Hello and welcome back to Hammer the Backlog, the weekly mini painting, productivity and accountability blog in which I, Mick, the backlog hammerer, attempt to motivate myself to paint my 30 years of collected table-top wargaming miniatures.
You join me this week for week twelve of quarter 1. As this is the penultimate week, as usual, things have started to pile up as deadlines rapidly approach. There is a real end-of-quarter feeling in Hammer the Backlog central this week. Combined with an usually busy couple of weeks in my real life and in work, you will excuse me if this week’s blog is a little shorter and more to the point than usual. It’s not that I don’t have a lot to say this week, but I have only started writing this at 9:15 on Thursday evening, and deadlines and consistency are king! Hopefully I will remember to circle back to anything I miss in next week’s end of quarter wrap up.
SCORECARD
Despite the busy week (or because of it?) it is a fabulously lizardly week in the green this week. The big win is the 10 Hammer the Backlog points worth of models finished, represented by Froge the Slann Mage Priest and his four palanquin bearers.
This was a heck of a model to paint and assemble, let me tell you, and it was tight to get it done on time this week.
With that done, we have only a single model left to paint for the quarter, the Brazanga’s Besieger’s standard bearer with the missing shield. And no spoilers just yet, but a solution might just have appeared in the form of a guardian angel! More on that next week!
THIS WEEK’S MODELS
This week’s (and last week’s) model is the completed Slann Mage priest on palanquin. The four Temple Guard were the biggest part of the painting job this week, and they were mostly pretty straightforward, being my normal saurus warrior paint scheme with a nicely detailed and easy to paint skull helmet hiding a lot of the surface area.
This biggest challenge in painting them was building them in sub assemblies and trying to figure out which areas would be seen on the finished model, and therefore would need the most attention. This is easily the most complicated and multilayered model I have ever painted from that perspective.
A lot of the Temple Guards bodies are completely hidden by the palanquin and helmets, but then they are also blocked by being stood so close to each other. And then the rear model’s weapon ends up blocking most of the work you did painting the front model!
I told a lie earlier. The most difficult part of painting this model was actually get the damned lump of a thing assembled. I had decided before I started to put the model on a 50mm base rather than on the 2 cavalry bases it originally came with. I have seen both done in the past, and always thought the single base made it look cooler ranked up with a unit of temple guard. It was only when regular contributor MG pointed out that that was a 6th edition thing, not a 5th edition one, that I went back and checked my fifth edition codex and battle book and saw that that was indeed true. Still, I prefer having the option!
He was a real piece of work to assemble. Having two long narrow sections holding up a single big, much heavier lump is an inherently unstable construction, so there was much gnashing of teeth, gluing of fingers and accidental damage of paint, but I got there in the end.
WHAT’S LEFT
So, as I said, a slightly shorter one this week! I’ve quite a bit to do before the end of the quarter next Thursday, including finishing the banner bearer, filming and uploading my Dogs of War army video, and filing the next quarterly review. Wish me luck! Off I go!
Best eggs!
Hammer the Backlog 
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