Quarter 2 Week 2 Update: Stop Making A Scene!

Hello and welcome back to Hammer the Backlog, the mini painting, accountability and productivity blog! In classic “New Quarter, New You!” fashion, this week has been both an absolute joy to get into and a flurry of activity that I will spend the next 10 weeks trying to keep up with!

If this week’s new models, not quite retro, not quite modern, drew you to the blog for the first time, let me introduce myself briefly and tell you what Hammer the Backlog is all about. My name is Mick and I spent 25 enjoyable years collecting tabletop wargaming miniatures with great plans to paint them up into units, squads and armies that I would be proud of. But I never did. Until 2 and a half years ago when I was introduced to the concept of using an “operating system” to organise my projects. In the last two and a half years I have painted more models than in the previous twenty five combined.

Each week I have a weekly blog, in which I use a scorecard to keep track of the health of the project, check in on the quarterly rocks (read: targets) and show off the models I painted. Let’s jump into this week’s update.

SCORECARD

A lovely week in the green for week 2. 5 highly detailed plastic models fully painted, blog written, social media commitments met and no hold ups! Will we go back to the old days of a full quarter in the green? Fingers crossed.

I also made some progress on the rocks, of course. With half a unit of Swordsmen done, we are roughly 10% into the Island of Blood elves.

I also added a deliverable to the Wrath of Tlaxtlan battle report to get 8 pieces of jungle appropriate scenery painted up, and managed to get one done this week. Nice.

THIS WEEK’S MODELS

This week’s models are the first 5 Swordmasters of Hoeth from the 2010 (2010!!!!!) Warhammer Fantasy Battles starter set. As you can no doubt see, I have gone from pretty much the default, standard Swordmasters of Hoeth scheme of blue, white and silver. I used a little more white and silver and a little less blue that the official models, but not by much. I prefer my high elves to read as mostly white rather than mostly blue, I suppose.

What I am 100% going to regret next week is going for the shadows and reflections on the blades. Although I love the effect, which I shamelessly borrowed from Jean Peinture on Instagram, it’s going to feel pretty time consuming to do it on a whole army’s weapons in weeks with tighter deadlines!

I wasn’t sure until they were almost fully painted what way I was going to go with the bases on these guys. When the models came out they were part of the steel legion drab, every battle is on a muddy plain era. I strongly considered going fully oldschool and doing goblin green and flock. In the end I went for the middle ground 5th/6th edition style and used steel legion drab on the base and trusty old warboss green on the trim.

These were lovely, clean, fun models to paint. They are not quite as over-detailed as I feel truly modern models have become, while still having the lovely crisp edges and details of modern plastic technology. They truly are the peak of monopose plastic models for me.

I’d love to say “five down, five to go” but I’ve made the beginner’s mistake of leaving the champion and banner bearer (aka the most complicated ones) till last. I hope I can maintain the standard of this group over the next twelve weeks or so.

MAKING A SCENE

As I said, there was a flurry of hobby activities this week. I also managed to finally get my last papercraft house fully based and flocked.

But more importantly than putting the last touches on a semi abandoned project, I started my Lustrain board project.

A few months ago I bought a few bags of cheap plastic aquarium plants from amazon (ironically enough). I obviously always knew the day for a lustian table would come. I stuck down a nice selection of the plants onto a sheet of plasticard and cut it out.

Then I sanded the base with fine grain hobby “sand” from green stuff world and painted the whole base Loren Forest, to match with my Lizardmen and Bretonnian’s bases. Looks pretty sharp, if I do say so myself. I’m planning one of these a week for the next few weeks to make a suitably jungley board, then maybe a spawning pool and some mesoamerican style jungle ruins. Excitement!

Regular contributor MG mentioned that WD 233 had some fun Lizardmen scenery builds, so I went back to my horde. And of course, I have WD 230, 231, 232, 234, and 235. Classic! Off I go to either eBay or the pdf library!

Well, thanks for reading this far. See you next week for the first complete unit of High Elves!