Hello and welcome to the final week of quarter 1 of year 5 of the Hammer the Backlog project, my ongoing mission to refind the joy (and paint up, I suppose) my 30 years of hoarded tabletop gaming minis. A real week of two parts, with the end of quarter well and truly in the bag, and the next quarter looming noisomely over the horizon.
Let’s go through the motions of formally wrapping up quarter one first!
SCORECARD
A little bit of red in the ledger, and that’s even ignoring the accidentally red zeros in the “hold-ups” column. I only painted one model this week, one of the Blightlord Terminators from the Conquest collection that didn’t manage to make it onto the Death Guard tray. The Terminators are big, detailed models, so I generously gave myself 3 points for getting him done. I did take my time and experiment quite a bit, taking some of the pressure off the next few weeks by practising some techniques and schemes.
As I said above, let’s formally wrap out quarter 1. The rock of quarter one was
One tray of Retro Dark Eldar painted, photographed and online by the 10th of September
And as you have seen over the last few weeks, that rock was well and truly achieved. In celebration, here, have a little gallery!
There were any number of highlights to this quarter. Rescuing the warriors and the raider were real highlights, as they genuinely were in bin-ready condition, and I thought that they would end up as scenery or base decorations at one point.
My favourite models, though, were the incubi, Drahzar and the Dracon. I think these look great together, and they are pretty much exactly what I wanted when I bought them back in 1998 or so.
THIS WEEK’S MODEL
This week’s model is one of the three “special character” Blightlord Terminators that came with Lord Felthius and the Tainted Cohort. These were base coated up as part of trying to follow along with the Conquest collection seven or eight years ago.
I took a risk and just sprayed lead belcher straight over the basecoats that were already on him. I think there were a few reasons I was able to get away with this. Although they were base coated, I did do it neatly back then, with decently thin coats. I also put a good bit of time and energy into moldline clean up and gap filling, so the basecoat worked as a decent primer.
Secondly, they are Nurgle plague marines. Any loss of detail or slightly rough surfaces will be much less noticeable on these models than practically any other.
I decided to go a little bit more “painterly” on these models, rather than aiming at ‘eavy metal style perfection. So after the leadbelcher base I gave them a top down blast of a bright metallic airbrush paint.
Then I started layering on green and brown and yellow contrast paints, heavily inspired by Trovarion’s Nurgle Rot Swords, although following the techniques rather than using the exact same colours.
Still the easiest way to paint AWESOME Warhammer Minis
For example, I used plague-bearer flesh as my green tone, which might actually be a little too yellow and bright for the whole army.
I’m going to keep this quarter’s painting purposefully sketchy, wash heavy and with high contrast, to try to push myself as a painter and artist rather than a technician or a “colour in between the lines” guy.
One thing I am unfortunately going to be stuck with for my Death Guard collection in the cursed 8th edition molded on smoke. I know the colour theory way to do this would be to have them as a contrasting spot colour, like a blue, but I hate them and so I don’t want to draw the eye to them. So I decided to paint them as a gross creamy yellow into black, like a poo factory has caught fire. I know this matches the tone of the boney growths and therefore hides the smoke a little in the composition, but that is kinda the point.
Another issue I’m going to have to deal with is my slight dislike for Nurglings. I get it. I do. But I find them a bit out of place on modern, grim, serious models. Little Jimothy here (not named after anyone in particular) is far and away the sketchiest part of the model. I think I did him start to finish in about 10 minutes, and that is how I will be doing all of the Nurglings, so they don’t distract me from the centrepiece models.
In the end, my favourite part of the model was the purple, which was done with:
Basecoat: Screamer Pink
Wash: Terradon Turquoise!!!
Reestablish Screamer Pink
Blend highlights with Pink Horror.
I never would have thought of washing a pink with such a dark bluey green, but I think it is my favourite single area of a model I’ve ever painted.
I have loads more to say about painting Death Guard, but let’s save some of it for when I get around to painting the Death Guard tray, whenever that may be?
SOCIAL MEDIAS
Speaking of! No spoilers or anything, but you might just get a sneak peak at what the next tray will be if you go watch the Quarter 1 review video, which goes live at the same time as this blog.
HAMMER THE FRONTLOG
Jim is back at work full time! Let’s see him keep so far ahead of me now! Although to be fair, he did manage to build, undercoat and get the painting started on a squad of sisters of silence. Damn it!
Lookit, that’s it for another week! See you next week for the start of a whole new quarter! Best of eggs.
Hammer the Backlog 
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