Please do allow me to welcome you back to Hammer the Backlog, the weekly Warhammer painting and accountability blog. This week’s blog is brought to you by five tiny boys, frustration, and a bit of nostalgia. Let’s get the ball rolling with a look at the scorecard for the week.
SCORECARD
Nothing particular to report this week, other than fewer disruptions and a much easier time organising my painting leading to the full week’s painting allocation being done by Tuesday evening, leaving a bit more time for some other stuff! Phew! After two hard weeks with the Saurus warriors, this week felt like a well earned rest!
THIS WEEK’S MODELS
This week’s models were inspired by this little fella on the front cover of the Warhammer Fantasy Battles 5th Edition box set, painted by the legendary Mark Gibbons. The lizardmen in the world of Warhammer are very much the good guys, fully on the side of lawful order, as it were. In fact, although you would be incredibly hard pressed to tell from the box art, if Lizardmen and Bretonnians were fighting, nine times out of ten you would probably want the lizards to win.
No need to confuse ten year old boys in the nineties though! Instead, look at these brave human knights fighting these gross monsters! Including this awesome orange skink, who despite being front and centre on the box, never saw his scheme mass adopted by the studio painters at the time.
Anyway, I think I did a decent enough job of getting the scheme down.
These were a lot more fun, and a lot easier and faster to paint than the saurus warriors. The paint almost leapt off of my brush on the first one, I got him 90% done on the first evening of painting in my excitement to see if the scheme worked.
I am not dreading doing another 11 of these in this scheme over the next two weeks!
THE MATERIAL WHICH SHALL NOT BE NAMED!
With a bit of time to work with, I also managed to make a start on my Green Knight, which I am hoping to paint to a decent display standard.
I will be honest, I have only worked on one finecast model before, being very put off by the amount of effort needed to get them decent looking before you even get a brush in your hands. What is more, green stuff (a two part epoxy putty used in model making, for the uninitiated) work is not something in my current skill set.
Well, never let it be said that I can’t handle a challenge. After a lot of filing, sanding, filling, test fitting, swearing, test fitting again, glueing and pinning, I have managed to get him to a stage where I am ready to put a base coat on him. I have no doubt a nice even base coat is going to show up a lot more of the flaws, both those caused by the poor finecast cast and by my own cack handed repairs. But that is all part of the process!
One shame is that my guy came with the wrong shield! Obviously a result of his time in different collections before he came to me. If anyone has a spare Green Knight shield in search of his Green knight, please do get in touch.
SPACE HULK, BATCH PAINTING AND MOTIVATION
I finally took some better photos of my complete 2008 Space Hulk set this week. If you have been reading Hammer the Backlog since day 1, you will remember that this is both my favourite boxed set of all time, and the set that nearly broke me and ended my love of miniature painting.
When this came out I rushed to the shops to get it and planned out how I was going to paint every model in the box exactly like the box art.
Twelve highly detailed Blood Angels Terminators, 22 Genestealers, a Broodlord and various bits and pieces of scenery, all to the standard of a team of full time professional miniature painters widely considered to be the masters of their style. Sounds achievable, right?
It wasn’t, and it ended up on a back shelf for 6 years, ignored.
When I finally did get the courage to get it off the shelf it was with the realisation that I would aim instead for what we gamers call a tabletop standard, nice to look at from a couple of feet away, but not going to win any awards.
I then made the second mistake of doing this whole thing with a batch painting process, which was absolute misery! Batch painting 22 genestealers meant undercoating all of the purple on all 22 models, then the blue on all 22, then the black on all 22 and so on. Absolutely soul crushing stuff!
Some painters swear by it, but batch painting this set was the second time that 2008 Space Hulk nearly killed my interest in the hobby.
This all makes me really happy with the system I am using for Hammer the Backlog. Sure, I might spend the next 3 weeks on 16 skinks, but they are broken up into small parts which give little moments of happiness when they are done, and there is always the next small unit to look forward to.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Instagram growth was the slowest that it has been in a while this week. I think people miss the bright and fun colour schemes of the knights. Luckily the Green Knight should be coming in two or three weeks, and I do have another little ace in the hole.
Oh, also, I started a Twitter account. I am not going to use it for anything other than doing automated announcements of blog updates using the WordPress Jetpack feature, but if you want to give it a follow, have a look for @HammerBacklog. HammertheBacklog was too long!
Thanks for reading this far, you are real buenos huevos.
See you next week for five more orange skinks!
Hammer the Backlog 
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