Hello! Welcome back to Hammer the Backlog, the weekly Warhammer (mostly) mini painting, productivity and accountability blog in which I try to get 25 years of unpainted tabletop gaming minis painting to a stand just below (if you squint) box art quality. (Please do squint. It will help with your enjoyment of the blog and with my ego).
It’s been a busy week in the personal life this week, so let’s cut the dilly dallying and get down to it!
SCORECARD
Despite the interesting (to put it mildly) week, all in the green. It was a big push to get as much done as I did this week, and that included spending lunch hours painting fiddly details on the Deathwatch Librarian. As with the last few weeks, I mostly focussed on the fantasy models at the weekend and the deathwatch during the week, but the fantasy models did flow over until monday evening this week, resulting in a bit of a push needed to get the Librarian done.
Slightly more action on Instagram this week thanks to the great bunch of lads over at www.merlinsminiatures.co.uk putting up a community spotlight post about me and my dumb little blog!
Speaking of Instagram, I noticed this week that @another.figure.painter who follows me on Instagram is Kornel Kozak, a former ‘Eavy Metal painter from the era in which I learned to paint. It’s so strange that the person who’s official GW tutorials I learned from follows me on social media. What a small and weird world we live in.
I initially planned to paint a side each of the banner for the company of honour for the last two weeks. But I realised that didn’t really make sense and so instead did the front and back trim so that I can spend the last week of the quarter doing the freehand parts.
I still have the space marine sergeant, the servo skull and teleport homer and two company of honour left to paint to round out the quarter. Then, into the recording studio to do the end of quarter wrap up next weekend! Busy busy!
THIS WEEK’S MODELS
This week of painting spoke to me a little more than the last few weeks, that’s for sure. There are probably a number of reasons for that. Let’s take a look at them.
First of all, it was fun getting to paint up my converted Company of Honour captain with his little baby griffon friend. The captain himself was very easy to paint, he is just the company of honour colours with gold instead of black. But I think he looks fantastic as a contrast from the rest of the models in the front row.
I struggled, as I always do with the variety of natural browns on the baby griffon. He could probably “pop” a bit more, but in the end he looks pretty close to the art that inspired him. I don’t even know where this little guy came from. Does anyone know what kit he was in?
With the captain and banner bearer in the front rank these guys are coming together to look like what I imagine they would when I made them 15 years or so ago. It is a bit of a shame that there were no on the march bodies and halberd arms with puffy sleeves for me to use back then, but I am glad in the end that I didn’t “fix” them for the modern world.
For Sci-fi this week we have Blood Ravens Deathwatch Librarian Jensus Natorian. That’s right, an official model of the chapter introduced by Relic Games in the seminal (SEMINAL!!) Dawn of War PC games. To this day, the best RTS games in the Warhammer 40k universe. Dawn of War was huge for me, I bought a new PC to play it in 2005, and bought and finished each of the expansions. A truly great game. And that makes it all the more shameful that I’ve never painted a Blood Raven.
Until now! There is not a huge amount new to report on this guy. He is slightly overdetailed, as most librarians tend to be, but he was fun to paint overall. I went for a pale pallor to the skin, with shadows in space wolf grey rather than the healthier looking magos purple and burgundy.
The yellow gold runes on bluegreen power swords seems to be the look that GW settled on for force swords in this era, so who was I to argue? I painted his force sword exactly the same way as the Dark Angels librarian I did a few months ago. Seems to have worked out nicely.
One area that was slightly fun to experiment with was the black highlights. His shoulder pad is dark blue, with blue highlights. His hood and cowl are black, but with the same blue highlights. His chest and leg armour is black with blue grey highlights. And finally his feet are black with pure neutral grey highlights. That means that the intensity of the blue on the figure increases closer to the face. Does it work? Don’t know, but I like it!
Lookit, that’s it for another week!
See you next week for the final models for this quarter’s targets!
Best of eggs!
Hammer the Backlog 
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