Well here we are at the end of another Fembruary and it’s time to take a quick look back at everything I managed to get painted. Last year I surprised myself by powering through 21 miniatures in the month, whereas this year I managed a more modest 11 of which just 9 came under the Fembruary banner (by virtue of being ladies).
Once again however I managed a fairly eclectic mix of models of all shapes and sizes, from an Orc cheerleader…
… to woodland dwelling witches…
… to vicious-looking ghosts…
…and my first ever Sister of Battle.
Meanwhile the Stormcast Eternals saw the most attention, gathering four new recruits.
My aim at the moment is to bring my backlog under control (isn’t it always!) but lately my focus has shifted away from simply flailing haphazardly at the mountain of sprues under my desk and instead I’ve tried to tighten my focus, concentrating on those projects I’m most keen to have completed rather than wandering wherever my fancy takes me. I suspect that from the point of view of my readers of course, this will be entirely academic and my output will continue to look much the same as ever – a random-appearing bombardment of models from all angles with no apparent theme at all but trust me, as the Lizardmen would assure you, there is a Great Plan behind it all! This is something I’ve been chewing over a lot since the start of 2022 and essentially what it boils down to is this; there are many things which may curtail a lot of my painting in the future (lots of them good!) and so I ought to focus on finishing those things I’d like to complete now whilst I have the time. I’m not planning on going anywhere, I don’t intend to quit the hobby (heaven forbid!) or anything like that but I am very conscious of the fact that I have a lot of part-painted projects, and a lot of gangs and warbands that I really want to have painted but which have been left unattended for years. I often find myself thinking about projects and realising that I’m still as excited about them as I was on the day I bought them, but that a lot of time has gone by and they’re still untouched. I don’t want to look back in a decade, or even just a year, and find that most of them are no further forward than they are now. Looking to the future I suspect that the best time for getting things painted is now and for a lot of reasons the longer I leave something the less likely it is to ever get painted. So for the next little while prioritising and getting things done is the aim of the game.
This also applies to cutting out some of the faffing I’m prone to. Take colour schemes for instance and look at the Sister of Battle above or this band of Chaos Warriors.
In the past I would have agonised over finding a combination of colours that was both original and looked good, and unsurprisingly these often proved incompatible. There are far too many models in my “pile of shame” which stalled between these two pillars and never got started again. With these examples however the colour scheme used by the developers for the studio models is great and I’m pleased with the results so I’m happy to copy them, call that a win and move on, putting the time into painting something else rather than stressing over perfection. It’s a lesson I’ve had to learn several times over the years and sometimes I still need to remind myself; the perfect really is the enemy of the good.
Anyway, that’s enough waffle from me! Here’s a group shot of everything I managed to do in Fembruary instead (click on it to see a nice big version instead of giving yourself eyestrain).
….And with that Fembruary is over for another year. The scattershot assault on my backlog however will be continuing apace!