Hitting the ground running

Remember my last post, where I said I wanted to get my Sonic Dread finished? Well it seems that after a few months asleep, my hobby mojo is up and raring to go!

Not only did I finish up the Dreadnought, but I also finished a Noise Marine squad and a load of Cultists to go with them! Given how few and far between my productive streaks tend to be, I'm certainly not complaining.

Here's a group shot. You'll have to forgive the terrible quality. My daylight bulb blew at precisely the worst possible moment:

I'll try and get some better pics later on. For now I just wanted to show off how busy I've been. There's another 22 Cultists and 10 Raptors sitting on my painting desk too, so I can't see this run of finished models letting up any time soon.

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...

Ok, so I'm weak...

My self control crumbled and I bought Death Masque. I know I'm meant to be painting more than I buy and I know this pushes my total massivvely more into the red than I was already, but it was a moment of weakness. I just got paid for my first month in a new job and I wanted to treat myself. I have no regrets.

I have to say, the box is an amazingly good deal. You get an impressive amount of plastic in there for the price, plus a mini-rulebook, finally giving me a copy of the 7th edition book to use. The character sprues are beautifully done and really show off what they can do with plastic these days. The only bad note is that the background included in the booklet is somewhat questionable, considering the implications for the Eldar race as a whole, but it's really no worse than GW's standard fare. All in all, the box is a pretty sweet deal, considering I plan on making use of everything which comes in the box, except for perhaps Eldrad.

I probably also shouldn't mention the Dark Elf Hydra I also bought off Ebay, which veers me even further from my goal. It was at a price I couldn't refuse and I needed it for my Fantasy campaign forces anyway. Also my order for magnets arrived, but those have no bearing on my painting points total, apart from allowing my to work on updating my Dark Elves.

I suppose the moral of this post is that impulse purchases are bad for painting discipline. Here's the breakdown on the hit my points total took, as far as I can work out:

12 Harlequins: -12 points
Eldrad + Death Jester: -2 points
2 Skyweavers: -4 points
Void Weaver: -5 points
10 Deathwatch Marines: -10 points
Artemis: -1 point
Dreadnought: -10 points
Hydra: -10 points
Existing points -30 points

Total: -79 points

Ouch! It basically means that I won't be buying any more models for at least the rest of this year (unless the rumoured 1k Sons vs SW box tempts me!). Although it looks quite terrible for now, it's not the disaster I thought it'd be at first. With the arrival of the magents, I should be able to chip quite a bit off this total in short order, by working on my Dark Elves. Fantasy armies have a lot of models and are fairly easy to paint. The extra Deathwatch pads which come in Death Masque also let me finish up my existing Deathwatch units very easily.

I suppose I'd best get cracking.

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?

Goodbye 2015, Hello 2016

It's normally about this time of year that I start posting about grand, overblown pledges for my coming year in the hobby. Not this year though. I've learnt the hard way that real life has a habit of screwing over all my plans.

Because of this, in 2016 I'm going to keep it simple and make just three pledges:

1. Play more games

This is going to be the main one for me. 2015 has been quite a slow year for gaming, mostly due to the fact that I've spent most of this year unemployed, This coupled with having to move flat in August to an area where organising games is difficult, I really haven't done much gaming since July beyond the odd game of BFG or Betrayal at Calth.

With this in mind, my primary pledge in 2016 is to play more games. If I can aim to play 26 games across the year, I'll already be ahead on last year. I figure playing an average of one game every two weeks shouldn't be too strenuous.

A big part of achieving this will be to find myself a gaming group. In Peterborough, I attended an awesome club (Peterborough Wargames Club, check them out here). Thanks to PWC I tried a wide variety of games and they were primarily responsible for me branching out beyond GW in my gaming. Now I've moved to Norfolk though, I've found myself without a group to play with (the groups I played with when I lived here a few years ago have mostly disbanded) - a state of affairs I intend to correct!

I think my first step will be to get involved in the 30k Community in Norwich. I've visited them at Athena Games a couple of times, but haven't had a chance to actually play against them yet. It'll be good to actually be  able to face other 30k armies, as my Sons of Horus have mostly faced 40k armies in the past.

My other plan is to sort myself out with a gaming table for my flat, so I can actually play against the few gamers I know who live close enough to play games against at home. I'll be building a double-sided modular board to fit onto it, so I can play both Battlefleet Gothic and standard 40k/Fantasy/Skirmish games.

This brings me quite nicely onto my second pledge...


2. Clear my Backlog

At the moment I have a massive backlog of models to paint - a result of being a self-confessed hobby butterfly. I'm hoping to clear a good portion of this over the next couple of months. This means actually finishing projects for a change, instead of leaving them half-finished.

Right now I have the following which needs finishing:

• Sons of Horus (3000 points)
• Thousand Sons with White Scars allies (3000 points)
• Battlefleet Gothic Sons of Horus fleet (2000 points)
• Battlefleet Gothic Ork fleet (2000 points)
• Battlefleet Gothic Terrain
• Deathwatch/ Inquisition (1500 points)
• Malifaux Show Girls crew (basic crew box)
  

I think that's plenty to be getting on with for now. A big motivation for me is the idea of being able to display them in my living room now that I have my own place. My plan is to start nothing new until they're finished. My only hobby purchases will be parts I need to finish these projects. To keep me motivated even further, I make my third pledge...


3. Document it all!
Nothing keeps me more motivated than sharing what I'm doing with the hobby community. As well as blogging about my work on here, I'm also a member of Warseer, The First Expedition and Bolter & Chainsword, as well as countless hobby groups on Facebook.

Everything I build and paint will be shared online, to motivate me as well as to pick up tips and advice improve my hobby skills. I'll try and post on here at least once or twice a week, keeping track of my progress on my pledges. Hopefully all this will allow me to actually follow through on my pledges for once.


So there you go, my aims for 2016 set out and ready to go. My life is far more settled now than it's been in previous years, so I reckon I stand a good chance of actually sticking to my pledges this year. As ever, we'll have to see though.

What are your hobby goals for 2016?