Let's Paint Warhammer Renaissance

A while ago, I was introduced to Warhammer Renaissance. Bizarrely living on a Facebook page, it's a fan project to take the 4th-6th edition Warhammer Fantasy Battle rules and make them, well, better. I'm interested in trying it, as I should have some folks to play with, and more to the point, a huge pile of Warhammer Fantasy miniatures from back in the day. If Epic was my first love in wargaming, I did also own the 4th edition Warhammer Fantasy Battle box, but got to play far too little of it. This is as good a time as any to fix that.

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Making something out of my chaotic collection of Warhammer Fantasy miniatures is very appealing to me, both from the obvious financial standpoint, but also on a deeper level. As long ago as 2019, I read a blog post from a Warhammer hobbyist, written shortly before he passed away. It made me resolve to try to finish modeling projects before starting new ones, so I did: I built some Warhammer 40,000 armies and actually played games with them. I followed that up with a New Year's resolution to not buy any new miniatures in 2024, which I think I mostly kept.

Then in 2025, Legions Imperialis showed up, and I've really enjoyed painting and playing it. I also feel that I've gone about it a lot more responsibly: I have no untouched Legions kits in my collection, and the unpainted stuff all fits in a single Legions Astartes Battle Group box. I'm quite happy about this.

So now it feels like the next logical step in this process is to go back to all the Warhammer Fantasy stuff I've bought over the years, and try to build some workable armies out of that. I'm going to try to do this with an absolute minimum of new purchases. This will make a serious dent in my stash of unpainted miniatures, and that makes me feel quite good.

What's more, we're going to be approaching Warhammer Renaissance through Stillmania. For those of you who have yet to hear the good word, Stillmania is an approach to wargaming named after Games Workshop writer and designer Nigel Stillman. It's basically the antithesis of the current meta-chasing, win-at-all-costs tournament culture.

For me, Stillmania means coming up with heaps of fluff for my army, but especially in my current circumstances, it means that I'm building a Warhammer Renaissance army out of what I have, and playing that army. I'm looking forward to it.

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At a guess, I could probably build three, if not four, whole Warhammer Renaissance armies from what I already own. The easiest one to get into playable condition has to be Chaos; not just because the models cost a lot of points, but because I have so many of them already. For starters, I bought a Wrath and Rapture box back in the day, so I already have a bunch of Daemons we can get into Renaissance shape.

I started with the Juggernauts I'd painted earlier and once fielded in a game of 40k. I'd given them grey bases to match my 40k minis, but it didn't seem appropriate for fantasy models. So I came up with a sort of hell-themed basing scheme of Vermillion with a German Camo Black Brown drybrush:

I like it.

Yeenoghu got the same treatment, and while I was at it, I also painted the base of my Skull Cannon of Khorne to match, even though it doesn't exist in Renaissance.

I'm still kinda happy with the job I did on it, though, so maybe one day...

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Wrath and Rapture also came with Bloodletters, and this project finally gave me a reason to paint them.

I never really thought much of Bloodletters, but they're kinda growing on me. Here's a closeup of the flag for pride month:

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I'm very happy to have this project underway!