And the scores are ...

114 painted vs 112 bought.

That was too close for comfort. I managed to paint up 17 elves today to drag myself over the finishing line. I will now go and fall into bed and get some much needed sleep.

High Elves

Barring bases and some other minor bits and pieces I have the first unit of Mantic High Elves finished!



I've already moved on to the scouts. I might even manage to keep the pledge this year at this rate.

I've just totalled things up properly using a spreadsheet and I think I now have 97 painted vs 112 bought.

15 more miniatures to go to break even. This might be close.

An early retrospective.

So is the pledge actually working? Sort of. It has cut down on *some* of my madder impulse purchases but I still ended up buying a load of maidenhead stuff in 2008 and Space Hulk and the new High Elf army this year. It has probably prompted me to paint more stuff then I would have done without the added spur.

What the pledge hasn't really helped to do though is reduce the number of unfinished projects on my list. The raw count of purchased vs painted doesn't provide much incentive to pick up some figures which are two thirds finished and see them through to completion. I guess this is partly due to my rather puritanical take on the pledge scoring system.

With this in mind I declare 2010 as the year of getting things finished. I still want to buy fewer figures than I paint but I will primarily be trying to complete projects rather than just randomly painting stuff up.

For something like Space Hulk completing the project is obviously just a matter of painting all the figures in the box but for other projects 'completing' is likely to be a little more vague. In some cases I have a large pool of models for a project (some of which don't work very well under the current rules) so painting them all wouldn't necessarily be all that fruitful but getting an army to x number of points with options would be a better goal (in the short term at least).

When I do end up buying new miniatures I'm hoping that I can justify them as adding to particular projects rather than just being shiny and nice. I think I will be making use of proxies in some cases so I can try before I buy and find out what works instead of ending up with units which get purchased, painted and never used.

Another thing I plan to do in the coming year is actually get out and play more games with the miniatures. It has been pointed out to me that if I spend half as much time playing games as I do painting up the miniatures for them I might actually get good at some of the systems. That would be nice.

Time is running out

Not much more painting done, not much time left, 5 more figures purchased. [facepalm]

Yes, I bought the Mantic metal characters pack. Actually I had a slight problem with it when it arrived as one of the figures was broken. One email later Mantic's super speedy customer service sent me a replacement which arrived the very next day. They also sent me a few more bases so I can base up the scouts I got as free samples. Jolly nice of them, thanks folks.

Painting wise I'm working through the Mantic spears unit. I've finally got the hang of the colour scheme so hopefully I can do the rest a bit quicker. Here's hoping.