To quote the Slim Shadies of our youth, I’m back! And thank you for coming back to the twenty second week of my efforts to get my entire backlog of mini wargaming figures painted, in a systematic and accountable way. This was the second week where work was split by my holiday to Valencia, so let’s take a look at the scorecard and see if that held me up.
SCORECARD
It didn’t! Everything in the green. In fact it was quite a light week, since I had got all 6 of this week’s models to ‘tabletop’ standard before I left for my trip, so all I really needed to do was a couple of hours of highlights. As per usual, that took me down to the wire, only getting everything finished on Thursday evening. I have really learned about myself that I can extend any task to fill the time, rather than the other way round!
ON RETRO TREES
If you are a wargaming product of the 90’s like me, you will remember that every battlefield, no matter how fantastical, far in the future or wartorn, was a flat green field with mixed deciduous/coniferous forests. It definitely stems from the fact that nearly all early wargaming tables were made by going to the local model train shop and buying scenery.
It would probably be impossible to imagine seeing another company’s products in a White Dwarf or an army book these days, but in the olden times most of the scenery was homemade or shop bought.
I think the real classic trees were made by a small company called H&K (I think?). While I was on holiday I saw a nice big bag of similar, but not identical, 90’s style trees for sale in Goblin Trader Valencia. I knew I had to have them for the blog! Goblin Trader Valencia is a great shop by the way, very well stocked, and old enough that you feel you might turn the corner onto some hidden retro gem at any minute.
As far as I’m concerned, buying trees doesn’t count as adding to the backlog! They are already coloured, so they will never end up in the pile of grey! I simply super glued them to a piece of plasticard, pva’d some sand and painted them like my normal bases.
Anyway, please enjoy this picture of some skinks meeting unexpectedly stiff resistance at the border to Bretonnia!
THIS WEEK’S MODELS
The final six skinks join the cohort from the 5th edition box set this week. They are painted in exactly the same way as the last two week’s worth. Please check out last week’s entry if you’d like to see what colours I used.
Another thing that I have learned about myself in this project is that I really start to wane after the first two weeks of a unit. Despite being half / three quarters done, I still struggled to get motivated to finish them and don’t think they are quite as well painted as the previous two weeks. If, much further down the road, I am doing units of 20 or 30 models, I will definitely be splitting them into batches of 10.
Having said that, 32 skinks and 10 Saurus in the bag!
Next week it will be back to Saurus warriors. I want to stick with green, so that they can reasonably be mixed in with the previous ten, but want to go substantially darker than the first set. What I am planning at the moment, for consistency, is to paint the next batch’s skin in the colour of the previous batch’s scales, and use an even darker green for their scales. If you get a look at the ‘eavy metal versions of the fifth edition lizardmen you will see that they have substantially more variation in skin colour than I have been giving them so far. Wish me luck with the colour choices for next week!
SOCIAL MEDIA
Well, the Youtube launch was an unexpected success, with plenty of views and comments and even a decent handful of subscribers gained! Considering that it was really just published as a way to ‘publicly’ have our quarterly and annual meetings, not too bad at all! Again, it was mostly the very kind folks from the Mediocre Hobbies Twitch stream and Discord who showed up! They are a bunch of good eggs, that lot!
My favourite comment of all has to be the one above by Tim. If Hammer the Backlog achieves nothing more than getting Tim to get his 2000 point old school dwarf army out of the closet, painted and onto a table, I will still consider it a success!
On the Instagram side, I realised I had taken the foot off the pedal a little bit. So I made a bit more effort to engage with the community there, which saw, in turn, my own engagement spike back up. With over 1750 followers at the time of writing, we are back on track to hit 2,000 before the end of quarter 2!
Quarter two is rapidly coming to an end too! Just ten more Saurus Warriors, the Green Knight himself and then one free week of bits and bobs!
Thanks for staying with me this long, you’re good eggs!
Now, go hammer your backlog!
Hammer the Backlog 
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