A hungry beast and a tired beast. Welcome back to Hammer the Backlog, the weekly miniature painting, accountability and productivity blog that follows my big dumb adventures in getting my years and years’ worth of unpainted tabletop wargaming miniatures painted. Every week we take a look at the overall progress of the project by starting with the productivity scorecard, moving on to the miniatures that I’ve painted and finishing up with some half baked ramblings. Scorecard first!
SCORECARD
Another week just about fully in the green. It was a very busy week at work this week, thanks to annual planning. I also had a few things going on in my private life, which all resulted in about 50% of this week’s work happening on Thursday! This is a terrible habit that I’m starting to form, and one that I really have to work hard on breaking before the end of this quarter.
As an example of what I mean, for the first time since I started the Hammer the Backlog Instagram account, I forgot to post a Work in Progress Wednesday update. A great shame on my house.
THIS WEEK’S MODELS
Ok, it’s time for a bit of honesty. I have definitely painted the Blackstone Fortress box set based on a scatter graph of Excitement to Disinterest and Confidence to Fear.
As you can imagine, I did the exciting and easy models first, the likes of Janus Draik, the Rogue Trader and Amallyn Shadowguide, the Eldar ranger. The likes of Ur-025 scored very highly on excitement, but I had never painted a robot in an industrial blue before, so he was a little bit intimidating.
The long and short of this is, as we approach the last few models of the box set left unpainted, they are the models that simultaneously have the least interest for me and that I had no idea how to paint. I’ve always been a bit intimidated by beastmen skin, it falls into that grey area of being natural colours, but not wanting it to look too human or standard.
It turns out I shouldn’t have worried about that too much, as these were more fun and less stressful to paint than I thought they were going to be. The horrifying beastly visages needed a little bit less care to look good than a human face. I guess it is something to do with human faces being the thing that we are hardwired, more than anything else, to look at and relate to.
Unfortunately, as in the last few weeks, I am still less than satisfied with these fellas. Another week on them would have given me much more time to perfect them. They are lovely models and they really deserved a little bit more attention than I had time to give them this week. Is this a case where I should have sucked up a loss on the weekly scorecard for a better overall performance on the quarterly target?
Only time will tell!
Oh, and I also did the second to last traitor guardsman this week, exactly the same way as last week. Only one of those fellas left to go.
Sadly, that is all I have time for this week if I hope to hit the Thursday deadline.
Please do join me next week for the models I’ve least been looking forward to from the whole set, the awkward as hell Negavolt Cultists.
Until then, keep being Good Eggs!
Hammer the Backlog 
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