A Division of Labour

For the first time in a long time I'm actually in a position where I don't feel the need to be actively buying models. Beyond my 30k Imperial Fists, which I'm expanding as the campaign goes along, I have pretty much everything I want/need right now.

That makes the next few months the perfect opportunity to try and make some progress on my backlog. It's quite a nice position to be in tbh. It gives me a chance to focus on some stuff that's fallen to the wayside as I've gotten distracted by the constant stream of shiny new releases. 

On the other hand there's the issue of that backlog. It's getting a little bit ridiculous. I'm starting to come to the conclusion that I'm too much of a perfectionist to have several army projects on the go at once, especially when one of those armies are Orks. Luckily I have a secret weapon - I'm going to cheat! 

Well not exactly. A mate of mine has been having a lot of fun using the 'Slapchop' method to churn out a load of models recent, particularly his Leagues of Votann army box:

I'm sure you'll agree that they really are lovely. Even more impressive is that he got the entire box done in just a few weeks! 

I was looking at the scheme he'd used and realised that it's actually really close to how I want my Deathskulls to be, so I asked if he wouldn't taking some of my bikes and vehicles to paint. 

Considering I've painted a ton of Death Guard stuff for him over the last few years, he was happy to return the favour. 

So yeah, a bunch of my Orks have gone off to be painted elsewhere, which frees me up to work within my hobby comfort zone: smaller, more detailed projects.

I've had the week off work, so I've had a bit of time of get some painting done. I finished these last night:

I seem to have amassed quite a few different sculpts of Thranduil over the last few years and somehow I've failed to get any of them painted, so it made sense to work on them all at the same time. I've got another two still to finish up after these! 

It's very strange to be essentially batch painting my centrepiece model, but it's also nice to get consistency between them all. I really like how they've turned out. I think the purple really makes the darker colour scheme pop.

I've also got a Sicarian half-done on my hobby desk, but I seem to have lost a bit of momentum on painting it:

Hopefully I can kick my hobby mojo back towards finishing it soon. I think my current pallete cleanser of Middle Earth stuff should do the trick, but we'll see. 

At least I'm staying productive, but it would be nice if I could stay a little more focused. You'd have thought I'd be used to me being a hobby by now!

Oh well, I'll keep you updated on how I get on. Until next time, happy hobbying! 

Keeping up to date and moving forward

In my last post I talked about my hobby mojo coming back and said I'd post again soon. Don't worry, it hasn't abandoned me already, I just wanted to have something completed to show you guys before I put anything up. Work had other ideas though. I've been ridiculously busy! 

At least I'm here now. I had actually written a much longer post, but the Blogger app seems to have eaten the draft, so this will be a much quicker one than I intended. I want to get back to blogging again on a regular basis, as even if I don't get as much response from here as I used to, it does help me organise my thoughts and stay on the right track.

Anyway, enough about that, I have some excellent news - I won another Best Painted award!

It goes rather nicely alongside the other two which I've won in the past year!

I'm rather happy with that, considering the amount of work I put into the display board.

It was actually quite a close run thing, only winning by a single vote. It's good to see other people stepping up their painting game. High quality models benefit everyone!

Moving on from that though, I've been working on my Imperial Fists campaign army, starting with the Phalanx Warders which I started nearly four months ago, before I even moved:

It feels so good to finally get these finished. Like I said, I started these when I first got the Age of Darkness box, way back in July, so they've been on my to do list for quite a while now. I even managed to get another five done pretty quickly after that, along with Castellan Holt, my commander for the campaign, plus a Contemptor Dreadnought done as well. Clearly I was on a roll! 

Hopefully the rest of the army won't be too far behind. I've managed to work out a relatively quick and easy recipe that gives pretty nice looking results, so the progress should just keep on rolling, in theory. 

I've got a bit of time off work next week, so hopefully I'll have plenty of time to crack on and get some hobby done.

That's all for today though. Until next time, happy hobbying!