Hello there! Stop! It’s Hammer (the Backlog) Time! Welcome back to your weekly mini painting, productivity and accountability blog. This week I present a lesson in learning to lose gracefully, and get on with things. Read on for a look at the weekly roundup, the overall progress on goals, this week’s painted models, and any issues or excitement that has come up.
SCORECARD
First of all, yes, we are fully in the green. With the Lord of Contagion painted up, counting for 5 Hammer the Backlog points, and all other commitments met.
Perhaps more excitingly, and as I hope you can see from the improve look of the screenshots, we’ve made a decent chunk of progress on the Hammer the Backlog productivity app too. Harry has been doing fabulous work getting it ready for public testing.
We’ll be running a kind of semi-open beta on the Hammer the Backlog discord server over the next couple of weeks. If you’d like to take part, poke around the app and help smush it into its final shape, hop up on the discord and I’ll get you set up.
It’s probably still a bit counterintuitive to use without any guidance, or tutorial videos and the like, but they will all come when we are ready for full public launch.
THIS WEEK’S MODEL
So. The Lord of Contagion. One of the most popular Death Guard models of the last few years. Very hard to get your hands on if you weren’t in the game, so to speak, back when Dark Imperium or Warhammer Conquest released. Generally preferred over the currently available version.
It is a great model. I can see than. The pose is very cool. He is huge, but oddly squat and threatening. He has a strong, solid pose, but with good motion to him.
There are parts of him that I was really happy with. I’ve pretty much nailed down both the skin tones and the armour colours for this army, and they both turned out good.
I really enjoyed using a deep blue shadow on the purple cloak, and using the same two colours to paint the entire purple gamut on this model, from the very deep inner cloak, to the more varied back and the pretty light strapping on the weapon.
The metals also fell into place nicely.
However, I am just not very happy with the overall model. I don’t think it puled together very well in the end. It is just a riot of colours and patterns and shapes that make it very hard to photograph, and to tell what is what.
The biggest problem might be that the armoured head is quite small, just using the armour colour, and is completely lost in this scheme when contrasted against the vibrant skin colours of the guts, and the prominent purples.
And then there is the huge, static, smooth, “plague censor” smoke…. things. I was happy enough with using a dirty brown to yellow to bone scheme on the other models, but they really are huge on this guy, and I think the look I’ve gone for detracts from the overall model.
Finally, and I think I’ll get kicked out of the Death Guard club for this one, I don’t love squished up nurgllings as base decoration. This guys face is already struggling to draw attention to itself, without having to paint a base of five or size funnier little faces vying for attention.
Look, I know it’s a great model, and I did actually enjoy painting it, but I think it is just too full of details and gribbles for me in the end. There is actually very little of the green armour on this model. I think I would have enjoyed it more with half as much other details and a little bit more armour, like the blight brone here.
But anyway, no need to get hung up on one model not turning out quite the way I would have liked! Onwards and upwards, lessons learned. We have a quarter to finish.
HAMMER THE FRONTLOG
Jim, on the other hand, had a great week. He got his gigantic bikes finished this week to a standard he is happy with.
Including lighting effects on the power blades, and painting up the cables to represent energy flowing into the power blades. I did not tell him either to do this, or how to do it.
They grow up so fast.
Well lookit, that’s all for me for this week.
In honour of this being the week that included Halloween this year, let’s finish this week’s update with the jumpscare that I got in the middle of edge highlighting every little strap with pink horror on this week’s models!
Best of eggs, see you next week!
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