Despite rumours to the contrary, the Flu didn’t manage to finish me off last week, leaving me alive and well to welcome you back to Hammer the Backlog, the weekly mini painting, productivity and accountability blog. This is the first update of calendar year 2025, but calendar years mean very little to us here at Hammer the Backlog Central (aka my house) since we are currently in the early weeks of Quarter 3 of year 3 of this ongoing project to paint every single tabletop gaming miniature I’ve ever bought.
But look, I love you guys, but we’ve only got 14 seconds to save the earth, so we should probably get on with it!
SCORECARD
After last week’s complete failure to launch, we finally dispatched war rocket ajax to bring back the body. A full week in the green. And the rest, to be honest. Even though I’m not fully over the flu at the time of writing this, the post Christmas lull did give me a bit more time to luxuriate in painting, letting me get this week’s space marine and two men at arms done, and get a good start on next week’s men at arms! Nice. I might just be able to recover from the Christmas debacle.
Nothing much else to report this week, thankfully, so let’s take a look at this week’s models.
THIS WEEK’S MODELS
I just know that I am going to enjoy this quarter. I really struggled to find a system to stop me from going mad as I painted 11 space marine heroes, mostly black and silver over the course of three months. By running a space marine project and a fantasy project at the same time I can either complete two fantasy models, then move on to a scifi model (or vice versa) or I can swap between them as interest strikes or as shades and washes are drying.
The first models I painted were the first two of the very Bretonnian Men-at-arms very kindly sent to me by Merlin’s Miniatures. These were great fun to paint after months of fiddly high elves, so much so that I almost got them done in an evening. I think my favourite thing about them is their faces, much more distinctly sculpted than the plastics and a lot of other metals from the same era. Big, goofy, expression packed faces. I went a little bit further with coloured washes of purple and red to put some tone into their faces. I especially love the guy in the full chainmail coif.
Since I’m working on the basis that each of the men at arms or bowmen units in my army is supplied by one of the richer knights who can muster a full unit, these guys are going to be painted in the livery of my knight that wears the colours of connacht. A classic blue and white scheme on the shields, with blue and white making up the main colours on the equipment of the men, as well as light and dark leathers and cloth colours. I’m going to mix it up a bit so that no two men are exactly the same.
Great fun so far.
The first space marine from Deathwatch Overkill to be painted was Iron Hand Ennox Sorrlock with combi melta. Again, the most fun thing to paint on this model was the face, which I painted paler than the official model to match the card artwork as closely as I could.
Painting the metallics on the Deathwatch arm was fun. I used a new silver method for this section, washing with Basinicaum grey instead of any of my usual methods. It picks out the lettering beautifully and very quickly.
I think I went a bit too stark on the highlights on the black on this guy. I’m going to take it down a notch on the next model, and I might actually go back over this guy once the rest are done and knock the highlights down a little.
A big part of this deathwatch overkill project, back when I first bought it, was going to be the basing. I wanted to base all of the models from the game as though they were running about on the gantries of decrepit mining colony. It never sit right with me that the official art uses light brown battlefield bases for this game’s models. It looks just as out of place as the classic goblin green necromunda bases.
Green, therefore, will be the primary colour for the bases. The boards themselves range from dark green, all the way up through the shades and in teals and blues. What unifies them is the bronze gold metal work and worn look, which I tried to replicate here.
SOCIAL MEDIA
So, as we well know, Instagram will never be the main focus of this project. It is a nice side project that helps me get things painted by providing a kind of final destination for photos of hobby projects. I can’t lie, it also helps with my need for extrinsic motivation, getting the pictures up and seeing people enjoying them will always contribute quite a strong amount to my motivation to get things finished.
Anyway, after pretty much exactly two and a half years of Hammer the Backlog, on New Year’s Eve of all days, I hit 5,000 followers on Instagram. Nice. With 10 quarters down, that is an average of 500 new followers per quarter.
How many followers will the Hammer the Backlog Instagram have when the backlog is finally hammered? Don’t know!
Thanks for reading all of this, you are the best eggs.
Hammer the Backlog 
Leave a comment