Hello there fellow Predators. No, wait a minute, that doesn’t sound great. Hey you, over here! Welcome back to Hammer the Backlog, the weekly mini painting, productivity and accountability blog, where this week, the insistence on a very obvious pun for the title is going to result in me really mixing up my sci-fi metaphones. You son of a bitch!
SCORECARD
The only red in the ledger this week is the red paint that I spilled while I was painting this week’s model! I thought it was supposed to be a month of green paint, not more red?
In terms of the quarter’s progress, at 4 weeks in we are 20 Hammer the Backlog points down with 30/35 to go. Noice.
Not much else to look at here this week, so let’s go take a look at….
THIS WEEK’S MODEL
So I did what I said I was going to do and “rewarded” myself for finishing the Nob unit with a mini vehicle to paint, the first of the three Deff Koptas. Get to the choppa, indeed.
It was a slow start this week, with the first two days being spent cleaning up, removing mold lines and finding parts and getting everything glued together. I decided to paint him up off of his flying base so that I could spray undercoat him more easily.
For the overall colour scheme, I skewed pretty closely again to Dawn of War 1. Now, obviously, Deff Koptas weren’t in Dawn of War 1, so I borrowed the overall idea for the colour scheme from the trukks in the game, being red, metallics and flames. For variety, I won’t do all three with flames, so the next one will get black and white checkers and the last one will get white dags.
One partial regret was fully assembling the model (except for glueing the propeller) before painting. That made it particularly difficult to actually paint the Ork pilot, especially his clothes.
Very little green on this model!
Overall I think this scheme turned out a little too red, with the metals being both a little too light and too warm. The in-game metals are much darker. I’m a tiny bit tempted to go back over the blades with Iron Warriors instead of Iron Hands Steel.
Isn’t it interesting that the designers of Dawn of War 1 went with red for both the Blood Ravens and the Orks in the first game?
I really did struggle with this model. I can see the appeal for ork players of just picking a main colour, picking out some random panels in metallics, and then using washes, drybrushes and battle damage to produce a cool, ramshackle, final result. But my brain just doesn’t work like that. There is very little more stressful for me in mini painting than purposefully trying to make something look like a mess!
Well lookit, I’d better stop flapping my lips and go and get started on the mold line removal for the next (first?) batch of five boys!
Best eggs, see you next week!
Hammer the Backlog 
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