Hello and welcome back to Hammer the Backlog, the weekly mini painting, productivity and accountability blog. You join me, Mick (he who hammers the backlog) at roughly speaking the mid point of quarter 1 of year five. It’s summer, I’m painting old metal models from the 90s, they are goths, could life be any better?
SCORECARD
It’s a clean sweep of green this week as I finished my Dracon for 4 Hammer the Backlog points and my “new” Incubi with shredder for 1 HtB point. A nice, uneventful week of painting, no stress, nothing in particular to report.
I’m decently far into the Dark Eldar quarter now, with a clear majority of models actually painted. I only have a unit of Wyches, Drazzar and the raider to go.
I discovered this week that sadly, despite all of these years, I don’t actually have a viable Dark Eldar army here. First of all, in the third edition, every army needed a HQ and two troops choices. So let’s assume that for a small force my Darcon is my HQ and Morathi is demoted to a sybarite unit leader for a warrior squad. That’s one problem sorted. Since the warrior squad I have has two splinter cannons, it is actually a foot warrior squad, not a raider squad.
So I only have one troop choice. There are only two troop choices in the codex, Warriors (10 to 20 models, 2 heavy weapons, no raider) and Raiders (5 to 10 models, 1 heavy weapon, raider). That means I need at the very least another unit of minimum 5, but practically speaking, 10 warriors to go in the raider. That would then leave the Lord with her Incubi and the Wyches on foot, which is ridiculous.
So realistically, this army needs 10 more warriors (including sybarite and 1 heavy weapon) and two more raiders to be a minimally viable force. Do I buy them now and try to finish them in the quarter, or wait for a few spare weeks in a bits and bobs quarter later in the year? Probably the second one, to be honest.
Funnily enough, while all of this painting has been happening, I have also been playing Rogue Trader on my PC, and have spent the last 15 hours or so trying to escape from Commoragh. The Dark Eldar really are complete bastards.
THIS WEEK’S MODELS
So this week’s models are the original Dracon and an Incubi with shredder.
The incubi (incubus?) was painted exactly the same way as all the others, and he looks pretty fine with them as a group.
The Dracon was great fun to paint, and she has actually turned out to be my favourite of my Dark Eldar collection so far.
No new recipes or techniques were harmed in the production of this model, but I just think her features and design make her blend in with the Incubi a lot better than my Morathi conversion, sadly. She also took the army colour scheme a lot better.
I am still really unsure about the red of Morathi. There is still a chance I go back and change it to Dark Green before the end of the quarter, especially seeing how the green pops on this one so well.
Regular commenter MG pointed out the one of the reasons Morathi fit in so well was that she was actually sculpted by the same sculptor as the majority of the Dark Eldar metals, Chris Fitzpatrick. He also did Asarnil for the Dog of War, one of my favourite models of all time. The things you learn!
HAMMER THE FRONTLOG
Jim continued his stellar pace by getting his first unit of custodian guards fully painted up and based. Don’t they look smashing. Jim decided to make his life more difficult (again) by going for the fully powered lightning effect on the spears. The lunatic.
Not only that, he’s already most of the way through the Wardens from this next set.
In trying to decide on a basing scheme we pretty much came to the conclusion that my Death Guard army is going to be their first opponent. That solidified that Death Guard are pretty much locked in as the painting target for quarter two. And that they are going to be similarly based.
This guy doesn’t look too bad actually. Maybe a full strip and repaint is going too far? Ah well, that is next quarter Mick’s problem.
See you next week for the first batch of Wyches!
Best of eggs!
Hammer the Backlog 
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