Hello there me hearties and welcome… No wait, I did the pirate thing last week didn’t I? Well, you write 200 blog updates in four years and try to be original! This is Hammer the Backlog, the weekly mini painting, productivity and accountability blog. It’s the penultimate week of quarter 3 of year 4, and a fairly busy and quite stressful week in real life definitely impacted painting productivity this week. But did it impact things enough to knock the quarter off schedule?
Only one way to find out!
SCORECARD
Kinda! Well, not really to be honest. I got all five of this week’s models done with plenty of time, even though one of them was a banner bearer with an elaborate enough freehand design, which I always forget to count as another figure.
The reason for the red in the ledger this week was a rare failure of shopping Mick. He’s not usually the one who lets the side down. With Hammer the Backlog going on for nearly four years now, quite a few of my supplies of things that used to feel infinite are starting to dwindle. My fine sand is nearly all gone, my static grass is down to about half a pot, and several different paints are in need of new purchases. Long story short, I ran out of both superglue and Fenrisian Grey this week and forgot to get replacements. That means this week’s five models don’t have static grass tufts on their bases. No huge disaster, especially since they are rear rankers, but if I remember and have time next week I’ll fix them up.
Nothing much else to report this week, other than that Jim and I are heading into the studio on Saturday to record the Assault on Black Reach video, and then I’m going to trick him into helping me with the quarterly video too.
THIS WEEK’S MODELS
Four rear rankers for the Scourge of the Reik, and their banner bearer this week. These were some wild conversions. I get now why I never attempted them back when I first made them about 15 years ago.
The banner bearer is, I’m fairly sure, an empire archer with the banner from a spare Island of Blood Seaguard banner bearer. I don’t know how I merged them together, but I have vague memories of sanding down the detail on the original banner and then trying to smooth it out with liquid greenstuff.
I decided not to do a mirror image of the banner on the reverse side, instead going for a classic empire cross to tie them in with the rest of the army. I don’t think historic banners tended to match on each side either?
There was some respite in the freehanding this week provided by the fact that four out of five of the models either have their tunic fully opened, or are wearing a hood covering it. So only one of them needed the red and blue emblem.
Five more freehanded ripperfish painted this week. Thankfully I have a bit of a break from freehand now for a while!
I like the overall look of this unit in the end. The slightly hunched over bodies of the archers, combined with the dirty paint jobs and odd assortment of parts does make them look a little more sneaky and shifty than a “normal” unit of empire swordsmen. I think. It’s not like I own a normal unit to compare them to!
So that is pretty much the Empire army I impulse bought when the Uniforms and Heraldry book came out more than a decade and a half ago. I’m fairly sure I have another rank, or possibly two, of Reikland Company of Honour knocking about, as well as plenty of sprues of state troopers, characters, wizards, flagellants and, the biggest boy of all, Karl Franz on Deathclaw. Does Empire make it as a potential project for a follow up project next year too?
Well lookit, that’s all from me this week. I’ve a busy week of learning 5th edition 40k, filming games and editing and I can’t say I’m super hopeful that I’ll get any off-project models painted. But you never know!
See you next week for the end of quarter wrap up!
Best eggs!
Hammer the Backlog 
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