Quarter 4 Week 7 Update: Hey You Guys!

Hello and welcome back to Hammer the Backlog, the weekly Warhammer mini painting, productivity and accountability blog. It has been a heck of a busy week here at Hammer the Backlog central, with loads of side projects on, and a slight bit of overambitiousness (is that a word? Google doesn’t think it’s a word) almost leading to a derailing of the main point of this blog, getting models painted. 

Let’s take a look at the Scorecard, this week’s models and then two other pieces of business!

SCORECARD

Alrighty then, it’s another week in the green this week, although just barely. As is often the case on these “skin-of-the-teeth” weeks, this week’s models aren’t actually fully done to a standard I’m happy with as I’m typing this, so I am giving myself the benefit of the doubt and assuming I’ve gotten them done by the time this is uploaded this evening.

There were a couple of reasons for the close call, all Hammer the Backlog related in one way or another. I’ll talk about one in a little bit, but first let’s talk hubris. So, if you recall the plan for this quarter, each of the aberrants (I think I’ve finally got the name right) was going to count as 2.5 hammer the backlog points, giving me 2 weeks to paint all four. This makes sense to me as despite the fact that they are far from as big and hulking and terrifying as their lore would suggest (they are about the same size as an ork, in fact), they are quite complicated models blending pale freaky skin, chitin and bit and pieces of cult uniforms.

Hubris got the better of me, though, and I foolishly thought I could get all four done in a week when I saw that they were relatively small. So, instead of sticking to the plan, I got all four of them about 30% done before I realised I was running out of time and switched the focus to two instead. Now, as I stare down a late night and early morning to get these two finished, I have learned my lesson about sticking to the plan.

OR HAVE I?

At least I have given myself a slightly easier week next week!

THIS WEEK’S MODELS

So, as I said above, two aberrants finished this week. Quite fun models, all in all. Being pale skinned bald freaks, they speak to me in certain ways. No psionically, just, I can relate.  The skin was the most challenging section, highlighting and shading unnatural skin tones while still keeping them “human-adjacent” is a new skill I’m having to learn this quarter with the cults.

For the skin, I undercoated them with Pallid Wych Flesh and when that was dry I applied a coat of Magos purple. I always thought magos purple was pretty purple, but when it was on the pallid wych flesh it looked a lot more pink than I expected. So I gave the models a glaze with Druchii Violet, a much more purple purple. 

I didn’t use this as a wash, just as a gentle all-over glaze. After that I glazed back up gradually to pure pallid wych flesh over 4 or five coats and then added a little white for the final highlights.

The more genestealery bits were painted exactly like Big G last week, and the transitions between the two were done with glazes of volupus pink, with the veins sketched on with pure voluptuous pink. 

Overall I am quite happy with them, even if their bulbous veiny heads hit quite close to home.

And next week, I have half the work to do!

INVITING ANYONE WITH TWO HEALTHY KIDNEYS

The biggest surprise of the week was being invited by Youtube to attend the first ever Irish Youtube Creator Collective event in Dublin this week. I spent the week trying to figure out what algorithm exactly had led them to inviting me, with my small channel that I upload to five or six times a year.

At one stage I was pretty sure I was being lured into an organ harvesting ring.

But no, it turned out to be a totally genuine invitation to a totally real event in Pitch Dublin. There were about 150 Irish YouTubers (gas) there, from people with a couple of thousand subscribers up to a couple of million. 

An evening of free food, free drinks, free games and swag. But the best part was meeting a multitude of people just as passionate about their niche as I am about getting minis painted. What was surprising was that I seemed to be the only one there repping mini painting, tabletops games, RPGs and nerdom in general.

Anyway, here’s my big stupid head grinning uncontrollably.

HEALTHY MIND, HEALTHY MIND

The other interesting thing that happened to me this week was that James from Merlin’s Miniatures reached out to me to see if I would like to contribute a miniature to an upcoming charity event they are participating in in aid of Mind, the mental health charity. 

I am lucky enough to be of fairly robust mental health, although like anyone I know that could change in the future, and I am not without my hang ups and foibles.

The reason that this spoke to me was that one of the main taglines of Hammer The Backlog is finding joy in what you have, not always chasing the newest and the shiniest things, and trying to avoid worrying about missing out or not being good enough.

One of my personal foibles is that I put a lot of myself into “stuff”. Particularly stuff that has a face. I still have every model I’ve ever painted (unless it was painted from the beginning as a gift for someone else), every action figure I’ve ever owned. Every stuffed animal and toy from my childhood is in the laboratory in storage boxes. I find it VERY difficult to part with things. The most I’ve ever cried, and this is not a joke, was when Andy gave away his toys in Toy Story 3. I realise that I am incredibly lucky that something relatively trivial like this is probably my biggest mental health issue, but I decided to confront it, for a good cause, by sending off one of my beloved miniatures to raise money for charity.

So my classic Chaos Warrior with hammer, including the shield from my first ever box of miniatures in the 90s, is currently packed up and ready to say goodbye. This guy has had an interesting journey. He was donated to my local GW (GW Dublin) years ago by a person who just handed in their box of odds and ends that they had no use for. I grabbed a couple of minis from the box and promptly added them to my own pile of shame for about 15 years. Then, once I started the Hammer the Backlog project I randomly picked him out of the box and painted him when I had a free week. I hope he finds a nice new home, but even if he doesn’t, at the end of the day stuff is not the most important thing in any of our lives.

Well look, that is enough confronting our own demons for one week of a blog about painting toy soldiers, I have to go and get this week’s models finished.

Thanks for reading all this. See you next week for the other two Aberrants.

Best eggs!