Quarter 1 Week 11 Update: A Frog in my Throat

Is that a frog in your throat, or are you just happy to see me? That’s enough mixed metaphors, welcome back to Hammer the Backlog, the weekly mini painting, productivity and accountability blog. It’s week 11 of 13, can you believe it? The end of the quarter is rapidly approaching, with plenty still left to do! Let’s, therefore, stop messing and get straight down to business with this week’s scorecard, before looking at the painted models of the week and then finally, stress ourselves out with what’s still to do!

SCORECARD

One big single red 0 in the scorecard this week, with, technically speaking, zero models completed. I wasn’t resting on my big froggy laurels, mind you. The vast majority of the week was spent firstly building up the courage to clean, assemble and undercoat the lump of white metal that is the slann. A good amount of time was spent trying to figure out a build order. Do I fully assemble the model, making sure that everything lines up without gaps and that nothing is wonky? Or do I build it in subassemblies, making it easier to reach the bearers, but also making it harder to make sure everything lines up at the end?

In the end I went with sub-assemblies. Whether this was the right choice or not, we will have to wait for next week to find out.

In other news, I officially killed the Dark Vengeance rock this week.

In other, other news, I have been a complete chicken about making a shield for the last besieger. It should be simple enough to make with either plastic card or green stuff (or a combination of both), but I haven’t been able to get over my perfectionist anxiety and just sit down and do it.

With the four temple guard bearers, Lorenzo Lupo and the besieger banner bearer left to paint and two (TWO!) videos to film, it’s going to be a busy couple of weeks at Hammer the Backlog central! But there should be just enough time to get everything done and another quarter in the bag.

THIS WEEK’S MODEL

Ok, so it’s not exactly a finished model this week, since he does need four big strong temple guards to carry him around, and a pair of nice flashy standards to go on his back. But at least the meat and two veg of Big Froge the Slann Mage Priest are finished.

I was a bit intimidated to get started on him, as always with new models with new schemes. In the end I went with exactly the same colour scheme that I use on my lighter skinned skinks, applied with a little bit more care and attention, as benefits his station as the biggest frog.

The rest of his colours are spot colours from the rest of his army, the red from the saurus shields, the green from their scales, yellow from the banners etc. I went quite light on the bone highlights for the dinosaur skull, so as not to draw the eye away from his big fun belly and eyes.

I have no shame in admitting that the overall look was heavily inspired by Ben over at @whiskeyandwizards on instagram. He has done my favourite slann of all time, a true classic. 

I wasn’t sure what scheme to go for with my temple guard. I was thinking about a teal, but having played around with the look of the army, I think they are going to be my standard darker skinned, older looking saurus warriors after all.

WHAT’S LEFT THIS QUARTER?

I’m getting more and more excited about coming to the end of the quarter and all of the projects I want to do. As I said earlier, I have 4 temple guards, a banner bearer and a special dogs of war character left to paint. 

I am also excited to do a 1998 to 2024 Dogs of War army showcase. I’ve got it into my head to spend a little bit more time on this and make it a bit special. I’d like to include some extracts from the army books and white dwarfs of the time (which I still have) as well as a bit of footage from Dark Omen, the mercenary focussed Warhammer game on the playstation. I also want to show the paint jobs off with a spinny table and do some extreme closeups with my macro camera. The good news is that since I won’t be on screen for that one, I don’t need to drag myself and the army into the studio twice!

Then I have the quarterly review video to do! The quarterly review video needs all of the models to be painted, and also needs to go online to coincide with the start of quarter 2, so that has a deadline of September 19th. Busy busy!

A QUESTION OF COLLECTING

I got a really interesting comment on the blog this week from MG and I thought it was worth talking about here rather than in the comments where it might get lost. I hope they won’t mind me copy pasting the part of interest.

“I got the sense that you really like these old 90’s models, perhaps almost more in some ways than the modern plastic incarnations. A drastic suggestion here, but… Have you considered selling off or trading away some of the newer sets in exchange for more of the older 2E/3E 40k or 4E-6E Fantasy? I feel like attuning the collection to the things you *really* like would help further with hammering the backlog. I understand that everything was just the coolest stuff ever when you bought it, and that sometimes you rekindle that when going back to the models – I’m very much the same. However, I think the truth is that when I look back over *all* the stuff I own, it turns out that I do have a favourite GW era that never fails to get me excited, and it’s the 90’s stuff.”

This comment really got me thinking, and I have to admit, yes, it is something I have thought about. Maybe moving on an entire small army of modern Dark Eldar or Genestealer cults in exchange for a couple of metal units of lizards or my beloved Bretonnians. My worry about this, and not wanting this to sound like a rebuttal, is that my current love of retro models may just be another one of my phases! What if, in a year or two, I get really back into the hive city, grim and gritty aesthetic and end up with a huge pile of unwanted retro plastics that felt like a good idea at the time. I don’t know? Am I justifying it to myself? Or just sticking to my guns?

Well, anyway, that’s enough out of me for another week.

See you next week for Froge’s friends!

Best of eggs!