Welcome back to the dark and mysterious city of Hammer the Backlog, the weekly Warhammer mini painting, productivity and accountability blog. Am I still on a productivity and excitement high after the yearly review and planning sessions, or has the reality of restoring and repairing the models in the worst state in my collection come crashing down on me? Only one way to find out. Read on, if you dare!
SCORECARD
Nope, nothing has come crashing down! Another week fully in the green, with one of the quarterly sub-goals, get 5 Dark Eldar Scourges painted, 100% completed.
I decided to go with the scourges for a bit of a break from struggling with the soft, broken plastic of the warriors and raiders. I think this is how I’m going to do this quarter; heavy repair work, simple enough strip and rebuild of metals, back to badly damaged plastics, back to metals etc…
In the same way that my early warhammer mind was formed in the 90s by units of 10 to 20 foot soldiers for Warhammer, for Warhammer 40,000 the iconic unit is a unit of five metal specialist troops on green bases. It could be a Space Marine Assault Squad, an Eldar Aspect Warrior Squad, 5 Chaos Marines etc. In that way, I have always loved this box of scourges. Younger me did not have the skills or patience to build and paint them to a good standard, and the act of stripping them revealed layers upon layers of superglue where errant pieces were repeatedly reattached.
Nothing a dunk in the biostrip for a weekend couldn’t fix. They came out very clean, to the point of looking almost brand new. A fully built 5 man metal unit is just soooo satisfying.
THIS WEEK’S MODELS
I know that the new versions of scourges are super, super cool, and they really got a unique identity as bird like sniper predators, with a really cool look. But! I just don’t think you can beat the pure 90’s vibes of basically five metal warriors with heavy weapons and cool wing jump packs.
There is not really any great difference between these models and the warriors from last week. They are painted in the same colors, using the same recipe and the same steps. I think the only real visible difference is that the heavy weapons make it more obvious that I’m painting the models’ armour in a cool black and weapons in a neutral black.
I kept the Dark Lances almost completely black with just a bit of bronze for the bulbous chamber thingies. I wanted them to live up to the “dark” part of the name.
I went back and forth on the hair for a while. I knew I wanted the sybarite (I think they are still sybarites at this point, not solonites, or whatever they are called now) to have similar shocking white hair to the warrior sybarite from last week. But I was unsure if I wanted the “hair” on the rest of the unit to be the same, or darker, like the box art.
For some reason, maybe balance, the sybarite has incredibly long feet!
I hope you can excuse the relative sparsity of my 3rd edition photo set up. It was a weird era of still goblin green bases, but a move to reality and gritty scenery, which I just don’t have much of yet. Another thing to work on!
HAMMER THE FRONTLOG
Huge news this week everyone. Jim, the man who (some would say maliciously) introduced me to Warhammer, decided to give it a try himself. Now, Jim is obviously no stranger to the overall idea, having played a number of the video games, as well as a few scattered games of Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, Blood Bowl, Space Hulk and Blackstone Fortress with me over the years.
In fact he even played a former Imperial Guardsman (and current asshole) in my Dark Heresy campaign a few years back.
But, since he is a teacher and is currently on holidays and has too much free time, he decided to dip his toe into 40k and buy his own models for the first time.
So off we popped to Underworld Games in Tallaght and got him his first ever box, three Custodes Allarus Terminators.
They were promptly built, sprayed grey, drybrushed white and coated with Black Templar. So I guess they are going to be Shadow Keepers Custodes.
I have avoided saying anything like “Jim, if you start a social media channel and get more followers than me, I am going to quit”, because the last thing I want to do is give him a target. But will he be able to resist the temptation of building a backlog, and keep Hammering the Frontlog i.e only buying something new where everything else is done? Only time, and societal pressure, will tell.
Thanks for reading all of that, see you next week for the next five plastic warriors!
Best of eggs
Hammer the Backlog 
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