Quarter 1 Week 4 Update: I Once Was Lost

Welcome back, dear friends, to Hammer the Backlog, the weekly warhammer mini figure painting, accountability and productivity blog that uses business scaling methods to ensure that I get my 25 year backlog of resin, plastic, pewter and lead tiny men painted up to a standard I’m happy with before the inevitable heat death of the universe.

It was a great week of Backlog Hammering this week, with things going ahead of schedule for a change and me feeling really engaged with the current project, which is always a lovely bonus.

Let’s start the week, as with every week, with a look at the scorecard.

SCORECARD

Another week all in the green. Five models done to a good standard, and all of the social media and other accounts are well and truly on track. 

Being truly absorbed by the models you are working on really helps with productivity. I know this comes as no great revelation to anyone with a working brain, but it continues to surprise me. Although I did enjoy the halflings for the last two weeks, and I think they are great looking now that they are done, I am glad to have them finished and can’t see any situation where I end up hunting down more of them to add to my collection. They are a discrete little unit of 10 and that way they will stay. Unless a dragon eats them.

The lost legion, on the other hand, have enraptured me. It’s funny, when I bought them originally in 1998 both the lost legion and the halflings got to basically the same level of painted, with a test model and a couple of colours painted over bare metal.

But unlike the halflings, in painting these I have become obsessed. I had them cleaned up, based, sprayed and with most of their base coats on by Friday evening, and a lot of the highlights and details done by Sunday. I could have powered on with them for another couple of days, but I live in fear of painting back rankers too well and not being able to replicate the standard with front rankers, so I finished them up by Tuesday evening and had a big relax instead. Well, that and worked on some other aspects, like scenery and getting battle reports ready.

After a few weeks of making no progress on improving the functionality of the website, I realised that I needed to be a little clearer on what I meant by ‘improvements’ so have given myself the sub-task of looking at a few blogs I like and writing down the parts I would like to integrate on Hammer the Backlog. All part of the R&D process.

THIS WEEK’S MODELS

This week’s models are the first 5 rear rankers of Pizarro’s Lost Legion, the Dogs of War mercenaries from Games Workshop. The background for these guys is that they are a conquistador type band who set out to explore Lustria. Unfortunately for them,  the landing went terribly and they ended up working as mercenaries for the Lizardmen, fighting their way out of Lustria while defeating the lizardmen’s enemies. This mix of weird influences makes them look pretty much like Spanish conquistadors, mixed with Italian Condottieri, carrying the occasional Mayan/Incan/Aztec trinkets. 

In 5th edition WFB they could be played as either crossbowmen with light armour or pikemen with heavy armour. The models are clearly set up for this, with roughly half of them wearing padded cotton armour and the other half wearing half plate. When I was snatching up the models for this week’s batch I didn’t pay particular attention to which ones I was grabbing and ended up with four in padded cotton and only one in plate.

In 6th edition they could be played as a mixed arms unit, kind of like the Lothern Sea Guard for the high elves or the city guard for the dark elves. This gives you a front rank of crossbowmen with all of the rear rankers carrying pikes. I always felt this was cooler, more thematic and probably more in-line with how the background writers saw them, but since my collection is aimed at a 5th edition Dogs of War army I went for all pikes.

Although I clearly thought these models were cool when I bought them, what ended up putting me off was how dark and muddy they were to paint when I got them home. The official studio models have dark bronze armour, very dark green trousers, the cotton is painted very dark, almost looking more like rattan and all of the details are also dark.

For my own I decided to take the brightness up on everything to make them fit in more with my 5th edition armies. I went for a much (MUCH!) brighter and more polished metal for the helmets and armour, which also brings them closer to the look of real life conquistador armour, which I think was steel? They were painted with a base coat of Canotec Alloy, given a tint with Skeleton Horde, then a deeper recessed shade with Skeleton Horde, a highlight with Canoptec Allow and a final edge highlight with Runefang steel.

I spent nearly as much time straightening out these dumb white metal pikes as I did painting! Part of me wanted to replace all of the pikes with much more rigid brass rod, but I decided that the time it would take and the damage I would need to do to the original metals made it only worth it if the original pike was beyond repair.

Next week’s models will be the front rank, which includes the leader, standard bearing (with broken standard), musician, one trooper in padded armour and one trooper in plate armour. This should be a lovely collection of models with just enough in common to batch paint without being too repetitive.

Well, I think that is all I have to say this week. Please join me again next week for the process of repairing and restoring decades old metal models with whatever random bits I can find in my various bits boxes.

You are good eggs!