In 2019 I hobbied more than I ever had before. In 2020 I want to keep up the pace, so I can:
Clear the Backlog
Ever since getting into the hobby I’ve fallen into the trap every hobbyist seems to fall into: I acquire more stuff than I am able to paint in the immediate term. I like to think that I’ve been better at avoiding the worst of it than some others, as most of the stuff I’ve added to the pile has been given to me for free (or very cheaply), like when Nat’s parents foisted all of her and her brother’s old minis on me.
Note: I don’t think this is a bad situation to be in. If I’m ever stumped for what to paint next, chances are I can find something in my collection that will scratch the right itch. It’s really nice to have a large pool of possible ‘next projects’, even if it does feel rather overwhelming! And there’s nothing wrong with getting stuff you want; there are absolutely worse consumerist vices than miniatures!
I want to finish the year as close as possible to the ideal state where the next thing I buy will be the next thing I paint and nothing is hanging over me.
Avoid Adding to the Backlog
I’ll never accomplish the above if I keep acquiring more stuff to paint. I’m generally quite good at turning my nose up at the latest expensive battle box Games Workshop are putting out. It’s the too-good-to-refuse offers from friends that catch me out. For example: Almost immediately after announcing I was in “acquisition lockdown” and wouldn’t be getting any more minis until I’d painted what I had, I went to a meetup where one of my friends said he was trying to get rid of the Gloomspite Gitz he thought he was never going to get around to. A horde of goblins. More Spider Riders. 2 Arachnarok Spiders. All looking sad in his never-to-be-finished pile. All for £30. I was slain.
But I have a promise I make to every single one of the previously-unloved little soldiers I took into my possession that day: You will be painted. You will get the care and attention you deserve.
So apart from Warhammer Underworlds warbands I will try very hard not to acquire any more stuff this year.
Have a Good-looking Gaming Table
Mostly for playing Age of Sigmar on, although there’s plenty other games that I’d like to be able to play at home on a big beautiful battlefield.
I’m halfway there already. I have some boards I can put over our dining table to make it 4’ by 6’. A 6’ by 4’ gaming mat from Gamemat.eu is coming my way in the post. I have a fair amount of painted terrain:
MDF (wooden) buildings from TTCombat like these ruined sci-fi-gothic structures, this watchtower, plus some other bits and pieces that might be from other manufacturers. I spent some time over the holiday making these look much nicer.
It’s quite a good collection, but what I want to add to this is some grassy hills, trees, little wooded copses, that sort of thing. So at some point I’ll be trying to craft some of that stuff myself. Just like with mini painting, there’s never been an easier time to learn how to build your own terrain, thanks to all the fantastic video tutorials produced by the likes of Terrain Tutor, Luke and Sorastro.
Play More
Of course, there’s no reason to do all this painting and terrain-building if the end result is never gonna be used. So this year I want to play even more Warcry, Age of Sigmar, Underworlds, Frostgrave, etc. I just really like it, you know?
Throwing Down the Gauntlet
I keep track of all my hobby projects on Trello. It’s a complete mess, but it keeps it all out of my head and I can use the Trello Plus plugin to track how much time I spend on projects, which is important for estimating how much I can get done.
Off the top of my head, the main things to get done in order to clear the bulk of my backlog are:
Finish all my Stormcast Eternals. Once I’m done with Soul Wars I have some Liberators to build. Some bits and bobs I got for free from an acquaintance who was having a clearout. Some of that might need stripping. Ew.
Gloomspite Gitz. This is the big one, I think. I need to figure out how to paint nearly a hundred Stabbas and Shootas quickly. A terrifying thought. But I did it before with a smaller number back in February, and I came out of that twilight feeling like a hobby god, so it’ll be worth it. My goblins shall block out the sun.
Paint the Dwarf half of the old Battle for Skull Pass boxset. I’m not really sure what I’ll do with these minis, though. Only a few of them have a home in Age of Sigmar anymore. Perhaps they could be the beginning of a Kings of War army or a Oathmark force? (In which case, should I base them on squares?)
Kings of War Vanguard. The Basilean and Northern Alliance boxes. These were very annoying to assemble. Hopefully they will be easier to paint.
Everything else is kinda small bits-and-pieces. Underworlds warbands. North Star minis for Frostgrave. Old Middle-Earth things. Old Warhammer stuff.
I’ll be recording my progress on here if time will allow it. I hope you’ll wish me luck, and I wish you all the best for your own hobby journey this year. Godspeed!
Tried a slightly simpler recipe for the green this time. Previously I would:
Basecoat Waagh Flesh
Recess shade with Drakenhof Nightshade
Tidy up any tidemarks with more Waagh Flesh
Highlight Warboss Green
Highlight Skarsnik Green
Highlight Skarsnik Green / Ulthuan Grey
Highlight Ulthuan Grey
Now, going forwards, I skip the shading step and instead of basecoating with Waagh Flesh I use the darker, more blueish Caliban Green (an old paint that I need to find a modern equivalent of). This way’s a bit quicker and looks almost the same, if not better.
I’m still not satisfied with how I paint the beige tabard-things. They don’t quite have enough contrast.
Once again, the most time-consuming part was putting down basecoats, particularly gold. Retributor Armour is a decent enough gold, I suppose, but no gold paint has great coverage. Some other Stormcast models (like Liberators) are mostly armour so I can be more efficient by using Retributor Gold spray, but Sequitors (and Sacrosanct in general) are 50% robes. Something some painters do to help it cover is put a layer of brown underneath. Maybe I’ll give that a go, even if, intuitively, it just adds another time-consuming step.
I have one more Sequitor to go, but he’s just a duplicate of the guy with the greatmace. If I paint him up I can field a unit of 10!
I began the year by finishing up my first batch of Sequitors.
These are from Soul Wars, the current main Age of Sigmar starter box, which I bought the Stormcast Eternal half of from a friend. There are 8 of them, with 5 different sculpts: 2 different Sequitor-Primes, and 2 each of a guy with mace-and-shield, a lady with mace-and-shield, and a guy with a big mace. These are push-fit mono-pose and mono-build figures, so unless you start chopping them up you can only build them one way.
8 is a bit of an awkward number because in the game they are supposed to come in multiples of 5, so until I paint a few more (which is exactly what I’m doing next) I can only field one unit of 5 instead of 2 units of 5 or a big unit of 10. I’m not sure when I’ll get them on the table anyway.
There are some things about them I could have done better.
The green cloth looks great but my method for painting them doesn’t scale well to batch-painting, so I ended up being a little messier with them than I would have liked. I should figure out a more efficient way to paint these that looks similar.
The gold lacks contrast, a problem I’ve noted about a lot my Stormcast. I need to investigate ways to make it richer, shinier, etc.
On the beige cloth I was experimenting a little, so these look a bit inconsistent across the unit. I did find a simple way to do them that I’m pleased with, though, so I’ll be using that method going forward. The beige is still a little too similar to the yellow-white of the parchment some of them have.
I’m quite happy with the red bits but I’d like to find a way to make them punchier and do them faster.
The early stages of painting these models, just getting the base coats down, was a slog. They have so much extra detail and different materials compared to Liberators or Judicators. I’m looking forward to painting the remaining 4 I have to do, a more manageable batch.
Oh, but I did paint a lot this year. 2019 prove me wrong about the extent to which hobby could take over my life and, coming to the end of it, I regret not having managed to do more. How is this possible? I should have blogged about it as I went, but I didn’t because apparently blogging is too much effort for me now? Fortunately I mostly did a decent job of documenting my progress on Twitter and on my portal-to-hell personal Trello board. So this post will mostly consist of links to those, otherwise it would have about 50 photos in it.
I began the year by working on some of North Star’s recent additions to their Frostgrave range, like this Barbarian, Templar, Apothecary and others.
I also made a boar! This lil’ guy is a spare who comes with the old Orc Chariot kit. There are two more piggies I could make out of that old kit, but they require a bit more work (their lower jaw pieces are attached to the chariot).
I based some old Warhammer models. I painted these in 2018, I think, but didn’t base them. They look great with decorated bases, each brimming with their own character. There are bats and snotlings. These were some of the first models I ever acquired, and it fills me with satisfaction every time I see them in their current well-painted, well-based state. I think I will make some Warcry rules for them.
February/March/stretching into April was goblin season. When Natalie’s parents discovered I was getting into the hobby, they were more than happy to foist her and her brother’s old collections upon me. This inundation of old, mostly-unpainted models included all the models from a copy of Battle for Skull Pass, the starter box for Warhammer Fantasy Battles 7th Edition. The Dwarf side of that box is still waiting for my attention, but I managed to paint my way through the whole Night Goblin half. This included:
A troll. Sadly for this guy, there’s no analogous model in AoS for him anymore since Sourbreath Troggoths were discontinued.
Some small scenery pieces.
With these came a couple of metal goblin shamans. Lovely sculpts, painted them up later in the year after the goblinmania had passed. Here’s one of them.
Late March: I painted the Chosen Axes from Shadespire.
Needed some more Skinks as allies for my Stormcast Eternal army, so I did 5 of ‘em. I know how to paint these in my simple scheme very quickly. Personally, I think these models hold up a lot better than most of the Seraphon/Lizardmen range, and I hope they keep this kit when they do a refresh. (Saurus Warriors, on the other hand, could desperately do with a new kit in my opinion!)
April/May: With a £40 gift voucher to spend, and needing some more terrain for games of Frostgrave, I picked up the 3-box of Osgiliath Ruins and bashed them out, unlocking a newfound love of terrain painting. It’s so fast and simple!
May: Oldhammer Chaos Warrior. This guy was encased in about a centimetre of enamel paint, and it took a lot of time to strip it off him. Dark Elf Sorceress, acquired from a friend’s clearout. I think this model came free with a White Dwarf? Dark Elf Assassin, acquired from same friend. Probably contains lead, it’s that old.
July: Khorne. I painted the whole of the Khorne half of the OG AoS starter box. Contrast did a lot of heavy lifting here, letting me do the skin, the vibrant red and the bone-coloured trim on all of the mooks super quickly. Here is the Lord.
August, September, onwards: Warcry. The big box. Excellent game. Excellent big box. The terrain. Took until November to finish painting all the remaining Iron Golems, but here’s the whole gang. Furies, more Furies and chickens. Untamed Beasts in September.
Built some zombies from Fireforge games. I’ll paint these eventually. Good for when I finally get around to Rangers of Shadow Deep, or something else requiring zombie villagers.
I spent the last couple of days sprucing up some MDF buildings I inherited when my Frostgrave-playing friend moved away. It looks much nicer now, although I feel like it could still do with a bit more attention. They’re excellent kits, but I don’t know if I’ll get more MDF stuff in the future unless I have a clear idea of how to make it look less flat, thin and textureless. Mind you, TTCombat’s new Savage Domain kits look really nice…
And that wraps things up for 2019. Phew! I am extremely proud of how much I’ve painted and how much I’ve improved, tried new things and honed in on how to paint better and faster.
In 2020, I will try to document my progress on here, because in 2020: I’m going to clear my backlog.
I have been working on a little tool for making fighter cards for Warcry, GW’s new skirmish game (wot is very good). Using a template, you can set how many wounds your fighter has, how far they can move, the stats of their weapons, etc.
The page saves its state after every change so it can restore it if you close the page and come back, but this functionality is incomplete. For one thing, it doesn’t restore user-provided images. For a second, it would be good to have save slots the user can name.
The page is ugly. Even if I don’t manage to make a pretty background or find a better typeface or whatever, I’d like the interface to be clearly broken up into sections.
Pageview tracking? I think I should already have this but I’m not sure.
Working on this I’ve learned a fair bit about front-end web programming. I grew my familiarity with JavaScript, picked up some JQuery, touched a little Bootstrap. Hosting is handled by GitHub Pages the same way this website is, using Jekyll to build the final HTML from templates.
It was pretty well received on Twitter. Once it’s a bit prettier I’ll find other places to share it.
I hope to round out the feature set by the end of the year and start working on other tools and neat things. Now that I know how to make little web applications, my head is full of ideas for things to try.
