New Year, new you? No! Nothing ever changes here at Hammer the Backlog, the weekly mini painting, accountability and productivity blog. Not for us Backlog Hammerers the ephemeral waxing and waning of motivation that January and New Year’s resolutions bring. Oh no. We have a full year of models more or less already planned out, and we are a little over halfway through it.
Having said all of that, I’m not immune to a good old fashioned week off work for eating and drinking and staying up late watching Stranger Things, so I’m pretty glad to have had a fairly simple week of painting! Let’s take a look together.
SCORECARD
Well, green sweep again. It was maybe (maybe!) a little generous to count this week’s model as a full five points, but then again I have counted similar models (like the mercenary general from my dogs of war) as full five pointers too.
And, since my little empire force is without a specific general model at the moment, this guy is probably the de facto leader of my sub 1,000 point force.
Not much else to report in terms of progress this week. The model was simple enough to paint that it was a relaxing week, but complex enough that it was worth doing one on his own first to set the groundwork for trying to do two a week for the next two weeks.
THIS WEEK’S MODEL
One finished Reiksguard Knight Captain reporting for duty. These are some old assed models, I think being released all the way back with 6th edition in 2000. Nearly 26 year old models!
When these came out I remember them painted in a startlingly bright, almost white silver. I wanted to recreate some of that look, but not quite so extreme. I also wanted them to have the brightest metals in the army, brighter than the chest plates of the “lesser” foot soldiers.
So I did something I haven’t done in years and years. I didn’t use any acrylic washes on this model’s metallics. I base coated in the brightest of the three citadel metallic bases, I think Iron Hands steel? That’s right, isn’t it? Iron Hands Steel is bright, Leadbelcher is in the middle and Iron Warriors is dark?
Anyway, after that I highlighted with Ironbreaker, a fairly bright metal. Now things were looking very bright and metallic, but quite toyish and plain. So, taking what I learned from painting This Way Up a few weeks ago, I broke out the Tamiya black panel liner and directly shaded the gaps in the panel lines, the rivets and the decorative edging.
This enamel wash gives a much softer edge than trying to shade with paint, contrast or even Nuln oil. My usual go would be to use Nuln Oil, but this method really sells the bright metallic shine.
Once that was dry I gave an almost unnoticeable edge highlight with stormhost silver.
These models, being very old, are noticeably much less detailed than modern models. That’s not a complaint, by any means. In fact, I prefer it. It did mean, however, that replicating the Dave Gallagher art from the uniforms and heraldry book was out of the question, as that much design on the metal horse armour would have needed some extensive non metallic metal painting, outside the scope of getting this army done in a quarter.
I suppose I could have just paid the $2.50 for it?
TIDY YOUR ROOM
With a little bit of time off work and a fairly small painting project to work on, I had a bit of time to tidy up An Seomra Beag, aka my nerd stuff room. This is where I keep my action figures, books, podcasting stuff, transformers, lego, comics etc.
With my lovely lady wife forcing guiding me, we managed to turn it into a fun place to sit and just be, and in fact that is where I am now typing this from. Not wanting to divorce myself from my Warhammering activities, I decided to bring some of my armies in from the Lab to go on semi-permanent display.
And what better choice than my favourite fantasy and 40 armies?
Now, does anyone have any tips for LED lighting?
Thanks for reading this, see you next week for two more knights.
Best eggs.
Hammer the Backlog 
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