Hello there! Welcome back to Hammer the Backlog, the weekly mini painting (not orks), productivity and accountability blog. This week, I’ve been painting pretty much anything but Orks. A classic end-of-quarter Bits and Bobs update for you this week. Or bricoles, as the French would say. Why is that relevant? Read on to find out.
SCORECARD
With no orks to paint this week, the only thing in the green is the weekly scorecard! I “only” gave myself 5 points of painted models this week, made up of 3.5 for my mounted character, 1 for my wounded space marine and 0.5 for a micro project.
But what fun it was! Enthused as I was by having the freedom to paint something fun, I leapt straight into painting this week, getting the mounted Bretonnian Sorceress more or less fully painted by Sunday evening. I’ve always wanted one of these figures, which is probably why Emiel sent it to me!
Part of the joy of finishing up a project and having a bit of spare time meant I could finish some “micro-projects”. Quick, little, single session things that have been left to the side or forgotten until there was the mental time and energy to get them done.
The micro-project this week was getting the Green Knight’s shield painted. A facebook friend very kindly sent me this shield nearly two years ago, after my gifted green knight turned out not to have his original shield. I took a single session of less than half an hour to get this shield painted up.
The issue over the last two years has never been the time. I could find a half hour in any week, no matter how busy it was, but the mental energy and enthusiasm. Which came in spades this week!
THIS WEEK’S MODELS
So the main project this week was this later 5th edition Bretonnian Sorceress (Damsel?) on horseback that arrived all the way from Thanqual’s Lair. Wherever that is? Man sized rats living under the cities? Seems fanciful.
She had the shortest bare metal to fully painted journey of any model I think I’ve ever owned. Of the two models that came in this blister back in 1998, I always thought the one on horseback looked older, while the one standing looked quite young, despite being very, very similar figures.
With that in mind I was led to thinking of sexy auld witches, and the inspiration went to the Red Lady in Game of Thrones. (I say sexy auld witches fully aware of the fact that when Carice van Houten played Melisandre she was younger than I am now, so that now qualifies me as a sexy auld one).
I went looking for inspiration for colour schemes and found a very inspiring image of a celtic goddess type character with very pale skin and dark clothing on a white horse. I spent a while trying to figure out the artist, but I think it turned out to be AI, so I’m not going to post it here. You’ll just have to trust that the final result is very close to the inspiration.
I think the GW method of basecoat, wash, highlight really struggles to create feminine faces, the wash stage creates too deep a shadow, so I went a completely different way with this character. I painted the face with pallid wych flesh, then painted in some very very soft shadows with a very light glaze of gryph charger grey. Then I glazed a very very thin red glaze of evil suns on the upper cheeks and a very thin sigvald burgundy on the eyelids. Then I painted on the lips, eyes and eyebrows and highlighted with pallid wych flesh, with a final very spare highlight of white.
I think the model turned out really well, but suffers from being a warhammer model on a green base in an army. It would probably look amazing in a tiny micro diorama with a dark background and a more immersive base. But they are gaming pieces at the end of the day! I’ve decided to name her Lady Emilie van Houten, after her Dutch heritage.
The shield on the Green Knight, as I already said, took about 30 minutes. It has three different green recipes on it, one for the field, one for the face, and one for the leaves. Sadly, I am already a better painter than I was two years ago, so it is now the best painted part of what was once my best painted model.
Here it the temporary shield I hand painted two years ago. It really makes a difference on the finish of the model, don’t you think?
The final model this week was another gift from Emiel. The wounded marine was the easiest model to paint this week (I didn’t have to paint his back!) and the most difficult to photograph.
It was very useful to refresh my memory on how to paint my blood angles, since it has been about 3 months since I’ve done one.
I made him an assault marine of squad 7 of the 5th company. For future quarters I have 3 bikers (3 marines), an attack bike (2 marines) and two landspeeders (4 marines). Nine being an awkward number of marines for a squad who has taken to the vehicle pool, this guy is obviously one who has lost his bike in action.
I hope you’ll pardon the length of this week’s update, but I did also manage to start work on my Arvus Lighter. I still haven’t decided what the exterior of this model’s going to look like, so I built it in sections to be able to take it apart to get the interior sprayed and painted up next week.
Thanks for reading all of that!
See you next week for more tiny spaceship updates!
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