Quarter 3 Week 4 Update: Pro(fessional)-crastination

Hello there, welcome back to the latest ever published instalment of Hammer the Backlog, the weekly Warhammer mini painting, accountability and productivity blog, that this week is probably going to be a bit short and whiney, but hopefully no less interesting or insightful.

Let’s kick things off, as we do every week, with a look at Scorecard, before looking at this week’s painted models, and then anything else worth noting.

SCORECARD

A week of deceptive green on the scorecard this week. Sure, I did actually manage all of the commitments, but it was pretty touch and go and I am not leaving this week feeling fully satisfied with my performance. Ironically enough it was real life accountability and productivity (i.e 3 days spent on the road for my actual paying job) that lead to most of the issues this week. 

Funnily enough, it wasn’t necessarily that I had less time to paint, it was more that after spending hours driving backwards and forwards across the county I just wasn’t in the mental space to do any painting. To compound the issue, I underestimated the detail on this week’s models, thinking I would be able to knock them out with the same speed as last week’s. 

In the end, I did manage to knuckle down and get them done to an acceptable standard. This also has the added motivational bonus of letting me mark the first of this quarter’s targets, get my 3rd edition Blood Bowl Orc team, as complete. Nice!

However! (And it is a big however) These guys are not quite up to the vision I had for them at the start. They are definitely done enough to call them done, but I did have visions of adding checks and grinning faces to shoulder pads etc. If I get time for bits and bobs later in the year, I might ust go back and add a few flourishes to these guys.

THIS WEEK’S MODELS

This week’s models were 5 more Blood Bowl Orcs.

The thrower and blockers were pretty straightforward. They followed the exact same scheme as the last two week’s Orcs and were pretty fun to paint. The blockers are definitely bulkier than the other orcs, and considerably more armoured. That meant that painting them too a good chunk longer than expected.

The Black Orcs, on the other hand, nearly killed me. First of all, they are a bit more detailed and complex than the other Orcs. More importantly though, I hadn’t settled on a skin recipe for the Black Orcs until today! Their skin was painted furiously over the last two hours. Am I happy with it? Christ knows! I probably won’t know until next week at the earliest.

One of my favourite things about this set is, Black Orcs withstanding, they come from the time that Orcs were both shorter and squatter than humans.

Full pics of the completed starter set coming next week, assuming I shake this procrastination.

WEAR AND TEAR

Bad news gang! Through either excessive use of a poor care routine, my beloved size 1 Winsor and Newton series 7 has lost its point. It’s still a great, very useful brush, but I really felt the difference in precision this week, which didn’t help with the painting panic either, let me tell you!

Are there any brush experts out there? Is this a salvageable situation? I’m not adverse to spending a couple of quid on getting a new one, but I also don’t want to throw this one in the bin if it is salvageable with a minimal amount of effort.

Well, that’s it for me this week.

I hope to see you at the same time (or hopefully a couple of hours earlier) next week, for the first week of the 40k part of year two of Hammer the Backlog.