They were a joy to paint and a pain to photograph! I’ll definitely be getting more of them soon.
I used a zenithal prime and lots of contrast paint & drybrushing to blast through the non-metallics, and then spent a few hours on the metals, trying to get a rusty, unloved effect. There’s verdigris on the bronze, but I’m not sure it survived the washes over the top. Oh well. They still look roughly how I planned them!
That brings me over 700 “effort” painted (total, not this year!) and very close to 500 painted models in my collection, which is pretty sweet!
And I’m creeping up on hitting the balance point for BATG, which is pretty good considering that HeroQuest happened!
I’ll do a mid-year reflection once we hit end of June. Maybe I can paint something else in the next three days…
They have aged SO WELL. I used a box of Gluttons to make Ogryns for my guard back in the '00s and I was working with Mournfangs to make my Bull Centaurs and I just thought “These kits are such a joy to work with. I should put together a small collection before GW updates them into overcomplicated monopose kits with too much detail that somehow have no character.”
I still have 3 Netters and a couple of spare archers left to go before this unit is finished, but that brings me to NET ZERO! We’re halfway there, and we’re back where we started!
But, uh… I ordered some more Ogors while shopping for the new Contrast paints. I can’t rest yet. The hope is now to stay in negatives for the rest of the year.
We’ll see how that goes!
Scores with 20 one-effort models done and a Shame Golf bonus point for getting a unit of 5+ models done:
This guy came from my bitz box. He’s one of the first models I ever bought, back in ‘97. I was vaguely saving him for a comparison exercise, shoot him side by side with one of those first models I painted with Testor’s enamels. But that first model was brown, and I am… not really keen on that.
Here’s hoping the itch is taken care of until I can get my BATG score a bit lower (ignoring that I’ve already painted more models in six months than I did all of last year).
I put together two more Grots from the old multi-part kit but I’m not sure I actually want to paint them. I’d like to make some room on the painting desk for Ogors or maybe some more guardsmen, so I’m going to put those last two models aside for now. I’d only need them if I decided to expand this unit to 20 anyway…
That means I only have ten spider riders and the hut terrain piece if I want to finish all the Night Goblins from Battle for Skull Pass! I don’t think I want to use the spider riders, but being able to put up before and after pictures is pretty tempting!
I’m very conscious of the fact that I have eight models in the mail right now, so if I want to stay in the negatives when they arrive I’ll have to find a few more models to paint really quickly.
I had literally just finished the last update when the doorbell rang, and a courier got me to sign for a suspiciously box-shaped box that just so happened to include 4 Leadbelchers and 4 Ironguts:
I finished the Ogor Slaughtermaster up and got him looking mostly not like a 1900s racist caricature, which is something of an achievement. It is VERY hard not to make him look like a Golliwog.
I got the model secondhand and missing the chains he uses to haul the stewpot around, so I did some stuff with some jewellery chain as if he’s snapped free and is off to go murderise things. I also had to replace his right hand hook because it kept snapping off.
I actually got him mostly done yesterday evening but I figured three updates in one day was too much.
In between work fiddling, I speed-painted the last of my Nighthaunt Chainrasps, probably taking only an hour altogether.
They were a bit nasty, with some serious texture in places from a mediocre spray can undercoat. I cut out as many steps as I could, and now that I’ve got a big pot of Seraphim Sepia I can cut out a lot of messing around with the metals.
That brings me back into negative score territory. I’ve now bashed out most of the models I’d been planning to paint, so I’ll have to fossick through the collection a bit to figure out what’s next. A lot of what I’ve been doing has cleared out my undercoated pile, so there will probably be a lot of airbrushing in my near future!
Here’s where the scores sit with the Slaughtermaster counting for 5 effort:
And mid-year thought bubble, since it doesn’t look like I’m going to get time for a big halfway-mark photoshoot:
Something I’ve noticed while working through my backlog this year - and I think part of the inspiration-purchase-new project cycle - is that I often catch myself thinking of parts of my Grey Mountain as static in their current state, like I tend to think “I have a Sloggoth new on sprue” rather than “I have a Sloggoth and it is going to be painted.”
I think what’s really helping (other than momentum) is being able to look at Figure Case or this blog and see the models in my collection as line items of potential, rather than as whole thing in and of themselves. It feels a bit metaphysical, I guess, but it’s true.
It’s proving much easier to conceptualise models as “temporarily like this” if I can imagine them finished. The Cities of Sigmar models I was so excited about earlier in the year never really got off the ground because I haven’t decided on a paint scheme. I just can’t imagine them finished. It’s the same for my Troggoth Hag. I wanted the models, but don’t have a way to envisage them all the way to the end, so they get stuck.
Not so for my Imperial Guard or Ogors. The projects where I know the scheme already through long practice or I have a specific plan in mind just sort of rolls along. That being said, the Guard infantry is going easily but I haven’t picked up a tank yet this year - because I never could figure out a good way to paint them.
BATG has been a great education in motivation, so far. I hope to learn some more over the next six months.
I’ve painted up a second Guardian of Souls for my Nighthaunt. This is the 2018 limited edition variant, that I lucked into picking up with a bigger lot.
It’s a real pleasure to paint Mengel-style Nighthaunt, all Nihilakh Oxide and then weapons and armour. It’s just so easy to pick up momentum and not get stuck anywhere.
I have eight more Ogors on sprue still, but I’m really enjoying painting the little carnivores so I’m sure they’ll get done before end of year.
Meanwhile, it turns out that the Horus Heresy itch refused to stop itching, and I found someone on Facebook who I could buy some mkVI marines cheap, picking up ten.
Annoyingly, this takes me back over 0 net score, so I’ll have to hunt up some easy wins.
100%. it’d be you with like, big sweat drops flying from your head, running in an exagerrated way after a bunch of minis, paintpots and paintbrushes that are going in all different directions