Hello and welcome back to the final update for quarter one of the second year of Hammer the Backlog, my ongoing project to clear my unpainted backlog of Warhammer fantasy and 40 minis before the plastic in them breaks down and they disappear harmlessly back into the atmosphere. A little environmentalist joke there, to get you started. The week, as with any week that involves more video stuff than painting stuff, was a real roller coaster of emotional highs and devastating lows. Let’s start this quarterly round up, as with every other week, with a look at the scorecard.
SCORECARD
Well, it’s a clean sweep to end the year, hopefully. I am actually typing this up before I have finished the last bit of editing on the Wrath of Tlaxtlan battle report, so if you are reading it, it means my hubris hasn’t got the better of me and I managed to get it done!
Since I didn’t get any models finished last week, this week’s painting load was actually relatively low, with only a few hours left to do on the galloper gun itself to get the quarter’s painting commitment done. That left the rest of the week, pretty much all of my remaining Hammer the Backlog schedule, to finish the Wrath of Tlaxtlan battle report.
Disaster, as it so often does, struck at the last minute. At 11:30 last night I finally finished an edit I was quite happy with. When I pressed the export button, nothing happened. When I tried to save the project, blank! In the end I had to reload the app, and lost a full day’s work on the video. My relationship with Microsoft Clipchamp is now pretty strained, I’m sure you can imagine. So, I got up early this morning, wrote the blog and finished off all of the remaining housekeeping for the quarter, and I am assuming that after work tonight I will be able to recreate yesterday’s effort and get the full video uploaded before 7 this evening.
Perhaps the biggest learning of this quarter was that 3 videos per quarter is probably biting off more than I can chew. A couple more videos are part of this year’s yearly target, so they are non negotiable, but I definitely won’t be doing more than two videos per month again! Video editing is not the main point of Hammer the Backlog, hammering the backlog is.
If you are reading this, I did it, and here it is:
So, with another quarter (just about) in the bag, let’s take a satisfying look at the rock chart and bask in the joy of “complete”
THIS WEEK’S MODELS
It would probably be fairer to call this week’s models last week’s models, but I completed them in this financial week, so here they are.
I know that a lot of people absolutely adore the galloper guns, and I do think they are awesome now that they are finished, but I discovered during the process that painting warmachines, with their large areas of plain wood and lots of awkward metal details, is a bit tedious. If I ever do a dwarf army, I’ll probably do it 4th edition style with lots of coloured paint on the wood and plenty of decoration, rather than the fairly restrained later editions, with plain wood, stone and steel.
Still, they look pretty cool finished!
For the wood, I went for a very simple scheme of XV-88 with a Agrax Earthshade wash, then an XV-88 dry brush and a small edge highlight of XV-88/Wraithbone mix on the very edges. Simple but effective for plain wood.
THIS QUARTER’S MODELS
As per Hammer the Backlog tradition, here is a little gallery of this month’s models. It feels like a lifetime ago now, so it’s easy to forget that I painted lizardmen this quarter too, not just Dogs of War!
What a quarter it was in the end! The “simple” project of creating a battle report video nearly took as much time as building an entire studio from scratch last quarter. I have nothing but respect for the people who are able to put out consistently scheduled video content, it’s a hell of a commitment!
Please do come back and join me next week for the start of quarter 2, including the setting of a whole new set of rocks!
Good eggs!
Hammer the Backlog 
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