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.

That list, in terms of models, and their current status:

• Bloodthirsters x2
  • 100% Assembled

• Bloodcrushers x4
  • 75% assembled
  • Need to attach Bloodletters
  • Need to convert for Fury, Icon and Instrument

• Bloodletters x24
  • 100% assembled
  • 6 fully painted
  • 5 75% painted
  • 5 primed
  • 8 unprimed
  • 2 banners untouched

• Karanak
• Assembled
• Needs basing work
• Flesh Hounds x15
• 100% Assembled
• 1 painted
• 14 unprimed
• Soul Grinders x2
  • 100% Assembled

(Why 6/5/5/8 with the Bloodletters?  I painted a test model, then tried the same technique with drybrushing.  Then I did 4, which is my preferred batch size, but now I had weird numbers, so I’m working on two batches of 5 each to put me at 16 (1+1+4+5+5) before I can do the last octet 4 at a time.)

Bloodletters aren’t bad, but they’re a mite time-consuming.  Flesh Hounds will paint quickly.  Bloodcrushers are going to be a pain in the ass, as they’re going to require some work in attaching the Bloodletters and some creativity and research in conversion.  That leaves four big models, the ‘Thirsters and the ‘Grinders, which shouldn’t be bad, but I’ve found that I don’t enjoy painting huge models very much.

My rough schedule puts me at:

• 12/28 – Finish the 5 Bloodletters I’m currently working on, as well as basecoat and get the ball rolling on the 5 I’ve got primed.
• 1/3 – Have the last 8 primed, basecoated and washed (wash 1).  Hopefully have 4 of them further along than that.
• 1/10 – Completely done with Bloodletters.  Ball rolling on Flesh Hounds.
• 1/17 – Finish 7 Flesh Hounds. 
• 1/24 – Completely done with Flesh Hounds.   Finish assembly/conversion on Bloodcrushers.
• 2/14 – Done with Bloodcrushers.  Prime Bloodthirsters.
• 2/21 – Done with Bloodthirsters, Karanak.
• 3/7 – Done with Soul Griders.  (And done with the army!)

That’s pretty aggressive (even giving myself, basically, a week per big model) and tough, but it I think it’s feasible.  It also gives me some room for slippage: I’ve got an extra week at the end, there.  And, if I focus on the Bloodletters and Flesh Hounds, I can really blow through them.  It also shouldn’t take me two full weeks to do the Bloodcrushers.  The things that really have me worried are the big models.

We’ll see if I can do it.

I’ve had more fun playing with my Khornate Daemons than I have playing with any of my other 40K armies.  It’s weird, but I’ve yet to have a bad game with them: I’m a far cry from winning all my games with them, but even my draws and losses feel so close that, a few days later, I couldn’t even tell you if I’d won or lost the game.  I’ve got a list that, thanks to a lot of input from Casey, I’m quite satisfied with.

But they’re wholly unpainted.  This distresses me.  I’ve been trying to work through how I’m going to do them for months now, experimenting on extra D&D minis I’ve got laying around… and I haven’t been close to being happy with the results.

As I said a couple of days ago,  Ron from From the Warp posted his technique for painting pale skin that I’d been very interested in, since it was along the lines of what I wanted to do with my daemons.  I tried it out on a Vampire, and was happy with the results, but unsure of how it would look on a Bloodletter.

See, the thing is that I want to do something different from 99% of the daemon armies out there: Khornate daemons are always blood red.  I get that, and I get why.

I like the idea of making them look bloodless, like pale corpses.  This lets me then splash them with blood in different ways to make squads, Heralds, and models with Fury of Khorne stand out more.