March 2022 Progress Report

 Ok, it's been a few weeks since my last post, and I have not done as much painting as I'd hoped, but more than I'd feared. In my defense, I got distracted with assembling a bunch of the 6th edition plastic Wood Elf Glade Guard (archers) so that they'd rank up in formation for games I'm not going to play probably, which was very satisfying but did take up most of my hobby energy and also led to this extreme run-on sentence. 

Anyway, the end of this month and the beginning of next I'm traveling back east to see family, but I'm going to hope for more progress by the end of April, and maybe start some new units in May.

All that out of the way, let's see some pictures.

As you can see above, I've made almost no progress on my spell singer and way watchers. They got a coat of green on them over the undercoat, and that was it (harder to see on the spell singer since she's undercoated in black).

I did however make some progress on my Knight-Incantor, below.

I'm not sure what I want to do with her weapons, but I'm liking the red for the fabric. The white limb armor and dark green torso is the layout of the Mentors Legion space marines I'm basing her off of, and I think it's starting to look good. Definitely need to look up some tutorials on painting white armor as I proceed, I'm not sure how I want to do the shading/highlighting on that yet.

The other major progress I made was on the Deepwood scouts.

The pictures here aren't the best, but you can see I managed to get color on all of them. Brown bows and leather and quivers, green cloaks (even alternating dark green and camouflage green!), skin tones (yes some of my elves have dark skin, some light, I like diversity), even the bases have the dirt color I'm probably going to use throughout the army. This unit is going to have grey/white fletching for the arrows, but I plan to alternate that by unit just for variety. All ten of them you notice are on a large base, called a movement tray in the game community. It's not a necessary part of the game but helps to move the whole unit at once (thus speeding up an already 4-6 hour game). The tray for the scouts is a skirmish tray, so the models do not rank up. The bonus is that I can paint and add details to the tray I couldn't on a basic movement tray, so that's fun. I got this one off eBay, it's a hard plastic or resin tray. I have some movement trays for the ranked-up units that are made of wood, which will probably feature in a future post.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is quality. I happened to order a model on eBay that showed up pre-painted, and when I looked into it the shop I got it from turned out to be a place that does commissions. Here are some pictures of that model.

The quality of this model blew me away. Look at that banner, those are free-hand runes and detailing, the banner on the model is just flat metal. The shading and highlights are amazing. This is the quality I aspire to. Realistically I've never been great at freehand, so that's unlikely, but maybe someday.

And then I was looking through some of the models I've had in storage for a decade or more, and I came across this one:

I actually painted this model. A long time ago, but that was me. And I looked at the shading and the highlights and I thought "wow, I was actually really good." So I know I'm capable (maybe not the freehand, but who knows what I could do if I practice enough). 

So I guess what I'm saying here is I'm hoping that doing this more frequently and maybe holding myself accountable a bit with this blog will let me get back to and possibly exceed where I have been in the past. I really do enjoy this, it's just been so hard in the past decade to get myself into the mindset to do this again. I really want to rediscover painting these miniatures. Who knows, maybe someday I'll even get to play a game with them.

So until next time!

Getting Back on the Hobby Wagon

 Looking at the last post, I have no updated this blog in over a year. It's been a long 2021, mostly of varying levels of COVID concerns and working on my own mental health. Part of that I think is trying to get my creative side going again.

Recently I got drawn back into the world of Warhammer Fantasy. First I was inspired to paint some old Elven figures like Orion of the Wood Elves as an avatar of one of their deities, and that sparked my love of the Wood Elf models from back in the day (was 6th edition Warhammer Fantasy really all the way back in 2006? And that was really 16 years ago?) and that led to a bit of an eBay spree. Sadly the models are all out of print these days so getting them is pretty costly, but if it gets me painting again I think it will be worth it.

So here's my plan:

I want to paint these guys this month. This is 10 Deepwood Scouts, 6 Waywatchers, and a Spellsinger.

Here is a closeup of the Waywatchers. Definitely the more detailed minis. I've painted some in the past but I wanted to do so again while filling out the unit. Waywatchers are specialized scouts, in the game they set up traps for enemies and are really good harrying units.

These are the 10 scouts. The models are much simpler than the waywatchers, but I really love the ascetic from this era.

This is the Spellsinger, the Wood Elf mage unit. She's a pretty cool sculpt, what with the floating and all.

Here's a sample of what I want them to look like. I still have a few of the Waywatcher models I painted all those years ago, which will let me have a full 10 elf strong unit.

So yeah. I've gotten my painting desk cleaned up after a year and a half of neglect, I got some models undercoated, and I'm in the mood again. I'll try to post some updates of my progress as I go here, maybe a weekly thing. If I can finish these before the end of March I'll be happy, and maybe next month I can pick another group to work on. Wish me luck!