And away we go! - First painting post of 2017

I've actually been quite busy hobby-wise since New Year, having clocked up about 5 hours worth of painting time. Doesn't sound like much, but it's more than I managed in the last three months of 2016, plus it's more than my 'scheduled' amount from my hobby pledges, so it's a massive improvement in productivity. Unfortunately, I've been quite busy on Ebay too, so my painting points have become skewed further than they already were. I needed some Bolt Throwers for a campaign game though, so it's not like it was impulse spending. It served a purpose. That's what I'm telling myself anyway

Either way, I've decided to focus on my Dark Elves for the first part of the year. I'm doing rather badly in my club campaign atm and everybody knows unpainted models perform badly compared to their fully-painted counterparts, so it's time to fix that. Besides, eight years after starting a project and two years after the death of the game the associated with them seems quite long enough for the competion of an army to be overdue by!

Here's how my army looked on New Years day.  Excuse the bad photography. Hangover plus bad lighting didn't make for brilliant photos ...

As you can see, that's a huge amount to work on. Luckily the huge amount of casualties I took in my last game means I have a much smaller pool to focus on (silver linings and all that...). I decided to start with my Executioners/ Beastmasters:

 

These are about two-thirds done. I still need to add a few washes and highlights, as well as finishing the bases. Obviously this isn't the full unit. I still have about twenty more to paint, but I figured it's easier to work on a rank at a time rather than demoralising myself by trying to tackle all 25 at once.

At the same time I started work on a pair of Sorceresses. I wanted to try something a little different to my normal skin recipe for Elves/Eldar, aiming to convey the kind of unhealthy pallor which the Druchii are likely to have. Living in perpetual winter and dabbling with the unnatural doesn't tend to help the complexion...

I quite like how the skin tone has turned out, even though it could still use a little cleaning up. I'm not always the best judge of these things though, so any thoughts or comments on it are very welcome, especially as it's a new technique I'm trying. I'm still in two minds whether or not to extend this recipe to all the elves in my force or just save it for the magic users. I'll have to give it some thought.

So there you have it, all my hobby progress for the first two weeks of 2017. It's not fantastic, but it's a start. I'm hoping to get these guys done by the end of January.