General updates

So I am plugging away at those elves, honest. I only have 10 more to go and all the infantry will be done just leaving 20 cavalry still to be painted. I am now reasonably hopeful that I will have the elf army finished before the end of the year.

This has got me thinking about what to do next year once the elves are out of the way. I think focussing primarily on one army seems to have worked reasonably well so I thought I might try and repeat the approach on a different project next year and see if I can complete that as well. The candidate projects are my human knights (Bretonnians/The Brotherhood/Kingdoms of Men/Basileans), my dwarves and my ogres. I'm not sure which one to go for so I have opened a poll over on the Mantic forum along with lots of photos of unpainted miniatures.

Talking of unpainted miniatures I have cracked and made some more purchases. I bought another 6 Hasslefree miniatures in their sale (2 modern and 4 fantasy) as well as 10 zombie survivors and Vercingetorix from Warlord games (they sent me a £10 voucher to spend). Even with these new additions to the unpainted pile I am still doing well on the pledge this year.

Funny looking elves if you ask me

Okay so maybe I won't paint up the rest of the elves just yet. I had fully intended to but instead the I detoured and painted something else instead.

This week I have been PNKD free for the first time in ages which has been brilliant. The only down side is that I no longer seem to be used to setting hunched over at the table painting for hour after hour like I used to and I now have a sore back. I will have to limit the length of my painting sessions until I recover.

The extra time to paint has borne fruit as you can see below. It also gave me the chance to put a little more effort into my painting instead of painting things in a tearing hurry, as a result I am quite proud of the results.

These two giants are from the Reaper Bones range and will join my KoW Ogre army.

Here is one of the new giants (left) alongside an identical mini I painted up for my D&D campaign last year (right). I'm not sure that the photo shows it but the highlights are much more subtle and realistic on the newer one.

Also joining the painted pile are the two Mantic Lykanis miniatures I bought recently which will be leading the werewolf contingent in my KoW undead army.

These were fun to paint up and quick too.

Maybe now I should be getting on with those elves after all.

The season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

The end of the year is approaching fast, way too fast it would seem for me to meet my target of 300 painted miniatures this year.

I'm still working though the pile of Mantic elves and I have 20 of them almost done - they just need their bases finished and the shield decals applied for them to be finished. I'm holding off on doing those for the moment until I have the next batch of 20 in a similar state as it will be easier to do them all in one go.

Without these I still have painted 160 28mmeq so far so I should easily beat the 200 barrier even if 300 is looking out of reach.

Purchases
After such a good run of not buying things in the first part of the year I seem to have slipped back on some bad habits.

• 2 Bones Hill Giants
• Bones Stone Giant
• 3 Mantic Ogre Hunters
• 2 Mantic Lykanis (Werewolf leader)
• Dwarf Berserk Brock Lord
• 6 Mantic Zombie Command

Despite this I'm still 115 miniatures in the good as far as the pledge goes and there is a chance I will get all of them painted before the end of the year.

And to round out this update here are the latest additions to the painted pile, a Rust Monster and some Spiders all from my Reaper Bones 1 box. These were a nice break between painting up lots of elves.

The three wiz men

Celebration time - I have managed to finish the last three goblins for tomorrow's tournament with hours to go. As I mentioned in a previous post - I could easily have used some of the many other goblin shamen I have in my collection but I use tournaments as an excuse to get things done which might otherwise sit in the painting pile for many years.

Here we have the three goblin shamans the first by Kev Adams from the Crooked Claw range the second from GW as part of the arachnarok kit and the last also by KA but done for Hasslefree miniatures.

Whilst I was waiting for some of the paint to dry on those I found another Hasslefree miniature which has been lurking at the back of my paint station for ages and added the last few highlights and steps required to finish her off.

Gwen can now lurk in the box with the rest of my D&D minis.

So what next? Well I have one last unpainted Hasslefree miniature in my collection which would be nice to finish but otherwise I'll probably go back to painting elves again.

76 Trombones

Well two goblin war trombones anyway. The first of these is a Mantic Goblin War Trombone which I bought in August. The second is a Citadel Goblin Lead Belcher which has been in my possession for 30 years. I think it was in the Orc and Goblin army list for 2nd and 3rd edition WHFB but has been sitting in a box on a shelf since then. Some of the paint job on Lead Belcher is my original 80's brushwork with a wash and a couple of highlights to make it look a little better.

This means two things:-
1) I'm almost finished on the upgrades for my goblin army for Sunday's event (just three goblin shamen to go and they're not vital).
2) I have now painted all the miniatures I have bought this year.

Unfortunately I'm still way down on my goal of painting up 300 miniatures this year so I had better get cracking.

On a (t)roll

My first batch of trolls to reinforce my goblin army are now complete. These are a Troll Horde and a Troll Bruiser from Mantic.

And here's a group shot with the trolls I painted up last year.

I'm now working on the Goblin War Trombones which hopefully won't take to long. In other news I'm now having to use my magnifying visor more and more - my reading glasses no longer seem to be sufficient for detail work. The good news is that comparing the trolls I did last year with the ones I've just completed I can see a definite improvement ... maybe I should have ditched the reading glasses earlier.

Clearing the way

And those Mantic Elf Scouts (Kindred Gladestalkers) are now complete which leaves my workbench more or less clear to crack on with those goblins and trolls.

 I've got speed painting Mantic elves pretty much sorted so I am hopeful that I can come back to the tray of unpainted elves and work though them before the end of the year. For now I am on to more pressing matters which will involve a lot of green paint.

And now for part 2

Returning from my summer holidays it looks like I'm going to have to get cracking. So far my "year of completing projects" hasn't exactly been going to plan with a grand total of er.. zero projects finished. Secondly this is about the time of year I begin to focus on my Clash of Kings army for October. After taking Elves to the last three events with mixed results I decided it was time to take something else instead. With the current meta being what it is I have opted for goblins with a few upgrades and upgrades has meant purchases.

I did manage to go 8 months without buying miniatures which is probably the longest purchasing embargo I've had in years but the prospect of some discounted trolls proved too much temptation for me to pass up. I have bought 6 more trolls, a troll bruiser and a goblin war trombone - all Mantic. Together with some items from the lead pile these will allow me to field a goblin army at the Clash of Kings that stands a reasonable change of doing well (I hope).

Before getting cracking on with those I decided to try and clear some elves I had already started off my workbench. This small chap has been a work in progress for a while and it really is about time he was completed. The new Mantic elf dragon is made from board game plastic and is an adaptation of the model they produced for Dungeon Saga. The material holds a reasonable amount of detail but I ended up painting the body scales individually as they weren't quite distinct enough to dry-brush as I would usually do. The rider is metal and is nice and crisp.

The model is much larger than the original Mantic elf dragon I painted recently, here they are together with my GW elf dragon for comparison.

I'm looking forward to a game where I can actually field all three at the same time.

With the dragon done I'm not putting the finishing touches to some elf scouts which are nearly complete and once those are out of the way then it will be time to get on with those trolls!

Halfway mark

We are now into July which means it is time for me to look back over the first six months of the year and see what I've accomplished.

My pledge tracker spreadsheet tells me that I've painted a total of 103 28mmeq and bought zero new miniatures (8 months and counting!). Whilst this is good news on the pledge front it does mean that I am behind on my aim of painting more than 300 miniatures again this year.

Why am I not painting faster? Well my painting time has been curtailed by PNKD but I've also got a little bored of painting elves.

After a recent disastrous showing at a KoW tournament my attention has been diverted back to my modern city project. My aim for 2016 was the year of completing projects - and the modern city project is a pretty good candidate for this. I had a box of street furniture, some cars, a building and a single 28mm miniature left to do and I have made a pretty good dent in it already.

I've also been working on the rules for the game which are coming on pretty nicely IMHO. Once this lot is out of my system I will probably be back painting the elves before too long.

6 months and counting

Today marks a big milestone - it has been six months since my last miniatures purchase. In that time I have not backed any miniatures kickstarters, placed any pre-orders or swapped or traded for miniatures. As a mildly obsessive collector this is probably the longest period I have gone without a miniatures purchase in many years.

Looking at the projects in front of me there isn't anything I *need* for any of them either so I could potentially keep this going for a while longer. Part of me wants to frivolously purchase something just for the sake of it but this is balanced by another part which is wondering just how long I can keep going. We shall see.

End of Q1

As the curtain closed on Q1 I managed to finish splashing some paint on a few more miniatures. These elves have been cluttering up my workbench for a bit, I started them before assembling the mass of miniatures in the last post.

Also from the workbench are some elf characters.The mages are metal miniatures from the 1st Mantic KoW kickstarter. The one on the left arrived damaged so I converted him with a GW component. The standard bearer is from Mierce miniatures. When I started painting him the standard had a dragon head at each end of the cross pole but it seems to have gone missing at some point. Hopefully it will turn up again soon.

And this post's surprise round consists of the restic Enforcers from the first Deadzone Kickstarter. My DZ2 rulebook showed up last week and I thought it would be a god idea to get these done so I could get some games in. I'm not especially proud of the results but they're done and I'll take that.

That brings my painted total up to 103 miniatures for the year so far so I'm on target to beat the 300 barrier again as long as I keep at it.

Send for reinforcements

Following the plan of "completing" things I took time out over the weekend to assemble every last remaining Mantic elf in my collection. We have here:-

• 20 Stormwind Cavalry (2 regiments)
• 10 Kindred Tallspears
• 20 Kindred Gladestalkers
• 30 Kindred Archers (1 regiment and 1 troop)

Now that they are assembled I need to fill some gaps in the horses (I didn't do a very good job of putting them together). After that everything will get washed in detergent (to remove grease/release agent) then have sand applied to the bases before priming.

If I can get this batch of elves painted up in a reasonable time scale I will be very happy. I still have some elves from a previous batch part painted on my workbench so those will get done first and I'm sure there will be the odd interruption but I'm keen to get cracking.

.. and we're back.

Even for this blog that was a long pause. A combination of health issues and real life conspired to limit the amount of painting time available coupled with a loss of enthusiasm for painting (when I was actually able to) meant that February and March were not productive months.

April has been better so far and I have been able to put the finishing touches on the miniatures that I have been picking away at since my last post. I have added (yet another) 10 Mantic elf Kindred Tallspears (spearmen) to my army - only 10 more left in the unpainted pile.

Also joining my KoW army is an Elf Master Hunter. This is a metal miniature which was available via the Mantic points programme as a scout captain but has been OOP for some time I believe.

And finally for this update a troop of 10 Mantic Orc Greatax. Yes I know they aren't elves but I fancies a bit of a change. The speed with which I managed to get these painted make me think that I might get round to painting up my Mantic Orcs sooner than I had planned.

Next on the table are likely to be some elf archers but plans may change depending on whether I can make it to a KoW tournament in Altringham next month. I need to work out which army I would like to take and see if I need to add any units to get a decent list.

One down, eleven to go

And that folks, was January.

For me January seems to have turned out pretty well on the painting front despite losing a lot of time to my movement disorder. It was a month of painting almost exclusively Mantic Elf miniatures - or at least Mantic miniatures I can use in my KoW elf army. Here is a run down of the latest additions.

Firstly a Mantic Dragon's Breath war engine which has been lying around primed for a very long time and is now ready for the table top.

Next up is a Mantic Elf Mage Queen from the most recent KoW Kickstarter.

Closely followed by a mounted elf hero from Gamezone, this month's only non Mantic miniature.

And lastly the original Mantic elf dragon. He fits neatly on a 50x50 base and is completely dwarfed by the new Mantic elf dragon which is currently on the workbench.

Looking at the close-ups of that lot I can't claim to be particularly proud of my paint jobs but they are good enough for the table top and that's what I was aiming for.

So how is the pledge coming along? Well so far the year I have bought a grand total of zero miniatures and I have painted a total of 58 28mmeq so everything is going nicely to plan. Lets hope that 2016 carries on being as productive.