Quarter 1 Week 5 Update: …. I Still Serve

I have awoken, again. Welcome back to week 5 (already?) of quarter 1 of year 4 (already?) of Hammer the Backlog, the weekly mini painting, productivity and accountability blog. It’s mostly Warhammer minis, let’s be honest, by why tie ourselves to one franchise when the worlds are our oysters?

I have been feeling particularly, and surprisingly, invigorated by this quarter’s project, a Dawn of War Blood Ravens take on a 2008 Space Marine army. Half the Space Marine side of the 2008 starter set Assault on Black Reach, half random space marine bits and bobs I’ve accumulated over 30 years of collecting.

Let’s get down to business with a look at the scorecard, this week’s models and the death of Instant Agency Tools.

SCORECARD

Instant Agency Tools is dead. Long live Hammer the Backlog. So it’s no secret (in fact it’s one of this quarter’s targets) that I am working on a more bespoke, fitting to model painting way of tracking my project progress, but it was a teeny tiny bit bitter sweet to see Instant Agency Tools wrap up this week. In the meantime, I hope you can put up with my basic-assed excel version!

The only red in this week’s ledger is that big fat 0 in the models finished column. Nothing particularly to worry about, since I decided to start work on the Assault on Black Reach Dreadnaught, and also decided to dedicate 10 points to him, spread over two weeks.

In retrospect, with a couple of days of really dedicated painting I probably could have actually got the Dreadnought done in a single week, although maybe not quite to the same standard I’m hoping to achieve. On the other hand, I’ll be away for a couple of days next week for a summer holiday, so it suits to have an “easy” week in hand.

THIS WEEK’S MODEL

So, no finished model this week, just about 70% progress on my first ever old school dreadnought. I’ve painted a Hellbrute and a Redemptor dread before, but despite 30 years of looking at the things, this is my first time painting an old fashioned box dreadnought.

Luckily, wherever I bought the Assault on Black Reach box set and built it up, this was one of the models I actually did clean up and remove most of the gaps and mold lines from. Clean up was fairly minimal, a couple of passes with sanding sticks and sanding up the base.

I could have painted this fella like a big infantry model, but with the predator tank looming on the horizon, I decided to try out some vehicle painting methods instead of infantry painting. 

So first of all, I undercoated the whole model, including all the nooks and crannies, with a Chaos Black spray. When this was dry, he got a fairly comprehensive coat of mechanicus standard grey spray, leaving only the deepest shadows black.

After that he got a zenithal spray of Grey Seer, covering maybe the top 25% only, and then finally a top down spritz of skull white. The effect was so convincing, I think, that it actually looks like I just sprayed the damned thing white and the shadows are real!

The next step was to bust out my underused Iwata airbrush. My lovely girlfriend bought this for me from a hobby shop in Japan more than 10 years ago, and I’ve never really got the hang of it. The whole cleaning process of airbrushes has always put me off, and I think I damaged a valve in it a few years ago with over enthusiastic application of alcohol, but since I haven’t used it in four years, I kinda forgot and just went with the flow and had great fun and loved the results.

The first step was to airbrush on contrast Flesh Tearers Red mixed 50/50 with contrast medium. Using it through the airbrush like this needed a couple of thin coats and, fairly obviously, killed the “contrast” effect of highlights and shadows, hence the underpainting with the spray cans.

After this it looked good, if a little flat, so it got two thin coats of Evil Suns Scarlet Air Paint, straight out of the pot into the airbrush, again as a zenithal.

This gave a nice dark to light effect, and was great fun. Even in air form, Evil Suns Scarlet is the best paint.

After that it was on to the normal edge highlighting and painting that I do on the infantry models. It really started coming together once the first edge highlight of evil sons was applied.

Using the same colours as my infantry models, just through an airbrush, really tied the vehicle in with the troops, which was my biggest concern about painting vehicles.

I left it there for the week and will complete the rest of the highlighting and details next week for the full 10 point model.

I’m really looking forward to using the same techniques on the predator tank in a couple of weeks. And since it is relatively fast, I might not need to count the predator as 15 points after all!

Well, that’s it from me this week. See you next week for a finished Dread, a trip to France and maybe, just maybe, an Alpha version of the Instant Agency Tools replacement.

Best eggs!