It’s time for quarter two of Hammer the Backlog! That difficult sophomore album, the tricky sequel to the timeless original. Will this be our Godfather Part 2, or our Tron: Legacy? Only one way to find out, by forging on into the unknown!
Now, if you’ll excuse all that drama, let’s take a look at what’s changing.
NEW TARGETS
First of all, the scorecard!
It’s nice to start the new quarter with everything in the green! Even though indecisiveness, a few home issues and multiple trips to the hobby shop made it a close one!
If I remember correctly, which I do, all of the first quarter’s targets were achieved and the scorecard stayed in the green for the entire 13 weeks. Last Saturday, I had Hammer the Backlog’s first official ‘Quarterly Review and Target Setting’ meeting. As always, the meeting was just me. However, to add to the accountability and transparency that I am hoping to achieve with this project, I did film the thought process for upload to the new Hammer the Backlog Youtube channel. I’ll upload that once I figure out how to do video editing!
In the meantime, here are the main takeaways of the quarterly review.
I am happy with the scorecard items. They are good from the perspective of keeping track of what has happened and what has gone according to plan (lagging indicators) and from the perspective of giving a predictive indication of growth on the social media side of the project (leading indicators). No changes there!
As part of the quarterly meeting, I broke the remaining models and targets for the year down into three roughly equal parts, which I put on baking trays for convenience. An idea which I borrowed (stole?) from the great model painting / productivity blog Scent of a Gamer.
Tray 1 – Lizardmen from the 5th Edition Warhammer Fantasy Box Set. (52 Hammer the Backlog Points)
Tray 2 – Finish Blackstone Fortress Base Game, Dreaded Ambull and Traitor Command. (49 Hammer the Backlog Points)
Tray 3 – Blackstone Fortress Escalation, No Respite, Deadly Alliance and Ascension. (56 Hammer the Backlog Points)
In the end, the lure of retro 5th edition Warhammer and nostalgia won out, and I settled on tray one as the main painting target for this quarter. Remembering that all of our targets must be SMART:
The first new target is:
Get WFB 5th Edition Starter Set Lizardmen painted, photographed and online by the 8th of December 2022.
Specific – WFB 5th Edition Starter Set Lizardmen
Measurable – photographed and online
Achievable – 52 Hammer the Backlog Points (Bretonnians were 63!)
Relevant – It’s a blog about painting models!
Timebound – by the 8th of December 2022
I got a little surprise in the post the other day. My old friend Andy, who runs the great channel Mediocre Hobbies, happened to have a spare ‘Green Knight’ figure lying around. He sent him on to me as a ‘reward’ for finishing my Bretonnians in the first quarter. The Green Knight is a hand sculpted model from the early 90’s that was never super easy to work with, and this one is in Finecast! If you are a survivor of Games Workshop’s notorious finecast period like me, you will know this is going to be interesting! He is going to be a bit of a challenge to get to the display standard I would like for him, so instead of just counting him as another 10 points of models, I have decided to make him one of the new targets:
Get Green Knight painted to display standard, photographed and online by the 8th of December 2022.
And finally, I like to have both painting targets and ‘meta’ blog targets. Last quarter’s meta target was to launch the blog, maintain the updates and to launch Instagram with consistent uploads. Those targets have been achieved and will live on as scorecard items. In keeping with having a meta target, I have decided that I am going to launch a Youtube channel to upload my meetings and reviews. I will not be trying to grow the Youtube channel, it will exist for the sole purpose of public accountability. Hopefully it will give you, the readers, some insight into the decision making process, without having to read a 6000 word blog post once a quarter, while at the same time being an uneditable time capsule of my commitments to the process! That makes it the third target for this quarter:
Launch Youtube channel, with Quarter one review and Quarter two review videos online by the 8th of December.
That’s me, by the way, not just a realisticly painted lizardman.
THIS WEEK’S MODELS
The first models of any new project are very likely to be the most difficult. There is so much to learn and decide, and doing it with a deadline doesn’t make it easier. It was Sunday night before the first lick of paint even touched these fellas! As this was my first time painting Saurus warriors it was very much a learning process. What are the tricky spots? Where is that one mold line that you always miss? What exactly is that lump supposed to be? I’m pretty sure I will be able to knock out the next five in half the time, with most of the learning and decision making done.
I am quite happy with how they turned out in the end. I wanted them to look pretty natural, but still try to skew closer to the 90’s style of vibrant colour schemes, mostly so that they will look nice matching up against the Bretonnians in the end. One of the bigger challenges was not knowing when to call them done! I could have gone for another week on these, adding more highlights and details. Thank you, oh great and wise scorecard, for saving me from that rabbit hole!
One issue that does bother me with these fellas is that the old school green bases are very unsympathetic to already mostly green models. I wonder if that was one of the reasons the studio stopped painting Lizardmen green in the late 90s? Or was it just that they already had a greenskin army with the Orcs and Goblins?
I think I am leaning towards painting all twenty Saurus Warriors from the box set in the same basic colour scheme, so that they can be one unit of twenty or two units of ten for the tabletop game. You know, the one that I have never played!
Five more to come next week, maybe with a slight / undetectable change to the skin recipe.
HAMMER THE BACKLOG GOES VIRAL
For twenty minutes! I mentioned that Andy sent me a Green Knight model as a little surprise a few paragraphs back. I decided to make a tiny little video and post it to Instagram as a reel. Apparently, reels are big these days. Well, for twenty fun, strange minutes Hammer the Backlog was embraced by the great unknowable algorithm in the sky and got 1000 views a minute. I felt like the Kim or Khloe Kardashian of retro model painting. Or the other one? Kandice? Is that her name?
Oh, and final bit of news! We passed 1200 followers on Instagram this week. That is the first time we have taken a 200 follower bump between updates!
Sure look, sure listen, that’s probably enough from me for one week. See you next week for 5 more Saurus Warriors!
Thanks!
Good Eggs!
Hammer the Backlog 
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