Well, well, well. Who do we have here? If it isn’t you, the beloved reader, back for another week of Hammer the Backlog, the weekly Warhammer mini painting, productivity and accountability blog.
It’s been a heck of a week in Hammer the Backlog central, with a dose of the rona virus and upcoming honeymoon, as well as very interesting models to paint all conspiring to make it one of the most interesting weeks of painting I’ve done in a long time. Let’s start this week, as we do every other, with a look at the scorecard.
SCORECARD
Instant Agency Tool’s email function still isn’t working, so sadly we have another week of a basic, unappealing table. But sure look, we will make do.
| Hold ups due to missing supplies | 1 |
| Instagram Posts | 3 |
| Facebook/Reddit Posts | 4 |
| Models Finished | 5 |
| Blog Post | 1 |
A slight red in the ledger this week in the form of a missing model from this week’s set. Brazanga’s Besiegers came in a box of 6 models when they were released. Looking back, that’s quite unusual, I think. They were Brazanga himself, the musician, standard bearer and three crossbowmen with pavices (which will henceforth be called Big Shields). Of all of my dogs of war models from the 90s, these lads were in the sorriest state.
Despite multiple fine tooth comb searches through my various “bitz boxes” I wasn’t able to recover two of the missing crossbows or the banner pole. Not to worry, I thought, I can replace or repair with alternative bits and brass rods.
Well, replace didn’t work. None of my unused metal crossbows matched the way the besiegers hold their crossbows, so I had to take two crossbows from Pizarro’s Lost Legion, file off the hands, glue them on to the besiegers and attempt, for the first time in my life, to sculpt new armoured hands. They turned out surprisingly….. not bad? Having one surviving crossbow definitely helped in getting the placement and size of the hands relatively consistent, and once they’re painted up and in a unit I think it will be hard to see a difference.
The next repair was the banner pole. No problem, a bit of the brass rod that I used for the pikes last year will do the trick. Except… Did I throw those scraps out after finishing the pikemen? Goddammit. So the banner bearer got pushed back to the next batch to give me time to go to the train shop and get a single brass rod. The original banner top was a tower, I think, but I should be able to find something suitable from an unused empire knight’s helm.
A big part of the fun of this entire project has been making things which would have stopped me dead in my tracks work and just getting on with it.
THIS WEEK’S MODELS
This week’s models are 5 of the 6 Brazanga’s Besiegers from the original boxed set. My dogs of war “army” can be broken into three broad categories, those that I never painted, those that I painted once and left to languish, and those that I broke out and repainted any time I thought my painting had improved to the state that I was “ready”. These lads were in that final category. That means they have been stripped and repainted this week for the fourth and final time.
It’s worth pointing out that this is still the first time they have actually been finished, though. I actually really liked how I’d done the metals on these last time and definitely considered trying to salvage the metal armour and just overpainting the rest, but in the end they got the full dunk.
The metal was fun to paint. They got two thin coats of retributor armour, which is a gold(ish) paint of the quality we could only dream of in the 90s. Then they got a full blast of reikland fleshshade gloss to add a reddish tone and darken the recesses. Next they got a targeted line shading of wyldwood to really darken between panel lines, rivets and gaps in the armour.
In the olden days I would have done a thick edge layer of a light gold and then an edge highlight with silver, but in the end I decided to go straight to the edge highlight with stormhost silver and I don’t think they look any the worse for it.
I nearly ran out of painting time this week, somewhat because we had a house full of covid and therefore energy was a little bit lower than usual, but mostly because I got a bit mono focussed on the Big Shields and ended up putting as much effort into them as I did the armour on the five models. I went for the red and bone stripy look to match their banner, as well as the banner of most of the Tilean units from the dogs or war roster.
Since I spent so much time on resculpting the hands, looking for parts, painting the armour and Big Shields, some things had to suffer if I was to get these done on time. On these lads that was the leather, fabrics, faces and feathers. They are all done to a very basic standard, with a base coat and, if they were lucky, a single highlight or two.
All in all, pretty happy with them, and they will be joined by their banner bearer very soon. Actually, I’m glad I just wrote down how I painted these, since I am going to have to do it again!
NEXT WEEK’S MODELS
Putting aside the banner bearer, I have five, yes FIVE, models left to paint to get every single one of my dogs of war painted and photographed! The birdmen of Catrazza are fairly odd models, being normal men on complex winged suits, and they are on the most brittle things of all time, 90s transparent flying bases.
I think, despite my usual approach, these lads are going to be a subassembly job, with the wings getting painted first, then fixing them to their bases. Then I’ll mount the men themselves to cocktail sticks (or the like) and attach them all together at the end. Since I’m expecting all of this to be fairly complex, I’m giving myself two weeks (or 10 Hammer the Backlog points) to do it.
Thanks for reading this though, you are the best eggs.
Hammer the Backlog 
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