I’ve made some progress… and had a setback.

I wrapped up Karanak in no time at all over the weekend.

I can’t help but feel like I need to get him with a bit of blood somewhere, but I’m not quite sure where.  It’s low priority to me, though: I can always come back and do that later.  I’m also waiting on some more Rubber Steel to show up in the mail so I can transport him in the drawer.

As noted in my last post, I’ve started on the Bloodthirsters.  The model is… making it difficult for me to motivate myself to paint them, but at least it feels like I’m making progress on them… unlike the Soul Grinders which seemed to live at the “drybrush Shining Gold” stage for forever.  I doubt I’ll have them finished by this weekend, but I’d like to get them most of the way there by then.  That’ll leave me with the Bloodcrushers (and the Daemon Princes).

Last week, I’d mentioned that I couldn’t think of a good way to put wings on the Minotaurs/Daemon Princes. Conveniently, Casey had some Tyranid Wings he needed to get rid of.  That’s great, because it means my “Daemon Prince – Mark of Khorne, Death Strike, Instrument of Chaos, Iron Hide” x3 can become the equally unhealthily expensive but significantly more useful “Daemon Prince – Daemonic Flight, Iron Hide” x3.

I’ve already stuck one pair on one of the Minotaurs.

They went on with extremely little work.  A pin in each wing, plus a tiny bit of green stuff to smooth things out.  I think I probably still need to come back through and do a bit more gap filling with greenstuff, but I’m pleased.

I did hit a minor setback last night, though: I got a game in last night (vs. Tyranids, got tabled) and, while bringing my stuff into the house, the foam tray with the Soul Grinders sitting in it (still need to do actual foam trays for transporting them) tipped over.  They fell, and some legs broke off.

Repairable, but I’d rather it hadn’t have happened.

Anyway, progress from this morning (discounting the totally painted but needing-attention Soul Grinders):

I started in on the Bloodthirsters yesterday.

For starters, the musculature is pretty crazy.  Like, Liefield-crazy.

Muscles and tendons aren’t quite where they should be.  I can’t tell if things are bulging veins or gills or what.

Ultimately, though: the boobs.

I had the following conversation last night:

Me: “I don’t know that I want to highlight these pecs.  They’re big… but I think that highlighting them makes them look more like boobs.

Mrs. Rushputin: “No it doesn’t.  They’re boobs.”

Me: “They’re supposed to be enormous, masculine pecs.”

Mrs. Rushputin: “Well, they look like boobs.”

Me: “Yeah, I suppose they do.”

They are pretty huge man-boobs.  It’s been better endowed by the breast fairy than the Keeper of Secrets

I’m forging ahead regardless, though.  I’ll have a more detailed status update later on.

Made a bit of progress with the second Soul Grinder over the past few days, but not nearly as much as I’d have liked.  I think I went to bed Sunday thinking that I’d be able to power through it and have it mostly done by Monday night but… that hasn’t happened.  

I think I got good use out of Snōmageddon II: Snow Harder / Snowtorious B.I.G. / 2 Fast 2 Flurrious, wrapping up my first Soul Grinder and powering through my second.  This is good, because the first one took much, much longer to paint.  If the second turns out to take as long, I’m definitely slipping my schedule.  I’m aways off from finishing it, but if I can get to where I think I can get before bed tonight, I won’t be in too bad shape.

As mentioned before, I’ve been lax in posting painted mini pics.  Allow me to rectify that mistake immediately.  Here’s my painted army so far.

I’ve got three octets of Bloodletters.  Each octet has a model with Fury of Khorne, with a great big KHORNINATION symbol on their forehead.  Two of the octets have Icons of Khorne, and the third actually as nine models, no Icon: I intent to merge it with another octet, which means I need eight regular Bloodletters.

I find it interesting: the inverse relationship between how interesting this blog is vs. how much painting I’m doing, particularly given that the point of this blog was to be a place for me to post pictures of painted minis.

Of course, it doesn’t help that I haven’t been posting many pictures lately: I keep telling myself, “I’ll take some pictures, when I’m done painting X,” and, by the time I think about it again, I’ve finished X and started Y… and it becomes, “I’ll take some pictures when I’m done painting Y.”

Anyway, as predicted, the schedule slipped a bit this past week, though it it didn’t slip nearly as much as I though it would… mostly because I finished converting the Bloodcrushers (which was supposed to be done Wednesday) and ended up making extremely good progress on the Flesh Hounds while in a Battlestar Galactica-induced fugue state on Sunday.  I have no excuse not to wrap up the last four Flesh Hounds tonight, which puts me just about a day behind where I thought I’d be.

With the Flesh Hounds done, I’m in the home stretch.  All I have left are Big Models.  No more batches of infantry: just big honkin’ models.

• 4 Bloodcrushers
• Karanak (Avatars of War Netherhound)
• 2 Bloodthirsters
• 2 Soul Grinders

That’s 9 models.  1 month.  Either this will go much, much faster than I anticipate, or it’s going to be drawn-out slog.

I’m shaking up my schedule a bit; I’d originally planned to paint things in the order I’ve listed above… but I feel like knocking out the Soul Grinders first, for some reason.  I’m hoping I can blow through them in significantly less than the two weeks I’ve allotted for them.

I’ll take some pictures when I’m done with my Flesh Hounds. :)

Busy weekend, but I did manage to keep to the schedule… by applying varnish to my last four Bloodletters before climbing into bed last night.

So, I’m done with Bloodletters!  (Well, until I get to the Bloodcrushers, but that’s different.)  I’ll have to get some pics of all of them up in the next day or two.

This upcoming week’s looking a little packed, though, which means I’m going to be hard-pressed to get through half of the Flesh Hounds I need to have done by Sunday, much less all of them to be on schedule.  Best to make peace with that fact now than be frustrated Sunday night.  There’s room for slippage in the schedule, though.

Should be getting in my first game of the year this afternoon.  It’ll be, effectively, my first game against the new Imperial Guard (remember, I spent most of 2009 fooling about with War of the Ring and Warhammer Fantasy), and it’ll be against Jeff L. who is, to understate, a very strong player.  Although I might as well log the game as a loss now, it should still be a good game.

This past Saturday was the IFL‘s first Swap Meet of the year, and I think I did quite well: managed to sell off the heaps of 5th Ed. Clanrats, my excess Sniper Drones, as well as some gaming books.  Left with a Chaos Lord on Juggernaut (which will eventually pull a Herald of Khorne’s chariot) as well as with a box of Cygnar Stormblades, as well as a couple of neat minis and useful bits.

(Sooner, rather than later, since I’m likely to actually take whatever route tonight.)

I’m trying to figure out how I should designate my third octet of Bloodletters.

My first octet is unmarked: no blood splatters.

My second octet has a bloody left hands.

The question is: where do I place the third octet’s blood splatters?

• I could play it safe, and make their right hands bloody.
• I could be somewhat more exciting and make their faces bloody… but I’m not quite sure how bloody.
• Some third option?

So far, I’m pretty much on-schedule.  Maybe a hair behind, maybe a hair ahead… it’s difficult to gauge beyond that I’m close.

Over the weekend, I:

• Wrapped up 6 Flesh Hounds.
• Wrapped up 1 Bloodletter (because, for some bizarre reason, I decided to do a how-to on my paint scheme).  I needed the extra one, but probably should have done a whole batch of them and just took pictures of that one along the way.
• Basecoated a number of models: 9 Bloodletters and 8 Flesh Hounds.
• Made good progress on 5 Bloodletters.  I’m at the highlighting stage.
• Figured out how to convert the Bloodcrusher Icon and Musician.  Began that work.
• Finally attached Karanak to his base.

The last two deserve some elaboration, I think:

• I went a-Googling and came across some conversions; unfortunately, I’m having trouble relocating them to post here.  In them, the modeler had the Bloodletters sitting back, instead of hunching forward.  That hadn’t occurred to me.  So, I’ve started the conversions: basically using the plastic Bloodletter torso glued and greenstuffed to the metal Bloodcrusher Bloodletter legs.  The heads on these will probably be plastic, and the Hellblade arms will probably be metal.  When I’m done with them, I’ll post pictures, of course.
• Because I’m not using the metal Flesh Hound models (though, more recently, I’ve started to take more of a shine to them), I can’t really use the Karanak model.  Instead, I’m using the Avatars of War Netherhound.  The model is not without some issues.  I finally just wrapped some rubber bands around my needlenose pliers and, to the best of my ability, straightened out his legs.  I wasn’t able to quite get one of the rear legs where it needed to be, so I cut some plasticard in the shape of one of the stones in the textured plasticard I’m using on my bases (two sheets’ thickness) to raise it up a bit.  I don’t think it’ll be noticeable when the base is painted.

In terms of the schedule:

I do a lot of thinking about the schedule: mostly because I’m 1) excited about the project and 2) at work a lot, and unable to work on the project. :)

I have three weeks left in January, four in February, and one week in March if I’m going to have things ready in time for Madicon (my goal).  In a perfect world, I’m totally done before March hits, but we’ll see.

I’m setting aside all of February for the big models: the two Bloodthirsters and two Soul Grinders.  Now, I’m hoping it doesn’t take me nearly that much time… but I’d rather be safe than sorry.  That means that, in three remaining weeks of January, I have to:

• Paint 8 Bloodletters (2 batches of 4)
• Paint 8 Flesh Hounds (2 batches of 5 and 4)
• Finish converting/assembling and then paint 4 Bloodcrushers
• Paint Karanak

Progress over New Year’s was slower than I’d originally hoped: I’m going to go ahead and blame the Steam Holiday Sale.  Well, work and the Steam Holiday Sale.

What I hoped to have done Sunday didn’t really get finished until last night, plus actually doing the icon slowed things up just a hair.

Since last post:

• I’ve squad-marked three of the already painted Bloodletters (each batch of 8 will have some distinguishing splatter of blood, even though I’ve been running a group of 16 and a group of 8, just in case I change my mind)
• I’ve painted five more Bloodletters (rounding out the second octet).*
• Done the first few stages of six Flesh Hounds.** They’re ready for the second wash, highlighting, and brass.