Back to the green tide.

As I mentioned in my 2018 recap, I have decided to get back to my roots and paint up some greenskins for 2019.  Orcs and goblins have been my first fantasy love since watching Bakshi's animated Hobbit and Lord of the Rings movies.



Diego with Knightmare games has some great miniatures out there by the greatest orc and goblin sculptor ever, Kevin "The Goblinmaster" Adams.  I have done a few of his Kicksarter campaigns and really liked the feral goblins so they were my first choice to work on.

After giving them a look while basing, it appears that they fall into 4 categories; wolf skins, boar skins, goat skins, and reptile and bat pelts.  I don't want to get overwhelmed with trying to paint too many varying styles so I made sure I had enough caps to get all the wolf skins ready for paint.  I have focused on them to keep the group manageable for the month that I am going to give myself to get them done.  I am gong to try a little different approach and go with a very strict base coat them wash then highlight process.  While this is my typical method I tend to focus on a single color/area with this technique and then move onto the next.  I often end of repairing/repainting areas that were already done but got contaminated by a wash or highlight from a nearby color or area.  This round of miniatures I aim to try the more traditional method and do them all at the same time. 

I'm also gong to start a new themed project appropriate named "Off with the Old, On with the New!"  The plan is to take some of my ancient mins and strip off my poorly skilled pre-teen paint jobs and redo them with what I hope are better paint jobs.  First up, in keeping with the greenskin theme, I picked out a troll from the old Fantasy Tribe Troll series (FTT04).

This was a very attractive model to a prepubescent boy in the late 70's with the nude captive slung over the troll's shoulder.  Not sure how I ever managed to slide that purchase past my mom, glad she really didn't pay too close attention to what I was buying!  I doubt that GWS would get away with that in today's market.  As you can see from the before picture, limited pallet, poor details and just average skin tone on the captive.  Not bad for younger me, lets see if old F@#% me can do better!  On to the painting.

The Great Painting Bust of 2018! A year in Review.

It appears that 2018 will go down as one of my weakest blogging and painting efforts in awhile.  I had these great ambitions for 2018: getting 52 blog posts in, working my way through the pile of lead sitting in my hobby space, actually gaming some, participating in Orctoer (which them became Gobvember) and Deadcember.  The list goes on, it turns out that my efforts were a bust.  I could come up with a dozen or so excuses like "the dog at all my paint" or "the bosses at work are so mean I just didn't have any time to paint" but lets be real, I was just lazy.  Or more positively spun, I just wasn't as motivated as I should or could have been.

Here is the misses.  I managed a whopping 12 posts for all of 2018, none since August.  Didn't come close to Orctober and totally missed Deadcember.  Honestly a post a week probably isn't realistic,  so I set myself up for failure.

While I lament away about what I didn't do lets change the focus to what I did accomplish.  First up was fighting off my adult ADD and focusing on collecting a full set of figures.  In this case my Champions of Khorne project.  Just getting the set purchased without blowing my entire hobby budget was an accomplishment.  The first group, the hateful 8 are close enough for me to consider them done.

A few minor details to clean up and finish.  White stuff on bases is sparkling compound to hide the slota base tab.  As with most of my projects I'll complete the bases once the rest of the crew is painted.  Here is the next group.

While I missed being able to complete a unit for Orctober I did manage to get a unit of Diego's Knightmare Games feral goblins based up, mounted on caps for the Hobby Holder painting rig and a few base coats on.  Speaking of the Hobby Holder, Kit currently has a second Kickstarter campaign going with a little less than a week left.  I would highly recommend it!

I also kicked off some Gaslands/Dark Future/Car Wars projects that I was able to wrap up.  To be honest these were lots of fun and actually pretty quick and easy to knock out.  I do need to get them a couple of coats of matte finish to protect their paint jobs.

And last but not least, 2018 did see one of my biggest hobby collecting journeys come to an end.  I finally completed my 40 year quest to collect the fist run of White Dwarf magazine.  That wonderful little magazine was one of the contributing factors that enticed me into the hobby and keep me engaged with it even though I wasn't always able to fully participate in it.  It certainly changed over the years but it was still a good read most of the time.

Goals for 2019: simple GET BUSY! I just need to make the commitment to getting more done.  I'll shoot for more regular posts, more like one every couple of weeks.  Painting wise I'll be trying to get more paint on lead with a quick goal of getting the green lads painted up by end of January. 

That is it for 2018, lets hope 2019 bears more hobby fruit!