Dragin’ on? Dragging on? Get it? Nevermind. Welcome back to Hammer the Backlog, the weekly mini painting, productivity and accountability blog. We’re three week’s deep into project Dragon Princes, which I always knew was going to be the defining phase of this quarter. But am I riding the crest of the wave, or is it grinding me down like the unending tides? Only one way to find out. Read on!
SCORECARD
Nope, I’m hanging in there. Just another single model this week, the Dragon Princes standard bearer. I felt fine counting this guy as five points of HtB effort this week. I normally count mounted models as 3 points. Or mounted characters as 5 points. I also usually count banner bearers as their normal amount +1, and that is for normal sized banners. So this guy, with his incredibly elaborate scheme and hilariously huge banner count as an easy five.
I now have 2 Dragon Princes, 5 Seaguard and 5 Shadow Warriors left to paint in this quarter and 5 weeks left to do it. I don’t love the idea of two more whole weeks of just a Dragon Prince a week, but they really are basically a unit of character level models at this point. That would mean 4 weeks of painting and a leftover week to film and edit the end of year 4 and start of year 5 video.
I can’t believe the end of year four is a little over a month away. Time really flies, both when you are enjoying yourself and when you are slogging through overly detailed models.
THIS WEEK’S MODEL
This week’s model is the enormous banner of the world dragon. Oh, and I suppose the Dragon Prince carrying it too.
The dragon prince is pretty much like the other two, with colours moved around a little. He has the brighter green on his leg and arm plates (greaves and vambraces?) and the horse’s head armour is the brighter red of the two.
This horse also has a scalemail coat as well as his dragon plate, for some reason. I’m not sure I built these right 15 years ago.
I went back and forward a lot on what I wanted the banner to look like. I thought about doing it like the Phoenix Guard and/or Sword Masters i.e fully “coloured in” and detailed. But those are sculpted, single sided banners and I didn’t have the time or skill to paint a matching, complex banner design on each side, especially not on one so large.
Then I considered doing a banner based on the Sea Guard banner, but with the dragon replacing the sea monster and volcanos replacing the waves. I couldn’t settle on an exact style, so I went back to the well, aka the Uniforms and Heraldry book to find some inspiration.
It turns out that most always the Dragon Princes have a fairly simple icon of a dragon on a plain white field as their banner. So I basically copied the one in the book, but in the colour scheme for my unit.
The scalloping on the edges of the banner made freehanding a little easier. I was basically able to use the points of the edging to create an imaginary grid to make sure the two dragons lined up more or less the same. Especially considering you can never see both at the same time, I am pretty darned happy with how it turned out.
It was an interesting week of humming and hawing, and procrastinating, about this banner. It was a real throwback to the pre-hammer the backlog days, when this kind of challenge or decision would have put the whole project into storage for a decade.
With the full command group done, they are really starting to come together as a nice centrepiece unit for the High Elf Army.
SOCIAL MEDIA AND A BIG EXPERIMENT
So the Hammer the Backlog instagram account will most like hit 7,000 followers this week and the Youtube channel should hit 4,000 subscribers by the end of year 4.
I’ve been thinking it might be interesting to do a big giveaway in year 5, and try at the same time to push for 10,000 instagram followers and 5,000 Youtube subscribers.
What I’m considering is having a giveaway where readers, viewers or followers can put forward a quarter’s worth of their backlog to get hammered the following year. Do you think people would be interested in that, or is my ego getting ahead of itself? So year 6 would be three trays of my own models and one tray from a viewer/reader/subscriber that I paint up for them and return to them when it’s painted, photographed and online.
Maybe we could have people send in pictures of their trays and vote on the final five or something like that? Would people go for that? Or does sending your backlog off to get painted by an internet weirdo not appeal to people?
Anyway, thanks for listening to that brainstorm, if you have any suggestion please do pop them in a comment.
See you next week, best of eggs!
Hammer the Backlog 
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