Combat Patrol 51 highlights Pink Horror, Pallid Witch Flesh for painters

Kevin Stillman treated Combat Patrol Issue 51 like a hobby supply drop, and that framing fits the contents perfectly. The 24-page issue arrived as a paint-focused breather between the Ork Combat Patrol and the coming Leagues of Votann run, with the Hobby Materials section moved to the front because the real draw was what landed on the desk: Pink Horror and Pallid Witch Flesh.

Those two Citadel paints do more than fill a gap in a rack. Pink Horror was called out as a desaturated pink, almost salmon in tone, useful for highlighting purples and pinks, while Pallid Witch Flesh was singled out as a warm off-white that mixes cleanly and works especially well on cloth and linen. The issue’s painting guide used both colors on older models and pushed further than a basic tabletop recipe, suggesting Pink Horror for Tyranid carapace highlights and freehand texture lines on armor plates. That is the kind of advice that matters to painters who want a force to look finished, not just basecoated.

At £9.99, Issue 51 is a smarter pickup for painters who can use both the paints and the guidance than it would be if those same ideas were gathered piecemeal later. The magazine also included a guide to updating collections with the included paints, so the value is not just in the bottle labels but in how the colors are meant to be applied. A beginner army builder gets a practical color recipe; a display painter gets a nudge toward surface texture and sharper armor work; a kitbasher gets ideas for turning standard panels into something more stylized.

The rest of the issue adds a useful bridge into the next force. It introduced the Leagues of Votann, the Kin, as a pragmatic and resilient clone race of sturdy warriors and miners guided by ancient Ancestor Cores, and it laid out the ground rules for the Fires of Conflict narrative campaign. That matters because the Votann range launched with 15 different SKUs after the faction, once known to the Imperium as Squats, had been absent from collections for almost 30 years. Warhammer Community’s Combat Patrol: Leagues of Votann force, Kâhl Warspeke’s Prospect, includes 1 Kâhl Warspeke, 10 Hearthkyn Warriors, 5 Cthonian Beserks, and 3 Hernkyn Pioneers, with Eye of the Ancestors using Judgement tokens and capping each enemy unit at 2. For painters eyeing the next army on the horizon, that makes Issue 51 less like filler and more like the first practical step toward a new project.