Thank you, oh dearest of all of the readers, for coming back to Hammer the Backlog, my weekly Warhammer mini painting, productivity and accounting blog. This was a week of awesome models, physical labour, splinters, progress and satisfaction all tinged with the melancholy of low energy and motivation. Do read on!
SCORECARD
Well, well, well, another week fully in the green, despite a real sense of ennui and a complete lack of motivation. I haven’t been this tired in ages! Maybe my 40s are catching up with me. Despite my existential crisis and how busy things have been, I still managed to get this week’s targets hit. It did take a couple of late evening painting sessions and snatching furtive half hours on work lunch breaks and before bed to get everything done, but in the end I am happy with the final results.
Operation: Turn the Garage into a Useful Space that can also be used for Models (does that name get worse every week?) also progressed apace, with the interior wall fully battened and ready to be slabbed. Two words, I should mention, that I had never heard before the start of last week.
THIS WEEK’S MODELS
This week’s models are the stunning and gorgeous cultists from the Escalation expansion of Blackstone Fortress. Specifically, they are Cultist Champion and 4 mooks. For the first time this week, unless I am misgendering the skinks and saurus warriors from quarter 2, there are more female models than males! Non-sexy female models outnumbering non-sexy male models without it being a big thing?? That’s a heresy!
As gorgeous as these models are, and they are gorgeous, they are grossly unsuitable for batch painting. Trying to do 5 at a time to a standard I am happy with was very nearly biting off more than I can chew.
They are especially difficult to paint in a batch if you are trying to replicate the box art to any degree. The great joy and simplicity of batch painting is knowing what colours you need to use and where the colours need to go. Since these are not uniformed troops, they all have very different outfits and loadouts, so ‘knowing’ each model is not really possible. The ‘Eavy Metal team managed to take this even further by painting them with a variety of different colours, even on similar areas. Would you like all of your cultists to have black trousers? No! How about very dark blue, dark grey, dark blue, very dark green, slightly lighter blue, tan and dark leather? Sounds good? Seven different recipes for seven different pants? That couldn’t possibly drive a man mad, could it?
Then! Each of the models, realistically, has a different skin tone! Seven different skin tones on seven different models? That couldn’t possibly drive a man mad, could it?
Having said all of that, I do love the final look, especially the contrast of the purple skirts with the very dark blues and greens. Many learnings will be taken into the final 2 cultists and the firebrand for next week. Sigvald Burgundy remains my favourite ever colour, by the way, but I would like to experiment a little and make a version of it that is ever so slightly redder. Does anyone have experience mixing contrast paints? Do they mix well and retain their properties?
WORKING ON THE BUILDINGS
In this week’s working on the buildings update I went to a lumber yard, bought raw timber, got a splinter, nearly gave up, learned how to use a jigsaw and learned how to batten a wall. Mad stuff altogether. These damn deadlines are really forcing me to keep going, but who knew they were going to have the side effect of forcing me to learn new skills as well?
The garage door is due to be delivered and installed tomorrow and the electrician is booked in to install the wiring, so the project is right on target.
My motivation, or complete lack of, is stopping me from being able to think of anything else interesting to say, so I’ll wrap it up there! Hopefully I’ll be able to look back on this week as a bit of a blip in a few weeks’ time.
In the meantime, thanks for reading this far.
Best Eggs.
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