Hello and welcome back to Hammer the Backlog, the weekly mini painting, accountability and productivity blog. Every Thursday I publish this blog, showing what models I’ve painted this week and keeping track of the overall health of the Hammer the Backlog project, aka, painting my nearly 30 years of collected grey plastic, metal and resin models.
Let’s start this week, like we do every week, with a look at the scorecard.
SCORECARD
Another week 100% in the green! One could get used to this! I made the ever so slight mistake last week of doing the four easiest models first and leaving the two more detailed models (the sergeant and the heavy gunner) for this week, meaning that I had to spend an extra 2 or 3 hours overall on this week’s models compared to last week. But that was not too much of an issue with how much I have enjoyed painting these dark angels tacticals.
In fact, I think that I’ve realised that my favourite colours to paint are green, red, bone, white, metal and gold, and those are more or less the only colours on these models! I’ve enjoyed them so much I’m actually looking forward to painting my Assault on Black reach tactical marines up as dark angels too! But that will be at least a year or two away! Wow, I have a lot of models to paint!
Nothing else to report this week, which is a good thing!
THIS WEEK’S MODELS
So this week’s models are the second fire team of the tactical squad from 2012’s Dark Vengeance, including 3 tactical marines, the heavy weapon guy and this Randy Couture looking sergeant. Don’t tell me I’m the only one who sees it?
They were pretty good fun to paint again this week, with a couple of lessons learned. Maybe the biggest lesson, and the one I really should know by now, is that you really do have to trust your process once you get it down.
I start these models by doing the contrast paint base coats on the armour, which in the case of Dark Angels means 95% of the models are very very dark green. Once I highlighted the green up, I really started to get worried that the base coat was too dark and the contrast in the highlights was too stark, especially when I compared them to last week’s completed models.
But when I painted in the other details, like the bone, metallics and reds, that problem completely went away and they lok indistinguishable from last week’s models. The human brain really does suck at recognising colour values in a vacuum. Only by being next to whites and reds did the very dark green start reading as green and not black. To my brain at least.
I did something I never do this week, and painted on some texture on the cloth that the sergeant is wearing. Since I was using the exact same colours that I used on the Deathwing’s terminator armour, I needed something to make the cloth read as different. So I guess this is more of a sackcloth than a silk?
The last thing of note, and really my only complaint of the week, is that I hate painting shiny bald heads. Natural skin tones are very difficult to highlight anyway, let alone when you have a shiny flesh egg. If I went for a slight grey stubble in the end, you know why.
ISN’T THERE ANOTHER ROCK?
Never fear, I have not been neglecting the other rock, to have next year’s annual planning video ready to go. The first steps took place this week, with me taking a look over my collection and starting to narrow things down a little.
One of the things that I am considering for next year is what i’m calling “A Little off the Top”. Even though a big part (the biggest part?) of the Hammer the Backlog project is painting what I have and not accumulating any more, I am but human and I have accumulated a few bits and pieces over the last two years.
Some of them were gifts, some of them were impulse purchases etc. What draws them together is that nearly all of them are metal models for Warhammer fantasy 5th edition. I’m strongly considering therefore having a “cleaning house” quarter early next year, where I paint all of my new stuff, finish off a few dogs of war units and end up with nice 5th edition armies for Bretonnia, Lizardmen and Dogs of War.
Well, that’s it for me for another week. I accidentally left my models at home today and didn’t manage to get any lunchtime painting down, so I’m an hour or so behind where I should be as I type this!
Thanks for reading this far, see you next week for some Ravenwing bikers!
Hammer the Backlog 
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