Hobby Goal and a change of philosophy

Hobby Goal #4

Paint the Kairic Acolytes

GOAL FAILED

The Kairic Acolytes turned out to be more work than I anticipated. They looked so simple and then I got to the gold. All the bloody gold: the edging on the shields, the edging on the armour plates, the belt buckles, the hilts of the swords, the masks. There's just so much fine detail they're too damn hard to batch paint beyond the basic block colouring. So, right now, three quarters of the unit look like this...

… with another rank just starting to get all their gold edging halfway to done. Didn't help that I ended up wasting my first couple of painting sessions on a colour scheme that didn't work and had to start from scratch but I have learnt a valuable lesson:

Clearly I need a change in philosophy here.

The days when I had the time to finish a unit in a week, let alone a unit I've never painted before, are done so from now on there'll be no more “finish a unit” goals. I'll start this week with a simple, immediate goal and work my way up, see how far I can reasonably take this instead of making myself grumpy because I just don't have enough time.

Also, I like the method that's arisen here through practicality. I decided I'd go mad trying to do the gold edging as a twenty model block so I'm doing it a rank at a time. I might try this out with another unit: base coats as a block then do the detail work rank by rank. If it works I get to have that high of “I finished something” sooner and more frequently.

We'll see.

Hobby Goal #5

Build my Lord of Change

Well, it arrived in the pre-orders yesterday and I want to get some momentum behind this project. With any luck I can plug away at the Acolytes for the rest of the week and have them done by the time I've finished building the Greater Daemon. I also want to write some background for the army, work out who they are and what they're doing.

But also...

Hobby Goal #6

Finish a bunch of basing

I said this month would be about Dwarfs and a Lord Of Change is not a Dwarf. Where there are some Dwarfs is on the basing shelf. There's also a lot of other models dating back to just before Christmas who need their bases finishing. The shelf currently contains five Ironbreakers, five Flesh Tearers Tactical Marines and a Librarian, five Traitor Guardsmen and five Genestealer Metamorphs.

If I get these done I can put twenty-one models in the finished column.