Welcome back to the fourth week of the third quarter of the first year of Hammer the Backlog, the painting and accountability blog that is keeping track of my foolhardy quest to get all of my existing tabletop wargaming and boardgame miniatures painted without going mad. Every week we take a look at the score card that keeps us on track, inching ever closer to completing the quarterly targets.
SCORECARD
Once again, all is quiet on the scorecard front. The biggest win this week was that Hammer the Backlog’s unpaid intern, Fiona, finally finished the box of Dwarfs that she was tasked with nearly six months ago. I tell you what, she needs a system! You just can’t get the staff these days. For free.
There was some debate as to whether the six dwarfs should go on the scorecard or not, since Fiona painted them, not me. My feeling on it is, there are now six fewer dwarfs in the backlog, so they go on the scorecard. Also, it’s my blog, so on the scorecard they go!
I haven’t been super pleased with my Blackstone Fortress photographs for the first couple of weeks of this new target, so I took a moment in the weekly meeting (with myself) to reflect on that and gave myself the to-do of setting up a simple background for next week’s photos.
THIS WEEK’S MODELS
It would be hard to imagine a more mixed bag of models than this week’s!
First of all, I got Dahyak Grekh finished, counting him as 5 Hammer the Backlog points, since he got a whole week of effort to himself. When Blackstone Fortress was announced all the way back in 2018, the whole set filled me with excitement, but poor old Dahyak here was the least interesting to me. There is a lot to love about him. He was, at the time, easily the newest and best Kroot model GW had ever done. He is an alien, teaming up with a bunch of imperial misfits exploring a dark dungeon in space!
On the other hand, I had no particular interest in Kroot at that stage. Another point against him is that he is exactly the type of model I struggle with. He is on the more natural side of the colour wheel, with lots of greens, browns and tans, which as I have said a few times before on this blog, is not my area of comfort. As well as that, he is incredibly detailed, with all sorts of extra bits, trinkets, weapons, different materials for his clothes and skin and spines, some metal bits, a few cybernetics etc. He’s not like my beloved Bretonnian bowmen, with their tunics, pants, shoes, bows and hats, that’s for sure.
As I was painting him I kept finding new bits that needed attention, up to and including when I was photographing him. It was another win for the Hammer the Backlog system that I had to draw a line under him and move on, because I was on the brink of becoming discouraged. He really is an incredibly detailed and intricate model, and putting him with this week’s other models really highlights how far plastic injection moulding technology has come in the last 30 years. I won’t say anything else negative about him, just in case he eats me.
The other models that joined the pile of unshame this week were the last six of the monopose 4th edition dwarfs that Fiona the Unpaid Intern painted. Let me show you behind the curtain for a second here. These dwarfs were the test models for my first set of Bretonnian bowmen and the placeholders when I was first learning how to make an ‘old school’ backdrop and take photos. So they really have been there in the background for the whole project.
It is really nice to be able to take them out of the box of shame and put them on display with the rest of the painted models. I wasn’t sure about the multi coloured tunics in the beginning, but the shared red on the shields really pulls them together and gives them that classic dwarf militia feel from the 4th/5th edition era, before they became a more formal ‘army’.
Three cheers for Fiona the Unpaid Intern everyone. There will be no remuneration for completing this task, as per the signed learning agreement.
DO YOU PAINT YOUR BOARDGAME MINIATURES?
A question that crossed my mind this week, specifically after Christmas, was “What is the line in the sand for unpainted miniatures?”
My lovely lady friend got me the awesome, atmospheric board game Nemesis for Christmas this year. After the initial excitement, the next thought was; ‘Well, that’s 26 models added to the backlog’.
But, is it? What do you think dear reader? Do you paint your board game playing pieces? I realise the irony of asking this while dedicating two full quarters to painting Blackstone Fortress, which is clearly a board game. But GW board games always feel more like ‘a set of Games Workshop miniatures which you can use in this game’ as opposed to ‘a board game with sculpted playing pieces’. You need only look at the difference in detail and sculpt between Dayhak Grekh and one of the aliens from Nemesis to see that they occupy slightly different niches.
Maybe I could treat it as a little side project some day? Maybe get the whole thing painted in one weekend, or something like that?
THE GRAND HAMMER THE BACKLOG COMMUNITY CHALLENGE
One last reminder that the awesome and exciting Hammer the Backlog style community challenge for Quarter 1 2023 has started on Reddit. We will, hopefully, be seeing the first few fruits of that labour tomorrow. I am hoping to showcase a few of them here next week too! In the meantime, if you missed it, here is the sign up post again.
Thanks for reading this far, see you next week for some faith and psychic fury!
Good eggs!
Hammer the Backlog 
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