Undead Supplies?

   In a bit of a tangent, I've painted a few of my 15mm Undead army, again an army I'd like to get on the table, but not one that was particularly urgent. I've had the knights and command figures on sticks for a while with no real motivation to get on with them, while the wagons were a more recent buy.

   

   The necromancers and knights are all from Alternative Armies and were bought in one of their spring sales - which they've just announced another one of . . . - the knights I bought as a pack and then loads of singles to get enough regular guys rather than too many of the standard bearer. It would be nice to have a bit more variety but as there are only 2 units its not too jarring.

   The necromancers were sold as wizards and I scoured their whole range for my favourites. The photos look much worse than they look in person. I've based them as per my future proofing theory. Big base for the army general, medium bases for sub leaders - useful when splitting a collection between players - and smalls for magic users in Sword and Spear. I've got a real urge to buy another figure of the male wizard on the single base to paint red and write WIZARD on his hat . . .

   I'm not sure if I NEED a civilian wagon and baggage element for my undead but it seemed like fun so I did it anyway. Now that I've found somewhere that sells 15mm undead farm animals, I'm tempted by a  few bases of them now too . . .

   The big wagon is from Essex Miniatures and was the first one I bought, with added horses from Alternative Armies. Then about a week after I built it ready to go, Alternative Armies announced their own corpse wagons, so I ordered 3 (was only supposed to click 2) and ended up with a small fleet of undead wagons.

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The Nassau Question

    Being a bit* of a butterfly in all aspects of my life, be it hobby or historical interests etc mean that the subject that I am reading everything I can find about and making detailed plans for how to make it part of my hobby one week, could be a barely remembered idea a few weeks later. That includes the subject of this post, the Nassau.

*Understatement

   When I initially planned to do bits of the Waterloo conflict in 15mm I had made plans on which units I needed to represent units at different points for different scenarios and it became clear that I needed the 2rnd Nassau. A regiment's worth were ordered from Essex Miniatures following my company as a single unit method, bases were magnetised as place holders and put into my "British" box and the figures were put into my backlog. Move on a year and with the French origins of the regiment firmly in my head, there is a very confused Mike trying to work out why I was putting them in the wrong box.

   But back to painting; I'm a tad surprised that these have been painted and are being blogged about at this point as there are at least two other Napoleonic projects that I've marked as higher priority, but I was sticking figures to lolly sticks and fancied doing a quick test unit to see what they looked like and I got carried away.

  There is a minor risk that these are the French era uniforms and not the British but I'm not an expert in spotting the differences so I'm not 100%, the key thing here is that the unit is recognisable for what it is and won't be mixed up on the board.

   I've painted a command figure to represent the Colonel or player, a unit of Grenadiers (with an extra 2 elements simply because I had the figures and it made no sense not to paint them while I was going through this project), 4 units of line and 2 units of voltigeurs (with extra elements as well).

   If I can get a cannon for the "British" and some horse painted for each side I'll have more than enough to do a test game. Back to the painting desk.

I'm also counting this as my second finished project of the year project of the year.

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Answering Napoleon's Call

    Carrying on with what I have named Operation Panic Paint, is another big project that I wanted to get finished off, as it feels like the win at the end of each batch is a lot smaller than you get with other projects, and I really want to see them on the table asap, the 15mm Napoleonic Waterloo French. These are the last figures that I need (if the plan works) for my planned La Haye Sainte scenario, which will now mean I have representatives from 2 regiments (with a unit representing a company*) of French line, vs a regiment of KGL 2rnd Light holding the farm itself.

*Although I am wondering if I should double up the figure count

   This post is another one of those ones where the figures I am blogging about have been supplemented by figures finished previously that didn't get their own post at the time.

   First up is a whole regiment's worth of men**. I've been slowly putting finished models on the shelf behind me in a less organised fashion than this so seeing them all lined up properly feels really good. Represented (and subject to change as I'm not sure if I'll end up adapting anything) is a command figure, command stand (which will probably replace a stand in the grenadiers), the grenadiers, 4 units of line, then 2 units of voltigeurs - totalling 77 men in a painted regiment.

**Using the analogy above

   While I was working on the new regiment, I also included the last figures needed for my first one, and to be honest, I'm not sure why I didn't just suck it up and finish these before. Once you get past the white step, they aren't actually that hard to paint. These were painted just before the Goths and include the first dog that I decided needed to be on a unit base.

   This is also a post where I admit that Operation Panic Paint encouraged me to get carried away and add new stuff to my backlog, in this case, a cannon, with associated crew and limber and the pair of mounted colonels to act as commanders for each regiment as I am toying with an idea, seen above. The cannon will make regular games a bit more interesting as my French collection was just infantry at that point***.

***barring an experiment in cavalry I am going to carry out

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Ere The Sun Rises!

   Following quick on the tail of the big Goth project is a smaller batch, mostly because I needed to keep my motivation up, of Riders of Rohan. I think I'm right in saying this is the last box worth that I need for my planned game, but as I have 3 more boxes worth to go, it won't be the last you see of regular riders.

   Nothing hugely exciting to say other than I tried a new horse colour recipe. 

   Next I probably should have started on the Royal Guard for this force, but instead I've gone headfirst into finishing off two more fairly big projects . . .

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15mm Gothic Infantry

    One of the things that I stopped to work out, once I realised that my new job would mean less painting time, was not which projects were more urgent and should be prioritised but which projects gave less little wins. One of the biggest ways of keeping myself motivated is splitting projects down into 'little wins', usually in the form of limiting the number of models in a painting batch so that I can finish, for example, 5 models in an evening instead of 10 half finished and then once a model is complete (inc basing) I add it to my notebook with a date*.

*and then a spreadsheet but lets not go there

   So by looking at projects without these little wins I was trying to avoid hitting the project when there wouldn't be much spare time and killing what motivation I had. My 15mm Goth army was the thing that came to mind immediately. Unlike my 15mm Romans, who I could paint a whole unit, base and count as a win, my Goths wouldn't be in a uniform, as I had been sticking them to wooden sticks in mixed batches so I could paint a whole row of identical colours, then mix them in units later on. The downside of this is that as I don't count a model as complete until it's based, I could have weeks of painting without a 'complete' model. Effectively I would be completing 6 units of infantry on the same day even if I had been "finishing" batches every few days over the course of weeks. So this became my biggest priority even though there are other more urgent projects.

   The infantry I painted was mostly from Forged In Battle, but the slingers are from Essex Miniatures. There are 3 bases of regular infantry that I can use as the base of an army or auxiliaries for my Romans, then a unit of archers and 2 half sized units of slingers to add some skirmishing elements.

   Early in to this mass batch painting I remembered I had some civilians from Essex Miniatures**, so they got added to the ends of a few sticks where there was space as it made the most sense for getting stuff moving. Then*** I remembered my plan of having at least one of the civilians on the base of a cart, so two carts got built**** and added to the queue along with some dogs and a cat that I bought at Salute from Pendrakon as I wanted this army to look like families on the move rather than a professional army.

**In another case of project creep

***See above

****I'm not really sure how much time I thought I was saving by not doing the 3rd in this batch

   The downside of this and in an attempt to make real ground, I painted the clothing in small batches, then went back and did all 126 figures skin, hair, wood, metal and shield in one go over for each colour, and I have a new found respect for those people who paint in big batches, it might be faster but I am never doing that ever again.

   I've got at least another 5 units of cavalry, some generals and another cart to paint for this project which I'd like to get on with at some point soon but first I'll be looking at getting some other projects without little wins, or for more immediate games, moving before my hobby time dries up. However, saying that, as I typed that it has very much dawned on me how stupid it would be not to get on with the last bits of this project . . .

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Eldar/Aeldari Howling Banshees - Howling Blade Shrine

    Not the post I meant to upload next but the post we have gotten. I ordered a box of Eldar/Aeldari Howling Banshees around Christmas as I kept having ideas about my army, mostly nostalgia, and figured that while they were out of stock I could pay for them then and deal with the models as and when they turned up. They turned up last week and I got on with building them, which was a bigger task than I expected. Each figure is 11 or 12 parts, which seems like overkill, none of which are swappable with other figures. This meant I built the exarch as a regular troop by accident and had to fudge some of the parts onto a different figure (although I'm pleased with the end result).

   Painting was quick and uninspired if you are familiar with the Howling Banshee regular colours, but I have ideas to make a second squad much more different.

I might have had a minor accident (or two) with the Aeldari preorders last weekend but they are a problem for another day. Now I'm sure I had actual projects to get on with.

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A Red Day

    After those detours, I thought it was best to go back to my main project of the start of the year again, my Rohan. I'm trying to keep chugging through these so I can get them on the table at my first chance*.

*which does beg the question of when I'm going to start looking at the other side . . .

   This post is about the next three batches of infantry. I'm not going to claim that these have been painted since the last unit I blogged about (Dire Avengers) as I've been using a batch of these as a palette cleanser between other projects. Again, I don't need these done for any of the games I have planned in the short future, but they are so useful to have and the sheer numbers of them in my backlog now (thanks Neil) mean that I do need to get some moving, plus they are quite nice to paint, so I'd like to keep units moving in between other projects. With 4 of the 6 batches done, I should now focus on the units that I need in the shorter term.

Also to mention in passing is that I've got a new role (in the same company that I currently work) that means I'll be out of the house more, which with travelling time and workload will probably mean my painting output will drastically lower from April onwards, so I've got March to try and get my painted figures number as high as possible and project numbers as low as possible. Stay tuned to see if I succeed. . .

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