Quarter 4 Week 10 Update: No, Wait. Maybe it is a Marathon

Welcome back, oh most beloved of readers, to Hammer the Backlog, the weekly mini painting, productivity and accountability blog. We are really deeeeep in the depths of year 3 now, with only about 3 weeks left to go and pretty much all of the painting targets accounted for. Join me for the penultimate week of painting this year’s target models as we take a look at the weekly scorecard, the models and the upcoming final three weeks of year 3.

SCORECARD

After last week’s slight blip, it’s nice to be fully back in the green for week 10. Five models finished this week, including finishing off the two familiars that I only got about 60% done last week.

With the familiars being both tiny and more or less half done, I really only had about 4 models worth of surface area to paint this week, making it relatively stress free. 

I did go a little bit off piste, as you can see from the fact that the final week next week will be spent on the two leader models together rather than a model and a familiar each, but that feels like the right move since the leader models have a lot more in common with each other than with the familiars, and it is easier to paint similar schemes across two models than it is to paint two completely different models.

Looking back over the, let’s say, four and a half months of work it has taken me to paint Deathwatch Overkill at this stage has left me wondering what I used to be thinking when I was buying these boxed sets. I know I don’t have that many of them, relatively speaking, but I really had no chance of ever finishing them with the way I used to do things, did I? How did I get away with buying them with no intention of ever actually putting the work in? Madness!

THIS WEEK’S MODELS

Lookit, the final three “rank and file” and two little men.

I’d call that a decent week.

The two guys with the mining lasers are somewhere between the more human looking 3rd generation hybrids and the slightly more genestealer earlier generations. Do they grow a third arm because they are the heavy gunners, or are they the heavy gunners because they have a third arm?

Since the weapons that genestealer cults use are supposed to be repurposed everyday mining equipment, how are humans with a normal complement of arms supposed to work these things? An additional servo arm? Probably. That feels pretty 40k.

Painting up the big guns was challenging, since they don’t have identifiable casings to paint a different colour. So I tried to use a variety of tones of shades to give the large metallic areas a bit of interest.

Although painting the more human looking members of the genestealer cults can be challenging due to the variety of different schemes (boots, armour, pants, leathers, weapons, skins, carapace bits, red cloth etc), they are still my favourite models from this set. You never get bored when you spend an hour doing everyone’s grey, then an hour doing everyone’s blues and so on. As opposed to say, space marines, where 90% of your painting time is on the same colour for the whole unit.

Just the two semi-characters left to go next week, then it’s pretty much all hands on deck to make two or three end of year videos, and maybe, just maybe, get some bits and bobs painted.

Thanks for reading this week, best egg!