Monday 29 August 2016

Daily Painting 28/08/16 - Thousand Sons Contemptor


Turns out I was awake enough to get on with some painting this this morning when I came in from work. I decided to add another layer of 50/50 Mephiston Red/ Wazdakka Red to my Thousand Sons Dreadnought:


Aside from reapplying a few dabs of wash into crevasses, that means the red is finally complete on this guy.

Next stage is cleaning up the white, then another highlight for the gold. I have a feeling that between this and my planned Emperor's Children, I'm really going to come to hate highlighting gold before much longer.

Anyway progress is progress. Hopefully I'll have the energy to tackle the white tomorrow.

Sunday 28 August 2016

Daily Painting Progress

As promised,here's my first post on the progress of my daily painting challenge. As you'll see, I've been working on a fairly eclectic mix in my first week, but I've really hit the ground running with it. I don't think I'll be able to keep up this volume of progress as time goes on, but I'll try.



First up is my Deathwatch. These two are Brother Braytek of the Iron Hands and the as-yet unnamed and unaligned Lightning Claw guy. he's probably going to become a Flesh Tearer, but I'm still deciding. These are going to become part of Kill Team 'Sword', the first of 4 teams that I'm going to produce. Not much progress has been made on these guys. The photo doesn't show it too clearly, but I've at least gotten the silver done on them, ready for washing.


Next up is the Thousand Sons Contemptor which I've been working on for ages. I certainly havn't done all this in a week! Mostly I've been chipping away at the massive amount of washes and highlights this guy requires.

I'm hoping to get him done soon, as it means a healthy bump to progress on my painting points total once he is finally finished.


More Deathwatch guys, unnamed for now, but are going to be an Imperial Fist, Raven Guard and Lamenter  (from left to right). I'm actually nearly done on these guys too, with only detailing and pads to do (the Lamenter's arm is about, but not shown here), meaning I should have a full Kill Team ready to go before too much longer. I'll get much better shots of these guys once they are done, as I've just realised that the photo I took the other day is terrible!



And finally, although it's not strictly painting progress, I had a go at building some terrain on my day off this week. I figured that now I have a lovely gaming mat to play on, I could really do with some terrain to go with it. I still need to add some more sand to the baseboards before I paint these, but I'm liking how they're turning out so far, especially as they we pieced  together from junk I found around my flat.

Summary: Lots of prgress this week, although nothing finished yet, so no painting points progress to report quite yet. Hopefully I'll have something by the end of the week. This is assuming of course that I don't get distracted with something else in the meantime. On the other hand, the beauty of this system means that progress is being made regardless.

I'm going to be hopefully switching to daily updates with this, or at least every other day. I did a weekly summary today because I've been having problems uploading pictures all week. I may take the bank holiday off though, as it's going to get ridiculously busy at work, so I'm likely to be spending all my free time sleeping. I'll see what happens though.

Either way, I'll post more soon.

What are you guys working on atm?

Tuesday 23 August 2016

And just like that, my plans are blown... New Ahriman and Kharn

It's been quite a day of revelation in the GW rumour mill, one which is almost certainly going to make my wallet and painting point tally weep.

First of all we had the leak of a new plastic model for what appears to be Ahriman. It matches his Visions of Heresy artwork at least.


This is almost certainly part of the long-rumoured Thousand Sons vs Space Wolves sequel to the Betrayal at Calth box.  It looks great, although the closet Elitist in me is quite disappointed that it's not in resin from FW. I'm looking forward to getting this for my Thousand Sons, although I'm only likely to be using him in larger games, due to my 55th Company's background of not getting along particularly well with the Chief Librarian.

The amazing part of this leak though was the response from GW. Within hours Warhammer TV posted up a video not only confirming the validity of the leak, but also basically saying "Think that's cool, we have Kharn!"

Not only does this come as an astonishing departure from form for GW in terms of releasing previews and sneak peeks, the model is pretty damn good too. I need to see a few more angles of him before I can form my opinion 100%, but this seems a pretty nice reworking of a true GW classic.

Hopefully this will tie into a new CSM codex, but we'll have to wait until September 3rd to find out. If this is a new book, then between todays leaks and Death Masque, I might as well say goodbye to any more hobby purchases between now and next year if I want to stand a hope of ever getting into positive figures on my painting points.

Talking of painting points, I'll start showing my daily painting progress from next the new pst. Obviously I've gotten a little distracted by the rumour mill today.

What do you think of the new models? Also, do you think GW will start giving more previews now, or was this a one off?

Sunday 21 August 2016

Making time to paint.

I talked in my my last post about how I'm trying to improve how I keep track of my painting and about how I want to try and start painting more than I buy. This time, I'm going to talk about how I actually intend to go about doing this.

Being on night shifts for 5 or 6 nights a week doesn't exactly lend itself to getting my hobby done, but I've come up with a simple plan to keep things moving nicely.

Every day, either before or after work, I'll try and sit down and paint for at least half an hour.

 I'll be aiming to complete a stage each time, whether it's a layer on a model or a wash, or anything else that needs doing. The theory is that over time, I'll still be making progress.

I'm starting this when I get back from work tomorrow. Let's see if this actually works!

Painting Points

I swear I already wrote a post about this a few weeks ago, but it seems to have gotten lost in the warp somewhere between posting from my phone and hitting the internet.

I've decided to change up how I keep track of my painting. I pledged at the start of the year to get several of my armies completed by the end of the year. Unfortunately my hobby-addled mind can't seem to focus on one project for very long, so I'm starting to think that having set project goals is a very bad way of trying to focus my hobby efforts.

Instead I've decided to switch to a system of 'painting points'. It's very simple, I keep track of how many models I buy and how many I paint. I get 1 point for every infantry model I paint, 2 for every bike/cavalry-sized model, 5 for anything Dreadnought/ Monster-sized, then 10 for anything bigger.

Similarly, whenever I buy a model, I keep track of the total using the same scale. In theory, I won't buy anything new until I'm in 'positive figures'. In reality, I'm starting 25 points down, due to having impulse bought some classic DE Executioners and some Betrayal at Calth stuff.

Still, hopefully I'll be able to claw back some points before buying more (although the new Death Masque box is calling out to me...). I'm working on some Deathwatch stuff and Thousand Sons Breachers atm, so that should bring my total up somewhat.

The obvious advantage of this system is that it doesn't matter what projects I get distracted by, I'll still be earning points. This is great, as at my last count, I have over 100 models in dire need of painting.

This is what I have to work on:

Sons of Horus
This is really just redoing my existing force to bring them up to my improved painting standards. This isn't as high a priority as my other projects, but it'd still be nice to get them done.

Thousand Sons

The eternal WIP. I'm liking how they're turning out this time, so I'm goin to keep at it. They're by far the slowest of my current projects though, due to the amount of layers and washes involved.

One the other hand, I have gotten far further into them on this attempt than I ever have before - 10 Tactical Marines and a Contemptor!

Next up on these are my Breachers.

Ordo Xenos
A vast sprawling project which includes Inquisitors, Storm Troopers and Deathwatch. The new codex for the latter has really helped kick my motivation into gear for these guys!

There's also going to be Harlequin Allies in there at some point, probably about the same time as I finally cave and buy Death Masque.

Dark Elves

I'm getting involved in a Fantasy 8th Edition campaign at my local club soon. This seems like the perfect excuse to finally finish my Dark Elves which I started by in 2009!

I'm rather looking forward to getting these done to a good standard. I've already placed an order for a massive amount of Magnets, so I can magnetise all their movement trays.



Obviously, I'll be posting on here every time I make some progress (or losses), so you'll be able to see how I get on.

Watch this space!