Welcome to Hammer the Backlog, the weekly Warhammer (mostly) mini painting, accountability and productivity blog in which I use a small business operating system to “hack” my fallible human motivations and get a backlog of 25 years of collected minis painted to a decent display standard.
After a break from painting for the yearly review and planning session last week, it was straight back into the deep end of 1996 metal models for the first update of year two.
SCORECARD
It was nice, as always, to start the new quarter fully in the green. No major hold ups this week, three fantastic oldschool models (1 point for the drummer, 2 each for the much more elaborate Champion and Standard Bearer) painted to a decent standard and some progress on all of the other aspects of the project. Overall, a good, solid week of doing a backlog hammering.
NEW TARGETS
Since I had the second quarter review and third quarter target setting session last week, I already know what this quarter’s targets are going to be.
- Dogs of War starter army painted, photographed and online
- Wrath of Tlaxtlan battle report played, filmed, edited and uploaded
Both targets have the completion date of Thursday 14th of September 2023.
Remembering that all of our targets must be SMART:
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant
Timebound
Let’s take a look at the targets!
Specific – The Dogs of War starter army never existed, so I have defined my own based on my teenaged collection, and inspired by the typical makeup of an empire started set from the time.. One mounted general (5 points), 1 galloper gun with full crew (10 points), 12 lost legion (12 points), 12 leopard company (12 points) and 10 halfing scouts (10 points).
Measurable – photographed and online
Achievable – 49 Hammer the Backlog Points (History shows I can do 65 in a quarter!)
Relevant – It’s a blog about painting models!
Timebound – by the 14th of September 2023
Looks pretty smart to me! The observant among you will notice that I have set a target of only 49, while being capable of 65. I have 10 points worth of models that I would like to do as part of the second target, so that brings us to 57. Allowing for a holiday that would be 12 weeks, giving me time to get everything done. And if I don’t think I can get them done, that would take the Achievable out of SMART. Not very SMRT, is it?
As you well know if you have been around the blog at all in the last year, I also like to have a non painting, or what I like to call ‘meta’ target. The meta target this year is to play some games with my Warhammer Fantasy Battle miniatures and make some battle reports. As this is a much more complex scope than ‘just’ painting 57 points worth of miniatures, I have broken it down thusly:
What’s all this Wrath of Tlaxtlan talk anyway? If you remember back to last year, some of the highlights for me were completing the Warhammer 5th edition set with the starter forces of Bretonnians and Lizardmen. I also managed to get a great deal on the cardstock buildings and templates from the box and now have a pretty much 100% complete 5th edition starter.
Unlike many of the boxed sets of the time, the 5th edition starter didn’t contain any tutorial missions or a setting of any sort, so it was up to Thomas Perninin to write one in White Dwarf a few weeks after the game was released. I am planning to learn to play 5th edition warhammer by following along with the game scenario using only the same models as came in the box and were in the White Dwarf battle report.
As the lizards are comically outnumbered and out-pointed, the designers gave all of the lizard units command groups, musicians and banners to try to get some semblance of fairness. That’s why I now have two completed saurus command groups, a skink command group in the spawning pools and a skink champion on the way.
Luckily, the Bretonnians don’t need anything extra to play this scenario!
THIS WEEK’S MODELS
This week’s models were three more of the absolutely classic 1990’s saurus warrior command groups. In contrast to last week’s models I painted them in the lighter of my two saurus warrior green schemes. I think this makes them look slightly younger or fresher than the more hardened or elite darker green ones.
Also once again I mixed and matched the colours on the banners and clothing etc so that some are mostly yellow and black and the others are green, black and red. This means they can be put on the table as one dark skinned unit and one light skinned unit or one mostly yellow and black unit and one red, black and green unit. Or all just mixed in together randomly, if it takes my fancy.
If I ever get around to painting the rest of my saurus warriors I could probably make these both up into units of 20 fairly easily.
These were great fun to paint, if a little tricky with having some many areas to add colour to while trying to stick to a limited pallet. If I ever do a unit of 90’s temple guard I think they will go more into the blue green spectrum, with oranges and blues on the feathers and plumes. I like the slightly tricky to pull off idea of my lizards being a riot of colours that still is largely consistent somehow.
Hopefully you can see the effort of the leopard skin on the gold banner. That was a little bit of practice for the upcoming Leopard Company, which I really want to get right.
YEAR 2 PLANNING
Just a gentle reminder that there is a video version of this whole thing, which you can see here!
Please do give it a watch if you are so inclined.
Well, thanks for deciding to join me again for year 2! It’s going to be another year of ups and downs, deadlines hit and missed, models painted and proudly added to the pile of unashamed, and hopefully very few models added to the pile of shame!
Cheers, you are the best eggs.
Hammer the Backlog 
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