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. 

New House, Ancient Tombs and Returning Evils

After weeks on end of packing, moving, unpacking, building furniture, arranging bill payments and entertaining violent revenge fantasies about certain employees of the local council, my housemates and I are now all moved in to our new place.

Both my new housemates are old friends and fellow hobbyists so we've set up a dedicated gaming space. Originally I planned to start a new project to celebrate a successful (if typically stressful) move but after a quick game against Dave with my Orks... well, I had a better idea.

You see, I got nostalgic from living with my friends again and so I decided to return to some old projects: one an army that I started but which never got off the ground, the other a revival of what was once my signature army.

A couple years ago I had a chance to snap up a bunch of Tomb Kings kits at a dirt cheap price so I did. Trouble was that whilst I was looking to move on to a new army, the army I was moving on from was Vampire Counts and so I just wasn't feeling it. I'd painted enough skeletons and so the kits have sat in a box ever since. Still, a year or so of Lizardmen later I can look at the Tomb Kings and see what I loved about them originally.

"Forward, my minions!"

I like that they're these Universal Studios-style Egyptian undead who are, in their own way, good guys. They even use exorcism magic. I like that just about everything in the army is either a skeleton or an animated statue and not just because it means I can dash off the block infantry and cavalry pretty quickly and concentrate my time on the centrepiece models. That's certainly a benefit but it also means the army has a very unified, focussed look to it. Plus, I have this odd affection for the Tomb Scorpion, which was one of the first “centrepiece” models I ever saw and one I'm really looking forward to painting one of my own.

The other army on the docket are The Lost And The Damned or, rather, Renegades & Heretics since I'll be using the list from Imperial Armour 13. The Lost And The Damned used to be my signature army back in the old Codex: Eye Of Terror days.

Whilst the Tomb Kings are an army with a very unified aesthetic that I can make straight out of the box, the Lost And The Damned are anything but. The Lost And The Damned are an army all about converting models, be it with the Forge World upgrade sets or by digging through your bits box. It is, in essence, the ultimate show-off's army. You can customise the characters and units as much or as little as you want. I have a bunch of the Forge World conversion sets I picked up at the final Games Day and oodles of ideas on top of that for cool conversions. Anyone who converts their models, I am convinced, loves that moment when someone asks to take a closer look at their work. Its a lovely feeling.

Also, the Imperial Armour list is, to my mind, the best version of the army so far. It has some very odd moments of copy editing and some rules my friends and I have flat out decided to ignore because they are flat out stupid. There's a lot of that Hordes of Chaos business where your choice of general opens up one or two options and closes off about a dozen others. That's just ripe for ignoring, frankly, which is why we don't usually see so much of it these days. Plus, there's a silly restriction on who can use Daemonology which, again, is a rule the group has roundly voted for me to completely forget.

I have some building to do, it seems.