorate this, he was given a cape to promote him to company commander, a shiny gold medal to wear on his chest and an eyepatch to show that he survived.