Quarter 2 Week 7 Update: I’ve Made a Grave Error

Hello fellow ghouls, welcome back to this Halloween update of Hammer the Backlog, the weekly mini painting productivity and accountability blog. You join me this week on a very busy week, with Halloween and my lovely lady wife’s birthday double teaming me with distraction, leading to (or perhaps just exasperating) a bit of a muck up in planning. Let’s take a look at this week’s scorecard!

SCORECARD

Alrighty then, another week of manual tables since instance agency tools is being a real scaredy cat.

Hold ups due to missing supplies	0
Instagram Posts	5
Facebook/Reddit Posts	5
Models Finished	0
Blog Post	1

The really scary thing this week, the real eyeball in the soup of life, is the big fat zero in the models finished column. Now, let me take you on the journey of the terrifying tale of how I mucked up.

When I started this blog, the first few weeks of models were single, monopose, mid nineties bowmen models. It was at this stage that I decided one Hammer the Backlog point would be equal to the effort it took to paint an infantry man (or woman! (or ghoul!)). So five points is five infantry men. He is a throwback photo to one of those weeks! Look at those simple bois!

This system bit me in the ass a little bit over the last 6 weeks of this quarter, since one of these dumbass Island of Blood infantrymen (infantry elves!) has about as much detail as five 90s models.

Now! Back two years ago I also realised a knight on horseback, with the rider, the horse and the horses armour would be equal in effort to three infantry men (or goblins!). All good so far. Lookit!

So why then, Mick, did you not only decide that instead of painting two knights a week (6 HtB points), you would paint all of them over the span of two weeks? 10 hammer the backlog points, instead of 15? Why? Is that not foolish? NEVERMIND THE FACT THAT THESE MODELS ARE MUCH MORE COMPLEX THAN 90S BRETONNIAN KNIGHTS!!!

Anyway, the long and short of it is there is going to be a three week project afterall, sadly. That means two weeks with no finished models! Booooooo! Very back Hammer the Backlogging!

THIS WEEK’S MODELS

So this week’s models were taking up with the clean-up, reassembly and undercoating of the five knights, as well as the basecoating of the horses.

The clean-up took a little bit more time than I thought, to be honest. They needed to be disassembled, have the mould lines scraped off and then be reattached, with the gaps filled in.

I decided to go for a fairly simple grey scheme for the horses, rather than the very deep dark blue of the official models.

I achieved this with a basecoat of grey seer, a coat of basilicanum grey, a wash of nuln oil, then highlights with dawn stone and administratum grey. I will add a very stark edge highlight when the rest of the models are painted.

I tried to stick to my guiding principle on these “not too much blue and gold”.

SPOOKY SEASON

I was looking for a spooky model that I’ve painted for Halloween night.

This was the best I could come up with!

See you next week for more progress on the knights!

Best eggs!

Lee Handsome

October 31, 2024

Quarter 2, Updates, Year 3

fantasy, High Elves, Island of Blood, miniatures, painting, Pile of Shame, Quarter 2, Scorecard, wargaming, warhammer

One response to “Quarter 2 Week 7 Update: I’ve Made a Grave Error”

MG

November 2, 2024 at 11:45 am

You know… I’ve been thinking about your scoring system for a while now. And what you posted above is what ocurred to me when you were doing the Dark Vengeance box.

I do like the new GW figures (I have lots!), but this post also highlights why the older figures continue to endure in their appeal to me.

For me, to clean up and prep, prime, paint, varnish, and base a model to a standard I’m happy with typically takes around 5 days of 4+ hours *minimum*. For older 90s models, that might be about 4 days of 4+ hours to a finished figure, but I’ve noticed that the new multipart plastic kits *never* take me less than 20hrs work, and to do a good job often extend to 30-40hrs. This is for troopers, cavalry, monstrous infantry. Dragons/tanks, etc., are a separate category of timescale altogther, often quite individual.

Now, the above is for single figures, but batch-painting units doesn’t always result in proportional time savings either. If ten 90s models take me two weeks to do as a batch, the newer models take about 4 weeks (sometimes more). This accounts for the extended time in prep work (more parts = more mould lines and sprue atachment points to clean, more parts to glue and dry, more to pin, etc), but also the resulting complexity in painting (more detail, smaller/finer details, harder access to areas, painting in subassemblies, etc).

This means the newer figures take at least twice as long on average, and (I have to admit) that I don’t enjoy the painting as much either. Yes, the crisp edges on the new figures make edge highlighting much easier, but they also have a tendency to be less forgiving on flat areas and details too, which takes longer to get looking smooth and complete. I also find the new figures are much more delicate to handle, and more than once I’ve accidentaly broken off a dangly detail or snapped the end off something spindly.

In the end, I find that I like both new and older models just as much when they’re all finished. This leads me to start to not look forward to newer kits and much as the older ones, becuase in the back of my mind I know there’s double the work for the “same” reward at the end. It’s silly, I know, but as I have limited time, this niggle bothers me much more than you’d think!

I think doubling the points you assign to models from 2000-2015 era is more than fair, and I would consider at least an extra couple of points per unit/lord (if not an outright tripling of points) for models post-2015. If you finish earlier, you can always do bonus stuff. But if you struggle to complete the models in the assigned time, it can be disheartening and may risk a burnout. It’s good to push yourself a bit (and you do/will get faster with continual practice over time), but it’s also supposed to be fun and enjoyable – so upping difficulty from easy to normal is okay, but there’s no need to play on hard or nightmare if you don’t enjoy the experience! 😉

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