Quarter 1 Week 7 Update: … And Their Flying Machines

Welcome back to Hammer the Backlog. My seemingly never ending attempt to get my nearly 30-year backlog of unpainted warhammer miniatures painted to a standard I am happy with. After my two and a half week honeymoon in Korea proved the biggest disruption to the Hammer the Backlog project since it started, this week I was fully back at it! Let’s take a look at the weekly project scorecard, then the models that I painted this week, and finally any other bits and bobs.

SCORECARD

Two reds in the ledger in one week!?! The shame! Let’s take a look.

First of all, my poor old Branzanga’s Besieger standard bearer continues to cause problems. It turns out I lost his shield at some point over the years. My first port of call was to see if any of the middlehammer Dogs of war facebook groups had a spare lying around. No dice there, unfortunately. The next best solution would be, probably, to make a green or blue stuff cast of one of the existing shields and make a copy. Sadly, I have shot myself in the foot there by fully painting up and attaching all of my shields. The risk of damaging a painted one probably isn’t worth the time it would take to make one from scratch with plastic card and green stuff!

The second missing piece is the banner pole. I bought a small pack of brass rod, but even the thinnest one in the pack is about twice as thick as I need. This evening I’ll raid the bits box for a plastic replacement, and if I can’t find one I’ll get to work on ordering a single narrow brass rod from the interweb.

Oh, and I also need to order some biostrip to get started on the Kroxigors next week!

The final red in the ledger this week is zero models painted. That is not to say that I haven’t been painting furiously, but this week’s models are complicated fellas that needed a lot of work, so I only did their marvellous machines. I will be doing the men themselves next week, then we will have 10 HtB points in the bag.

THIS WEEK’S MODELS

This week’s models are the Birdmen of Catrazza………….’s flying machines. Barring my poor, battered besieger banner bearer, these models were the part of my 1998 Dog of War army in most need of some TLC. A large part of this week was spent rummaging through bits boxes, making sure I had 5 sets of wings, 5 men, 4 crossbows, 10 tiny little foot pedals and 5 unbroken (or at least salvageable) clear flying stands. Once everything was located and compiled, they went into the bio strip to be taken back to bare metal.

When I decided to split painting the five birdmen across two weeks I thought that I was maybe being a little bit generous with my time, but I was 100% right to do it.

These five wingsuits took about 3.5 hours each, thanks to the fiddly nature of the wooden struts as raised detail over the canvas wings. I couldn’t really figure out an efficient way to get them painted, with enough details and neatness that I was happy with.

In the end, I basecoasted them off white. Then I painted the struts and supports with Wyldwood. This was messy and covered a lot of the white. Before fixing the white I painted all the metals and gave them gave them a nuln oil wash.

Then I went back in and tried to reestablish the whites, now recessed behind already painted and highlighted wooden struts. This was a challenge, as it took two coats of white to hide the brown and I had to be neat. 

Of course, I had a few slips and inconsistent edges, which I then had to go back and fix with agrax earthshade and wildwood. A struggle, let me tell you! I’m glad I wasn’t trying to do the pilots at the same time!

I remember these clear plastic flying stands being an easily broken nightmare in the 90s. The solution, I hope, was to enlarge the hole in the bottom of the wingsuit before pushing in a little greenstuff. Then I superglued the stand on, and they feel much more secure. Let’s see if they stay when I add the weight of the pilots too!

Well, that’s it for me for this week. I’m off to start work on the birdmen themselves. See you next week for the last full unit from my 1998 dogs of War army complete.

You’re the best eggs.