Hi there! Thanks for coming back to Hammer the Backlog, the weekly Warhammer mini painting, productivity and accountability blog. The big winner this week was the productivity and accountability side of things, as painting motivation took a real slump! Read on to find out how I managed to stop a slump in wanting to paint from ending my current unbroken run!
SCORECARD
So, another week in the green. And well in truly in the green, with the fully painted Lamassu, as a large monster, counting as ten whole points. Everything else is on track too! Great stuff. The story that the scorecard doesn’t tell this week is that it was a bit of a slog.
Without getting into it too much, it was a highly stressful week this week in my real life job, and the latest season of World of Warcraft Classic was released. When real life is stressful, it is very, very tempting to slip off into a simple, nostalgic, fantasy world. So to be honest, that is where most of my free time went this week.
At the same time, because I am holding myself to deadlines and publishing this blog every Thursday evening, come hell or high water, painting didn’t feel like a break from the stress.
On top of those two factors, I am also dealing with the normal “Week 11 on the same project” slump in motivation and interest that practical all human beings deal with. If it wasn;t for the scorecard commitment, and the accountability of having a public blog to update (that some people actually read!) I definitely would have procrastinated into not getting the Lamassu done this week.
If this had been week 3 or four, not only would I have got the Lamassu done on time, I probably would have got a start on the Sorcerer Lord and built some scenery. But, job done, and let’s be thankful for small wins.
THIS WEEK’S MODEL
So for this week’s model I finished off the Lamassu from last week. I went for deep red wings, medium red mane and bright red beard.
The muscular, cow-like body I painted with the exact same steps and techniques as my Bull Centaurs from previous weeks, just swapping out red recipes for a very dark blue black recipe. You can read the recipe in last week’s post.
Arguably, I could have given myself 9 points this week and not counted him as 100% painted. I didn’t go through the full shade and highlight process on the parts of the blue throne that the Sorcerer Lord is going to cover when he’s painted up next week.
This was a fun model to paint, ever bearing my motivation slump in mind. The horns in particular, with their recurving shape and ridges going in two directions, were fun and challenging to paint. And a nightmare to show off in photos. They don’t seem to have a good angle that shows everything.
I’m looking forward to getting the Lord painted next week and calling this model, and the current Chaos Dwarf project, complete.
SOCIAL MEDIA UPDATES
I guessed that the Chaos Dwarfs would be popular in my little retro warhammer niche on Instagram, and it turns out that I was mostly right. Follower count is going up again rapidly at a rate that hasn’t been seen since I was painting Bretonnians.
In the pre-Chaos Dwarf times it was big news for me when a post got over a thousand likes. My most liked photo ever on Instagram is my 5th edition boxed set photo, with about 1600 likes. At this rate, most of the Chaos Dwarf photos are going to overtake it in the next couple of weeks, and Hammer the Backlog might just crack 4,000 followers by the end of the year. A little bit of extrinsic motivation never hurt anyone!
Well, thanks for reading this far. See you next week for the end of this project!
You are the best of eggs.
Hammer the Backlog 
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