Paint it or Punt it

What better way to close out this project than to paint more minis for one of my favourite games. I had the plastic Fellowship but through several ebay sales I managed to pick up a full set of the much nicer metals. My intention was always to strip them and get the Balin’s tomb display for them but it turns out that took quite some time to find at a reasonable price. With one in hand, or in the cupboard, excuses are over.

I’m a big fan of the Battle Streams in Middle Earth stream every fortnight and a few weeks ago was Gandalf week. The whole point of BSiME is to paint models you haven’t quite got round to. If you paint on theme for the week, you get entered into a draw for a highly prized, exclusive BSiME die. More importantly though, it’s just a bit fun to paint along.

Over the stream I managed to get Gandalf and a Galadriel done (she doesn’t count towards this project as she was only bought this year but it’s another mini from the backlog cleared). I’d forgotten how much I enjoy painting these minis. Especially the old metal sculpts. They are an absolute joy and yet not very time consuming. The bases aren’t finished because I need to mix up some flock for Galadriel to match the rest of my MESBG minis and I haven’t decided what to do with the Fellowship for their display tomb (I will not call it a plinth!).

I had started the 17 Judges from the last edition of the Judge Dredd miniatures game. I love Judge Dredd and these were a present from a friend so though they felt a little like an obligation, I was looking forward to them. They came primed black and I put down the green and some skin tones. It was around about this time I realised I wasn’t going to enjoy them as much as I thought. In fact, I really dislike them. Setting them aside wouldn’t be difficult and along came the chance to paint up the Imperial Fists for this project. Nor was not going back to them after the raffle was done.

Or the following two months.

October coming around and feeling a little better about my hobby, I decided to finish off everything I had primed and partly painted.

Putting on an audiobook and just pushing through the misery, I did eventually get them all done. Can’t remember the last time I enjoyed a bunch of models less but they are now DONE!

It’s been a few months since I posted here. I had every intention of completing the Spring Clean Challenge but the chance to raise some extra money for a worthy cause popped up and I dropped everything to go do it. Let’s catch up shall we?

The last of the Perry plastic French were split into two more stands and then some single based skirmishers. The idea is that one day they’ll get used for a skirmish ruleset Forager when a friend gets round to painting up his Rifles… I don’t know if that’ll ever happen but I did really enjoy painting these and I think they look pretty good. Not enough that I’d painted hundreds of them for a true Napoleonic army at 28mm but never say never.

Don’t have any photos of them but I also finished off the four Romans and over on my Frostgrave project I showed off finishing all the minis from the pile. That just leaves the Judge Dredd judges and the Fellowship (plus two B&B minis but I seem to have lost them somewhere. I suspect they’ve been kidnapped by the cats so who knows where I’ll find them).

Getting back into a bit of hobby the same way I started this project waaaaay back by painting up a few B&B miniatures.

SCC count: 5 down, 74 left to go

These are left over from a Kickstarter two years ago. The KS is a good way to pick up a bunch of fun painting projects but I haven’t gone in for the last few because I realised I wasn’t actually painting them. With only two left to do, I can look at the next KS without that guilt ?

Now then, what’s this, a post? On a sprawling, painfully slow to load project? Aye, I know, I didn’t think I was coming back here either. Honestly after January I thought I’d just break down the remainder of the paint queue and make separate projects for each of them.

Sometimes though I don’t sleep at night and that tends to play havoc with the strange little things I set my mind on. Thinking about the hobby plans for the rest of the year, I realised that this project need to finished before I can take those on guilt-free.

If only there was some sort of challenge that would help gamers with clearing out old projects

One of my main hobby goals for 2020 was to take back control of my collection. I felt a weird sense of guilt about the number of unpainted models I owned. Not a pile of opportunity or a heap of hope or whatever positive spin we are meant to put on it. Mine was most definitely a pile of shame. I frequently felt like I didn’t know where to start and would just not paint instead of having to face it all.

In January 2020, I had 1281 unpainted models in the pile. Over the 15 months I’ve painted 243 and sold or given away 850 or so. Heading into 2021, the push was towards 100% painted for everything that was on the spreadsheet… don’t worry about the actual maths, I’m a librarian not an accountant.

So let’s set out parameters shall we? It’s 30 days until the end of the Spring Clean Challenge and I have in my head a rough idea of what remains to be painted in the cupboard. Updating the spreadsheet gives us this wonderful looking set of totals

81.7% painted and 79 models either unpainted or unassembled. This includes all the changes brought by painting up Frostgrave, which I thought was going to be my SCC this year. What remains to be done for it is terrain based so I’m not bothered about that right now.

30 days and 79 models. That’s doable.

The breakdown:

Burrows and Badgers – 7

Judge Dredd – 17

Napoleonic French – 24

Romans – 4

Fellowship of the Ring – 9

Frostgrave – 18 (FG numbers actually a pain in the arse because I apparently wasn’t as good at tracking them as I thought I was being. I’ve definitely added to it this year but this is what is sitting to be painted, so that’s what I’m going with)

There are other models in the house that are unpainted right now. They’ve all been bought in the last couple of months as projects for once this was over. Am I saying I’ve got a wonderfully balanced relationship with my desire to buy models and actually getting them painted? Not in the slightest. I still have four separate projects I want to start but I’m being better about not buying things immediately and then sticking them in a darkened corner to waste.

There’s also a set of minis that I stripped for a painting challenge this month and then lost the energy for. If I manage them too then fantastic but it’s not something I’m going to beat myself up about it.

The story behind the Legion core box ties to last year’s snag-a-normie challenge. I went halfers on the box with a friend. We managed a build session and one short paint session before lock-down happened. I went ahead and painted my droid troops but left everything else untouched. Fast-forward to November and he admitted that he didn’t think he was interested in painting minis after all. So they got added into my pile of unpainted grey, not likely to be added to but possibly to be played with at a skirmish level in the future.

Painting clone troopers, I thought I’d try the Zorpazorp technique but after the first couple of stages they looked like crap so I went back to check I was following the video properly. Instead of watching it on my phone, I watched it on my PC screen and found out the flaw in my plan… I think the ones in the video look like crap too. That’s maybe not fair but they aren’t neat and tidy enough for my tastes so it was time to mount a rescue. Nothing needed stripped or anything crazy like that, just lines cleaned up, evidence of the drybrushing eradicated and many layers of thin white paint patiently applied.

After those were done it was time to move onto the Barc speeder. I wanted it to look different to the clones so went with a grey palette and some pretty heavy weathering. My friend confirmed he’d like them with 501^st colours so I went in and added the blue along the sides. Then went back and painted the clones. The sources for clone markings are all over the place and truthfully, it’s not my army so I don’t care. They are clearly 501^st, my job is done.

Next I finished up the droid side by painting the droidekas and then a fun little evening working on Grievous and Kenobi. Once everything was done, the horrible Geek Gaming Mars base ready mix got brought out so they match the other droids. Seriously, great idea for a product but it is a nightmare to work with. The pigment gets on everything and after sealing and touching up, it would have been faster going with any of the other methods I considered way back in March when I did the first lot of B1s.

With that, the Legion core box is finished. I won’t be jumping to paint more of either faction for now. I am tempted by building a Rebel force but truthfully it is such an expensive game that I just don’t know I’ll be able to justify it.

Time for a January wrap up. Plenty of progress and some self examination.

After I working through the Imperial Assault goal in December, I decided to try and lay out the rest of the collection to be painted as monthly targets. For January, I wanted to finish off what was in the Star Wars Legion core box, and paint up some odds and sods minis that somehow have taken up residence in my flat. I also wanted to get the last batches of eBay sales up and running.

I’ll do a separate post for the Star Wars Legion update but let’s cover some other things.

January stats:

Sold: 96 (plus 250 pending)

Painted: 37

Collection painted: 43.3%

Quick little section this one. Two cows and goat.

From Dust Tactics.

I shit you not.

I have no idea if these will ever get used but 100% painted is 100% painted! Painting these took so little time that I added in the gangers from Judge Dredd too. After so much white it was a joy to paint garish colours!

Adding these to the 4 Burrows and Badgers minis from the start of the month and the total painted for the month is 37. Painting up the rest of the Burrows and Badgers kickstarter is one of next month’s goals.

The last few lots went up on eBay and I was happy with that. Then I had a chat with a friend about his Legion collection. I was giving him a hard time about owning two of everything for all four factions. “You’ll never paint all that and you’ll never play that many armies” said I.

Of course, I am sitting in my own (albeit much smaller) glasshouse. I have 9 factions for Middle-Earth SBG. Nine!!! Not one of them is a complete army and I’ve only ever played small points games. Stones came crashing down on my head and so I decided that most of it has to go.

I’m keeping the two forces that I have painting everything I own for (the Pelennor Fields box) and for the meantime I’ll keep hold of the Minas Tirith that I painted last year though their place in the cabinet is precarious. I’m also going to keep one of the two Fellowship sets I have and in fact they are earmarked to be my Spring Clean Challenge project this year.

If I want to buy more MESBG then it makes much more sense to pick out specific units for the two armies I have and build them out rather than just buying shit cheaply on eBay. This decision also dramatically changes the outlook for the Paint it or Punt it challenge. Of the 500 odd miniatures that remained to be painted, nearly 300 of them were MESBG. Getting rid of them and planning out the remains to be painted up as monthly goals, I think I should get to 100% painted collection by May. Or at least the collection as it stood up until now but that’s a topic for a future post and possibly future project logs…

Finished one unit of 7 Clones. Not using unit markings (for the time being) because technically they aren’t mine.

The bases will match the droids when I’m done which means Geek Gaming Mars Earth basing material. It’s messy as heck though so I’m going to wait until probably the rest of the box is done before breaking that out.

The streams today were great and helped pass the time for painting white… thanks to the OTT crew for putting them on.