2016 Is it over yet?

Unfortunately my planned push to complete the elves before the end of 2016 didn't happen. I had been painting away merrily and looking like I would meet the target but I hadn't bargained on being the victim of an assault in early December (it certainly wasn't on my to do list). Fortunately I escaped with mostly cuts and bruises but it put paid to any more painting for a few weeks. I managed to pick up my paint brushes yesterday for the first time since the incident and I will have to keep my painting sessions brief until I am fully recovered from my injuries. At least I have a load of painted and part painted elves from November and early December which I will now be completing in 2017 to give myself a bit of a head start.

So how did I do with the pledge in 2016?

Total Painted 170 (138)
Total Bought 90
Balance 80

Meaning that 2016 was a WIN for the wargamers pledge for the third year in a row.

What about my other hobby objectives for the year?

• Paint more than 300 miniatures: Fail - Without sustaining injuries I might have made it but we will never know.
• Don't start any new projects: Pass - No new armies, systems or scales, yay!
• 2016 the year of completing things: Fail - I got very close to finishing my elf army but didn't actually finish off any projects.

On the bright side my movement disorder seems to be behaving itself at the moment so if things continue 2017 might be a bumper year for painting. I can at least hope that it will be anyway.

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.