Quarter 2 Week 9 Update: Brokeback Mountain

Hello there! Welcome back to Hammer the Backlog, the weekly mini painting, accountability and productivity blog in which I, Mick, attempt to paint nearly 30 years of accumulated tabletop wargaming models before my hands fall off. It has been a tricky few weeks at Hammer the Backlog central, with a single large project taking up all of my time and motivation, but this week sees it finally broken and with new, exciting stuff to do on the horizon! Every week I start with a look at the project scorecard, then the progress on the targets, before looking at any issues that might be coming up. Join me!

SCORECARD

Ok, two bits of red in the scorecard this week, with Instagram and Facebook/Reddit posts down. Not at all surprising, since I haven’;t had any new models to post pictures of, and I was so dedicated to getting my Reaver Knights done I didn’t have any extra spare time to spend on taking army or battle shots for social media.

On the other hand, we have a lovely strong green in the scorecard with 15 models finished! This is counting each of the Reaver Knights as 3 points worth of effort, which to be honest, might be underselling them a little bit. The unit champion, for example, could and should have counted for 5 points. He is easily as complicated as any Grail Knight or 40k character model.

At the risk of harking on, I really did make a major planning mistake when I decided to count these equine idiots as 10 points and tried to get them all bulk painted in two weeks. Over the last few years I have learned a system for knights. Treat normal knights as 3 points and paint 2 of them a week for 6 points, or 1 a week and two infantry models for 5 points. Treat banner bearers and unit champions (if suitable differently for the normal models) as five points.

If I had followed this plan I would have had two finished models in week 1, two finished models in week 2, and the champion and therefore the unit finished in week three. My motivation probably would have held up better then too, with visible progress and less batch painting monotony!

But sure look, that brings the High Elves from the Island of Blood set to more than 80% done, with just the prince on griffon left to paint. 

No progress on any other rocks this week, as every spare moment was dedicated to getting these finished. Let’s take a look at the models!

THIS WEEK’S MODELS

Five Reaver Knights from the 2010 Island of Blood set, finished to a standard that I am happy with. Could I have done a bit more? Always! But let’s call them done. There are three unique models in this set, the unit leader with the winger lancer styled headdress, the shooty guy and the reload guy. Let’s be honest here. Although these were an absolute pain to paint and have taken up a lot of my thoughts and energy over the last three weeks, they actually are the nicest models in the box, aren’t they?

The horses are great, the armour is great, the riders are nicely proportioned in not over the top action poses. The plumes on the horses, the riders and the fletching of the arrows makes a lovely little triangle that you can apply a spot colour to so it really pops.

The box art versions of these guys are much darker than mine of the horses coats, with a lot more blue and pink. My guiding principle for this army is that the armour is silver, the cloth is white and the trim is blue. This meant I used a lot of fairly neutral brown on the armour where the official scheme used reddish gold. I am quite happy with the brown leather being a fairly prominent colour as it reinforced the feeling of light or medium cavalry for this unit.

I’ll tell you what, I think I have another 10 of these somewhere near the bottom of the pile of shame, possibly even still on sprue. I will be in no rush to paint them again in the foreseeable future, that’s for sure.

I think for my Prince of Griffon I am going to go with gold armour, but try to include some of this reddish pink colour on his shield to tie him in with these a little more.

WHAT’S NEXT?

Well, the end of the quarter is fast approaching and the battle report looms over me. So it’s time to put the High Elves away for a little while and look at what needs to be done for the Revenge of Tlaxtlan.

First of all, we need unit command groups for the two units of bowmen, one in red and one in yellow. Luckily enough these are already bought, cleaned up and undercoated, so 4 points of work next week to get them finished.

For my arm list I need a general, hero and battle standard bearer. I think my knight with sword and shield can be the hero, and my already painted Grail Knight can jump in as the general. That leaves one grail knight to paint up as the battle standard bearer. He is going to be a full week’s work, which leaves week 10 and 11 accounted for. That gives me two weeks afterward to play the game, make the battle report and paint the prince on a griffon just in time to take a little Christmas break.

I better get to it!

Wish me luck!

Best Eggs!