Hello and welcome back to Hammer the Backlog, the suddenly highly topical mini painting, productivity and accountability blog in which I try to get a mountain of collected Warhammer projects painted before my hands fall off. From too much Warhammer. Lookit, when I decided to do a first born, 2008 style Blood Ravens army about 5 months ago, I couldn’t possibly have known that Games Workshop were going to release a Dawn of War boardgame. And then release a remake of Dawn of War 1. And then announce Dawn of War 4 (why did they skip 3, I wonder?). Or could I have known all along?
I didn’t.
Anyway, as we come tantalisingly close to the end of the quarter one project, let’s take a look at the weekly scorecard, the progress on the project and this week’s models.
SCORECARD
Not quite a full week in the green, thanks to dedicating two weeks to getting my predator tank painted, but an awful lot of hobbying done and many lessons learned and things prepared. Not having the pressure to finish the tank (and in fact, allocating too much time for it in reality) really took my foot off the accelerator and let me luxuriate and enjoy the project this week.
I did get plenty done on the tank. At the time of writing I would say it’s about 70 percent done, which leaves me loads of time to finish it next week and give it plenty of attention when it comes to decals, highlights, weathering and other adornments.
No updates on the “replace instant agency tools” rock, although work has far from stopped on it. It just turns out that these things take time. But there should be something fun and exciting to start playing around with in a couple of weeks time. Nice.
You’ll also notice that the scorecard for blog updates this week says 2 instead of the usual 1. Why? That’s because Harry, from the awesome blog Harry paints minis, has been using the Hammer the Backlog system for the last few quarters and has contributed our second ever guest blog, which will be posted mere moments after you have finished reading this.
Check him out at https://www.instagram.com/harry_paintsminis/ and give his guest blog a read and a comment when you have a moment! Cheers, best eggs!
THIS WEEK’S MODEL
This week’s model is my Blood Ravens predator tank, reclaimed from the forces of chaos and reconsecrated, as only the Blood Ravens can do. Ok, so the true story is I bought this tank about 20 years ago for my Chaos Space Marine army, built it and put it in a drawer for 19 years.
It wasn’t in terrible condition, but there were a few things to fix. First of all, I have to un-chaos it by removing the gargoyles from the end of the guys and cleaning them up, and replacing the chaos hatch covers with plain ones. I also had to remove the chaos spoke adornments that were all over it. I left the two hooks on, though. Being towable isn’t against the codex astartes, is it?
After that I used some tamiya extra thin to fill in some gaps and a bit of sanding to make everything extra smooth. The gaps along the side of the rhino models have always bothered me. Are they there on the “real” tank, like panel lines, or should they be completely filled in and painted over? Even the GW team doesn’t seem to know sometimes. I didn’t break my heart completely by sanding them smooth like I would with a historical model kit, but I did choose to paint to deemphasise them.
I used the exact same method to paint the tank as I did with the Dreadnought a few weeks back. An all over spray of black, followed by a decent coat of mechanicus standard grey, and then a top down only blast of grey seer. This came out a little dustier than I would have linked, but I think it’s fine for a tank. It looks like it was actually painted on, rather than being cast or dipped in red.
Then I gave it an overall coat of Flesh Tearers red contrast through an airbrush. Once that had dried, a very light zenithal highlight with airbrush Evil sons scarlet, again through the airbrush. Then, normal edge highlights with evil sons scarlet, wild rider red, and a dot highlight of tau light ochre.
I am going for the blood raves as they appeared in Dawn of War One, so the predator doesn’t get any bone panels. If I ever do a rhino for this force, they would get bone coloured doors.
So, really, not much left to do. A bit more weathering, darken some recesses, paint the blacks, golds and silvers. Paint in the various lenses and do the decals. I also need to find an imperial eagle to stick on the front panel for maximum authenticity. I know I must have one somewhere, I’ve built enough chaos tanks that there must be imperial spares in a box somewhere.
One piece of advice for predator builders, leave the sponsons off until the end. They weren’t particularly hard to paint around, but the connection is so thin I managed to break them both off several times while painting and will need to spend a little while pinning them back together most likely.
THE RETURN OF DAWN OF WAR
Lookit, I really couldn’t have known Dawn of War was going to have its big revival while I was doing this! But it has made it a lot of fun. As my enthusiasm for Blood Ravens has reached a peak, so has the internet’s. My Blood Raven’s army shoot on Instagram is going to be the post that finally dethrones my Warhammer Fantasy Battles 5th edition box set as my most popular post ever.
It’s so funny, because I really did think this was going to be a personal passion project that no one else would have any interest in. In fact, this might be one of my favourite quarters of Hammer the Backlog ever. I know the main point of Hammer the Backlog is remembering and recovering the joy and inspiration to finish every project you ever started, but this one has been a complete blast.
I’ve enjoyed it so much in fact, that I went looking through the rest of the pile of shame to find out what other 2008ish models I had that could be reasonably added to the Blood Ravens army. I was shocked to find this:
Some of them are still on sprues, some of them were started as ultramarines, some of them were cut off their sprues and it took my hours of rummaging through bits boxes to put them together, but in the end it turns out I have an entire second tray’s worth of Blood Ravens waiting for me for year 5! Yipee?
Well look, that’s enough out of me for one week. I’m off to finish a tank and drive it around going pew pew pew.
Don’t forget to check out the very special guest blog from Harry!
Best of eggs.
Hammer the Backlog 
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