Back on track

After my little distraction, I'm returning my attention to my more pressing project, which is of course my Breachers. I promised myself that I would get my 1000pt force painted before the end of the current campaign leg, but that isn't looking like a realistic prospect now. I've got nothing in the force that's above about 75% completion and I can't even take part in the game now due to real life getting in the way.

Instead I'm going to set myself a wider goal. The next stage of the escalation campaign is 1500 points. That's not actually a massive amount more to do considering the premium that Thousand Sons pay for their units in 30k, so it seems reasonable to aim to get that completed in time for the end of second campaign stage, which will be in a month or so.

I've also decided to give myself a little kick up the arse in the productivity department. The Age of Darkness podcast (which is fantastic btw and you should check it out) runs a regular segment called the 'Two Week Hobby Challenge', where listeners set themselves challenges and aim to complete them in two week segments. It seems a great way to keep motivation up and also adds an element of accountability if I fail to complete it, so I signed myself up.

My pledge for the next two weeks is to finish painting and basing my Breachers, with a stretch goal to get the transfers done as well. This seems a pretty easy start for me, as my Breachers currently look like this:

 They're coming along nicely, even if I do say so myself. I reckon a couple of nights work on them should see them finished. Considering how long I've spent on them, I'll be over the moon to finally see them done and sitting in my display cabinet.

In case you're wondering, this is the state the rest of the force is in atm:

I finally feel I've reached the turning point between thinking 'this looks terrible and will take ages' and 'actually these are nearly done and don't look too bad'. It's a fine line, but it's always nice when a project reaches that stage.

I think the focus of the next period of the Two Week Challenge will be focussing on the Veterans, but I'll see how I feel when I get there. Either way, expect lots of hobby progress posts in the next few weeks as I get these done.

Progress at last!

I seem to have gone from very little painting progress to massive amounts in a very short space of time. I finally found some time to myself the other day to sit down and paint. Three hours later, I was somewhat stunned at the results.

Firstly, I managed to repaint an entire Sentinel squadron:

 These are the first of the Elysians I bought from a mate the other week. They're a unit which are going to be pulling double duty in my Ordo Xenos and 30k Militia forces, so I kept to a very simple colour scheme which could work in either era. I think they turned out really nicely considering how quickly I got through them. They're certainly not going to be winning any painting awards any time soon, but they look good and it's a really quick and easy scheme to replicate on the rest of the force. I should be tackling some infantry to go with them as soon as they've been stripped down.

The other unit I got pretty much finished was these:

That's a pair of Quad Mortars for my 30k forces. These are also going to be pulling double duty between my various 30k forces (seeing as I don't fancy shelling out £30-ish a gun so I can have them in the correct colours for each army), so with that in mind I kept them to fairly a fairly neutral gunmetal silver. Fluff-wise this can be explained by saying they were salvaged from warzones as the Heresy went on, so there wasn't time for their new owners to repaint them.

What I will be doing at some point though is painting up crewmen for them in Thousand Sons, Sons of Horus, Night Lords and Militia colours, so at least the guys manning the guns will be correctly attired. I know I don't play Night Lords, but a friend of mine does and he likes to borrow them whenever we have a game, so I figured it'd be a nice touch to have the right crew for him too.

So that's 30 painting points for me for the Sentinels, plus another 10 once I've run a wash over the base of the Quad Mortars. I didn't realise until I took photos just how much of the white under the basing sand showed through. That's easily fixed though.

Lets hope this productive streak continues! You never know, I might even be able to finish that Whirlwind Scorpius this week too.

Oh and on top of everything else, I managed to get a game in vs my local Emperor's Children player. I'll leave you with the photo I took of the exact moment it all started going wrong for my poor Thousand Sons. I need more AA...

Daily Painting 28/9/16 - Underhive Scum

In my excitement to talk  about my Watch Captain yesterday, I forgot to add my other piece of progress. This guy is even closer to being finished than Wulfenhien is!

He's only a bog standard member of one of my Inquisitorial Henchmen squads, but I'm loving this guy. Built from the unlikely combination of a Chaos Cultist and some leftovers from the Betrayal at Calth box, I was aiming for a kind of Underhive Mercenary feel for the model.

Really it's just little bits left to do now. I need to pick out the rope of his 'grenade necklace' in grey, add another layer and wash to his chainblade, then he's done, apart from obviously cleaning up his base.

A quick little conversion, simple paint job and a painting point for me? That will do nicely!

Daily Painting 27/9/16 - Deathwatch Watch Master WIP

I've been plodding ever onwards with my daily painting and surprisingly I've been quite productive. I'm almost at a stage where I'm actually finishing some models and earning some of those elusive painting points. Wonders will never cease!

Most of my efforts have been going into my Deathwatch Watch Captain, who's now pretty much done, minus a few details, such as his right arm and base:

This guy has been onw of my favourite models which I've worked on for a long time.. He represents my hobby journey pretty much coming full circle, tying my current projects in with some of my very first forays into the hobby 15 years ago. Basically, his background is that he's the last loyal member of the Golden Knights chapter, out for revenge against his traitor kin. In case you're wondering, the Golden Knights were the first army I ever collected when I got into 40k when I was 13. They were my homebrew chapter who went traitor and pulled double duty as Loyalists or Chaos as required. They were led by the infamous traitor, Elgran Wulfenhein, who went from humble Captain, to Chapter Master,to Chaos Lord and finally becoming Deamon Prince - before he developed a nasty habit of sprouting 4 Lascannon shots in the chest each game and reverted back to Lord status!

This new guy represents Arik Wulfenhien, Elgran's brother. He was on a far flung mission when the Chapter fell to Chaos and returned to find them declared Excommunicate. Vowing to kill his brother and restore the honour of his Chapter, he served my Inquisitor, Rikard von Nearostaffen for many years before finally joining the Deathwatch, on the sole condition that if word came of the whereabouts of his brother, he would be allowed to join the hunt to destroy him and the rest of the traitor Golden Knights.

It's perhaps a little tragic that he'll never get the chance to do this now. The Golden Knights were sold off about 6 years ago and I have no plans to recreate them. Arik will probably never get his vengeance!

I'm loving being able to tie my latest projects into my personal hobby history and it helps that the Artemis model is a joy to paint and convert. He'll eventually be getting a fancy bionic limb and a Storm Bolter once I can source the right bits for it. This loadout is far from optimal in the DW, but it's another nod to my hobby history, this time being the Kantor model I was using for the last few years to represent my Deathwatch Captain before they got their own codex.

Hopefully I'll be able to finish this guy this week. Like I said, he just needs a few details and a clean up. I've decided to count HQ models as 5 painting points apiece, otherwise there's no incentive for me to put in the extra effort to bring them up to the standard which Wulfenhein is going to be when he's finished.

I'll post more soon!

Daily Painting 11/08/16 - Rescued Ebay Hydra

I've taken a couple of days off my hobby challenge this week - flu and stomach bugs are not conducive to good hobby progress. Now I'm feeling better though and I've been able to get back to it, I've decided to tackle my new Hydra next. This is partly due to needing it for a campaign game and not wanting to break my 'only game with painted models' rule, but also because it let me indulge in one of my favourite hobbies within the hobby: rescuing Ebay models.

This one arrived with me in a shocking state. Serious it was like it was painted by a five year old. The paint was a full 1mm thick, obscuring all detail. I really wish I'd taken a picture before I scrubbed it down, so you could see it in all it's terrible glory. Worse yet it was Finecast, turning my usual method of a long soak in Fairy Power Spray following by furious scrubbing into a dicey proposition at best. After a short think, I decided to risk it and it was unceremonious dumped in the stripping tub within 20 mins of it arriving in the post.

After much work, I got it as clean as it was going to go. The next step was obviously to rebuild it, undercoat and basecoat it, leaving me with this:

Not bad at all considering the amount of work it'd taken just to get it to this point. Next up was a liberal application of Nuln Oil, taking it to this:

Pretty nice looking if you ignore the base and the missing leg. These will be fixed shortly along with the addition of much more layering and highlighting.

The manacles you may be able to make out on two of the necks are plasticard hoops I've added to conceal the worst of the damage to the neck joints. I'll be adding modelling chain at some point to make it look like it's broken free and is on a rampage. I've also deliberately left a few moldlines showing, which will be painted to look like scars where it's regrown limbs.

So there you have it. It's not brilliant by a long shot and a long way from done, but it's good enough for gaming tomorrow night at least. It's weird to think that a few years ago, I would have considered this paint job to be the finished model. It really shows how far I've come!

I'll post updates as I have them.

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.

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?