A Right Pile Of Potential

Earlier today I was looking through some of the blogs that I follow, sipping at my coffee and looking blearily out at the world around me much in the manner of a hibernating mammal forced out of its den. Some people start the day with the news but I like to have at least a pint of the black stuff (coffee for those times when Guinness isn’t socially appropriate) before I dare to expose myself to that much rage and misery, so I turn my attention instead to what, if anything, my fellow hobbyists have managed to produce overnight. In this case it was this post from Scent of a Gamer which caught my attention and got me thinking about something which I’ve considered writing about for some time – “The Pile of Shame vs the Pile of Potential”. I started to write a comment in reply and it grew and grew into something so sprawling and lengthy that I decided to post it here instead.

Firstly allow me to recommend, if you haven’t already, that you take a look at that post on Scent of a Gamer and indeed the blog in general – it’s well worth reading at the best of times and this post is very much a reply to it. We’re talking, to quote davekay himself, about “something every wargamer has: the pile of shame. Those unpainted miniatures bought on impulse or with intent years ago, but never touched”.

He also links to a video by Goobertown hobbies which isn’t a channel I’ve watched before, in which the presenter digs through a (vast) collection of unpainted miniatures looking for something which takes his fancy to paint – a process which I’m sure will be familiar to many of us. I’ll confess that I didn’t watch all of the video, there’s only so long you can look at a man showing off how many miniatures he’s bought over the years whilst listening to elevator muzak, but I enjoyed what I saw and I’ll take a nose at the rest of his channel when time allows.

I’ll admit too that I had a moment of being “triggered” (as da yoof would have it) into a brief rage when he produced a copy of the Looncurse box out of his stash – a box I myself craved as the start of my long-planned Sylvaneth army, with a whole heap of lovely Night Goblins thrown in for good measure. Looncurse famously sold out in next to no time and I missed out, so it was damn annoying to see someone else proudly admitting to having snagged a copy and not even touched it. On the other hand, I realised with a growing sense of discomfort, I picked up various other kits at around the same time which I’ve yet to do anything with so could I honestly say I wouldn’t have neglected my own copy in just the same way?

This isn’t the first time I’ve had the pile of shame on my mind lately. In fact, a recent inventory of my unpainted collecting revealed a worrying fact – there’s a hell of a lot of it. Years of bargain hunting and snapping up good deals have taken their toll and the “to paint” pile has grown into a mountain large enough to influence the local climate. By my rough count, assuming that I keep painting at my current rate (something I wouldn’t bet on by any means) it’d still take me several years to clear the backlog. Add to that the forthcoming releases for Necromunda and Warcry, the new Space Marines (which would go very nicely with my existing collection), the new Necrons (and you know I’ve always thought a Necron army would be cool…), the mate who’s slowly but surely convincing me to try out Bolt Action, and whatever else emerges over the coming months and years and it starts to feel as though the lead mountain and the grey tide are very much here to stay.

Resistance is futile!

I don’t like the term “pile of shame” very much. Shame is a terrible emotion, and rarely one that inspires us to action. Excitement and enthusiasm is what gets us to pick up the brushes, whilst shame and embarrassment put us off, killing the joy that our hobbies are intended to engender and starving us off the passion that would otherwise help to overcome the unpainted masses.

At the end of the day miniatures are there to be enjoyed. A particularly good game can stay in the memory for years, even decades. There are plenty of ways of making that happen of course, and for me some of the most memorable contained no painted miniatures at all (indeed in a few cases no models were involved, just blank bases with post-it note labels to tell us what was what and a whole load of imagination). However it’s a fairly safe generalisation to make that well painted miniatures on thematic terrain will stick with us longer than unpainted models on a bare kitchen table. Add to that the fact that “check out this model I painted” is a far more engaging conversation starter than “check out this stuff I just bought and will now shove under the bed and never touch or look at again for as long as I live” and we find ourselves drawn to an inevitable conclusion; our hobby ought to have as its crux the collecting and painting of miniatures. A large number of us however would be hard-pressed to deny that our hobby is collecting unpainted models, with assembling, painting and gaming a sideline at best.

Why won’t you paint me? I’m so beautiful…

On the other hand I really don’t like the term “pile of potential” either. The implication is very much that ending up with lots and lots of unpainted models is something to be celebrated, that buying things and then never painting them is inherently a good thing to do. This is quite a comforting idea, after all I have lots of unpainted models already, and there are new things that I’d like to own, and I’d far rather be telling myself that adding to this great mountain of plastic and lead and sitting on it like Smaug is something to be proud of. However I can’t shake the feeling that actually it’s just profligate, that all I’m doing is showing off how much money I would have had in the bank if I hadn’t squandered it instead on miniatures that I’m not painting.

I know that I’m not just speaking for myself here, I’m also undoubtedly addressing something that a lot of my readers will be very familiar with from their own collections, and I’m not trying to make anyone feel bad. After all we’re not really doing much harm, we’re not selling drugs, stabbing grannies or mismanaging the national response to a pandemic, we’re just hoarding bits of plastic. On the other hand I’ve never looked at a miniature and thought “I’d love to store that somewhere and be vaguely embarrassed that it’s cluttering up my house”. Quite the opposite in fact, I want to paint them, perhaps even play with them.

So how to go about it? Well there are a few tricks that have helped me over the years. Firstly, although I’m an occasional gamer at best, planning a game in advance is a great motivator to get something finished. I’ve boosted Necromunda gangs, Warcry warbands and the contents of Blackstone Fortress over the finish line using exactly this method.

Then there’s the old “model a month” trick. Some readers will already be familiar with this, as I’ve described it often enough in the past, but for anyone who’s not encountered it the premise is simple; paint at least one miniature for a project every month (for a year, or until it’s done – it’s up to you really). Now one model isn’t very much, especially when you’re dealing with a horde army like the Skaven (as I was). However Newton’s First Law of Motion can be applied here; Objects in motion tend to remain in motion, objects at rest remain at rest. If you’re painting one clanrat it’s easy enough to paint a second or perhaps even a third, and then your enthusiasm for Skaven is rekindled, you remember what it was about the project that made you want to paint hundreds of the little bastards in the first place, you get some more work done on the warp-lightning cannon whilst you’re waiting for the shade to dry and the whole project keeps shambling forward. Leave them sitting, allow them to gather dust, push them to the side of the desk and finally pack them away and months, then years will go past without so much as a kiss of a brush upon a ratty whisker. By applying this method I went from this (at the beginning of January 2017)…

… to this (at the end of December 2019).

Another trick I’ve been applying recently is simply to keep track of exactly what I’ve added to the collection. I keep a note of what I’ve bought each month and I check it before I buy anything else. For one thing this is just sensible fiscal prudence, but more than that it helps to remind me of all the things I was really excited about before I saw the thing I’m currently really excited about. More than that I also keep a note of all the models I’ve painted this month as well, and I aim (although of course I don’t always succeed) to make the latter number bigger than the former. It’s early days yet, I’ve only been doing this for a few months, but so far it’s helped me a great deal in keeping on top of the “pile of unrealised projects” and even helped me chip away at it a little, so I may come back to it and talk about it more in the future if it proves to be useful in the long term.

Finally, the most valuable tip I ever received was “paint what you’re passionate about”. If you’re excited about painting something then get on and paint it. If you want to paint something you’ll find the time to paint it, and if you don’t want to paint it you’ll find an excuse. Enthusiasm for a project will do far more to get you painting than all the tips, tricks and tutorials in the world and when that enthusiasm inevitably drains away to be replaced by something else you’ll have done a lot more than if you didn’t act on it.

Do you have a pile of shameful potential, and if so how do you tackle it? As usual if you have words of wisdom to share I want to hear all about them and the comments box is open to all comers.

Rodents Of Unusual Size – January

Back at the tail end of 2016 I found myself looking at my Skaven collection and wondering what to do with them. I’d loved the ratmen for a very long time, indeed the first miniature I ever owned was a skaven given to me by a friend when I was just a nipper, and my verminous host was long overdue for paint. Indeed, inspired by dreams of Skavenblight’s dominance I bought another friend’s army when she decided to get rid of it and added a whole new mountain of grey plastic to the one I’d already accrued myself. Now the thought of actually climbing that mountain appeared beyond my capabilities, it was just so vast a task that I found myself doubting I was up to the challenge. Enter “The Year of the Rat”.

My challenge to myself was simple – every month of 2017 I would finish something for my Skaven collection, no matter how small or insignificant. Some months it was indeed next to nothing, others I managed to churn out a reasonably sized host, but no matter the result the ball kept rolling, the army kept growing and I started to believe that I could do this, that someday I would be general to a rat army not a shameful, unpainted blob. By the time 2017 rolled to a close I didn’t want it to end, and I feared that without this goal to keep things rolling my Skaven would soon stall. Of course the answer had to be – why stop at all? In spite of the progress I’d made there are still plenty of unpainted rats waiting for attention. I may not have reached the summit of that unpainted mountain in 2017 but I’d crossed the foothills, now it’s time to shoulder my metaphorical pack once more and make for the summit.

At the same time as I was making the decision to forge onwards with my rats Azazel of Azazel’s Bitz Box blogged about Painting Decemb-uary, a hobby challenge which takes some effort to say and is damn near impossible to spell. Essentially the idea is to make use of the Christmas/New Year holiday and, for those of us in the northern hemisphere, the darkness of midwinter that keeps us indoors anyway, to paint something big. Whilst some hobbyists are naturally drawn to the big, impressive kits and struggle to finish a single foot-soldier others – and I count myself amongst their number – can paint infantrymen until the cows come home but fly into a panic at the sight of anything larger than a dreadnaught. Azazel’s challenge to us was to tackle those centrepiece models that we otherwise cower from, and I knew just the one I wanted to take on; the Screaming Bell.

If I had my time again one thing I’d definitely do differently is the building of this kit. I bought it fully assembled and, somewhat foolishly, thought that meant the job was partway done already. Heed my advice if you’re planning a screaming bell of your own because this proved to be a real error and an unmitigated headache. By trying to paint the model fully assembled (bar the grey seer himself who’d broken off along the way) I found myself struggling with numerous sections which proved next to impossible to reach with a paintbrush. Worse the open appearance of the model means that rather than being hidden these awkward corners are displayed for all to see, making getting in to fix them was even more imperative, if no less difficult. Hopefully my perseverance paid off although I’m still dreading the (highly likely) possibility that one of you will spot a section I’ve missed. If you do feel free to hoist me by my own habit of encouraging conversation on this blog and draw my attention to my error in the comment’s box. I’ll even thank you (albeit through gritted teeth…)

Of course the completion of such an imposing centre-piece model is a fine excuse for another group shot, even if it is only a month since the last one.

Once again my thanks to Azazel for setting up this challenge and giving me the push to get this model finished. If you’re not already familiar with his blog I really do recommend you take a look, both for the quality of his own work and to see the creative output of everyone else who joined in with Painting Decemb-uary.

The Year Of The Rat – August

With real life shenanigans ongoing I’ve not had a lot of time behind the painting desk this month, with the result that my Skaven output has been rather low this time round. Still – I promised at least one rat per month in 2017 and on this occasion that’s exactly what you’re getting. Fingers crossed normal service will resume in time for a more sustained output in September.

Dreadnaughts I Have Known

I painted my first dreadnaught at some indeterminate point in the past, although exactly when is hard to tie down now. Assault on Black Reach had been released and the Orks had drawn me into 40k’s grim darkness at last but I was still unfamiliar with the universe and its protagonists. Having picked up the Black Reach boxset purely for the greenskins within I found myself with a bundle of space marines as well – and almost no interest in painting them. Only a grudging sense of duty got me through the tactical squad, although I admit I tackled the terminators with rather more enthusiasm. The only thing that really grabbed me however was the dreadnaught.

He’s been tweaked and improved once or twice over the years but even those improvements still look rather old and somewhat lacking in comparison to my modern standard. Still I was hooked, on dreadnaughts if not on space marines. Thus when a friend of mine was clearing out his cupboards and gave me his copy of Assault on Black Reach and the Chaos Space Marines codex I knew straight away that the next dreadnaught I painted would be something much darker, angrier and spikier than before. It was also at this point that I was discovering the joy of converting models and, although there remained much for me to learn, I was well on my way to becoming the kitbashing, greenstuffing heretic I am today.

Next up was an Ork deff dread – completed mere days before Games Workshop announced the release of the current plastic model. Sadly he was never the best of creations, leaning rather too heavily on Orky qualities of ‘cobble it together and hope for the best’ and now resides in the bottom of the bits box waiting for redemption and reconstruction.

With Dark Vengeance the chaos dreadnaught was reborn as the helbrute; the angry, spikey box of before replaced instead by the fleshy, unnaturally-organic beast of today.

Of course painting one of them wasn’t enough for me, especially after the release of the putrid blightkings made it possible to create a bloated, Nurgly hulk.

Nor was that the end of my dreadnaught obsession. Last October feedyournerd ran the Dreadtober event which aimed to encourage as many people as possible to paint a dreadnaught (or similar sized model) in the month of October. Seeing the brilliant work that others were producing provided the spur I needed to crack on and bring this Khornate monster into being.

At the time I asserted (rather boldly) that if this event happened again I’d be sure to join in. One year on and it’s time to live up to that claim as DreadTober returns. This time responsibility for the event lies with Broken Paintbrush so I’d recommend getting across there to take a look at what’s planned. I’ll be taking on this unfortunate-looking former Crimson Fists dreadnaught. His loyalist masters may have abandoned him to ebay but I feel sure that, with Nurgley and Khornate dreadnaughts already in the bag, he’ll do very well indeed in the subtle embrace of Slaanesh.

Naturally these events work best when lots of people join in so I encourage (nay – implore!) you to dig your own battered and abandoned dreadnaught projects out of the bitsbox, or take them down from the shelf of shame, and get to work on them. This is their moment!

Pure Hatred – Part 2

As promised here we have the second new Khornate terminator. With this one I wanted a more restrained pose that emphasised the bulk and power that I associate with old-school terminators which could act as a blank canvas to play with. I’ve also wanted to make use of a pair of wrathmonger legs ever since I discovered they fit neatly onto a terminator body, and the rest of the pose flowed naturally from this stance. As ever I’m happy to hear some feedback so let me know what you think in the comment’s box.

.Of course, with two new units added to the squad it can only be group-shot o’clock. If you want to find out more about the others in the squad you can look here, here, here and here.

All That’s Left Is Blood – Part 6

The Bloodcleave: a band of ferocious killers, dedicated to the service of the Blood God and drawn to Kell’s ranks as he began to sack the fortress worlds of the southern Kadatheron sector. To Kell himself they have little loyalty however, and their disgust at the presence of the servants of other gods amongst his ranks has earned them the enmity of many of their erstwhile allies. Nonetheless they know that Kell’s wars serve Khorne, though the Chaos Lord may not admit it himself, and in doing so draws His gaze upon those who stand at his side. Thus they feign loyalty until the day comes to spill the blood of Kell himself, offering up his skull in a final orgy of sacrifice.

—

The second eight Berserkers are unleashed! Khorne be praised! Like the Bloodbeasts I wanted an icon of wrath to round out the squad and the weird head of the Khorgorath gave me the inspiration I was looking for.

Of course, I’m sure you all realise what this means. With eight models painted and the squad complete it can only be group-shot o’clock.

As usual comments and feedback are very welcome and scions of the Blood God should fear not – more Khornate killers are on their way soon!

All That’s Left Is Blood – Part 5

If the blood god’s warriors are to be brought to battle a champion must be found to lead them – one who can seek out the skulls of the worthy before his warriors turn on each other…

The champion of my second squad of Khorne berserkers stands ready to join his savage brethren.

Erratic Progress – Part 2

Like a skaven itself my collection of man-sized rats progresses in fits and starts; bursts of frenetic activity followed by pauses of tail-twitching uncertainty. Indeed this was the reason behind the title for this series of blogs (actually who am I kidding? The whole thing was an excuse to make a pun on the word ‘rat’). Unlike, I suspect, the majority of people tackling a horde army like the Skaven, I prefer not to batch paint models. Few things strike me as more dreadful and tedious as spending an evening painting the boots on forty orks. To me every model is a character and should be painted as such, and although this doesn’t result in the overnight appearance of huge regiments I find the results when they eventually are completed to be more pleasing.

Anyway, let’s take a look at the latest additions.

With this one I tried adding a lump of warpstone to the base. I’m not entirely convinced that it works that well but I’ll probably try a few more and see if the effect is improved by spreading it around the unit a little.

I’ve also been working on updating a few of the older (red) skaven to the new colour scheme. Let’s take a look at some ‘before and after’s. Some of the ‘before’ images are less than brilliant photographically but there’s not much I can do about that now!

So there we have it Man-Things! As usual feedback is welcome so if you want to provide some obsequious high-pitched praise followed by vicious backstabbing feel free to do so in the comments box below.

All That’s Left Is Blood – Part 2

My efforts to clear my desk of Khorne Berserkers continues apace. With this model I tried to achieve a taller, slimmer look, emphasised by the ‘bunny ears’ on the helmet, the long haft of the axe and the smaller shoulder pads.

And in case anyone is thinking “I’m sure I’ve seen that pose somewhere before…”

Here’s a group shot of the whole squad so far (click it to make it bigger – you know how this works by now!). Cower behind your defences men of the Imperium – there’s more on their way!

Erratic Progress – Part 1

So all this talk of Warhammer lately has taken me back to my Skaven, if only in a fairly small way. Having painted my first clanrat in at least a couple of years I found myself facing something of a crisis. I’ve recently bought a bunch of Skaven from two different friends, adding up to an enormous heap of partly painted plastic and sprues. The trouble is I realised I’m not particularly enamoured with my chosen colour scheme. Partly it’s that red tends to blend in with brown, making for a homogenous mass when viewed from a distance. Partly it’s that I’ve already used red for my Space Marines, and intend to use it again when I get around to painting some Skitarii and Vampire Counts. Thirdly red is the colour of Clan Mors and as a result painting one’s own Skaven red and then claiming they’re part of a different clan is rather like painting your Space Marines blue and gold and saying they’re not Ultramarines (or red and saying they’re not Blood Angels…).That leaves me with three options.

1. Accept the situation as it is. Red’s not such a bad colour after all. Obviously that requires far too much emotional maturity for me to even contemplate so we move on to…
2. Think of them as Clan Mors. Now I’ve got no real beef with Mors any more than I dislike the Ultramarines. I even painted Queek Headtaker a few years ago (and if I ever work out where that model has ended up I’ll show you). However they’re still very much someone else’s creation and, like the aforementioned Ultramarines, not one I’ve ever found that gripping. They may be the largest and most powerful of the warlord clans but they’re also a little dull and my rats are no-one’s lackeys! Next!
3. Change the colour scheme. As it stands I’ve only painted 14 rats*. Sitting in a cardboard box in the corner of the room however are roughly a hundred more, as yet clad in nothing but bare plastic. If I’m going to go through the work of changing the colour scheme now is the time to do it.

*ish – there’s a few, like Queek, that I can’t lay my hands on.
Faced with choosing a new colour scheme I weighed my options, looking for something that would stand out, whilst still looking suitably filthy and ragged, and hadn’t already been used extensively elsewhere. Cutting a long story short I started to become drawn to the yellow Skaven which appear throughout Age of Sigmar’s Pestilens Battletome.

Fighting censorship – used without permission (naturally!)

A bit more research revealed that yellow is also the colour of Clans Krizzor (beast-trappers and –moulders of some repute) and Skurvy (pirates – naturally) which gives me a few ideas when it comes to thinking up a background for my own clan. The question was though – would it work? Time to paint up a couple of test rats. Here’s the first of them.

And here’s the second.

And shoulder to shoulder with one of the red originals.What do you think (beyond that I need to improve on painting yellow – this being my first real outing with the colour)? At the moment I’m pretty pleased with these results but it’s not too late to speak out if you wildly disagree (better now than in 100 rat’s time – especially if I find myself agreeing with you!)

Anyway, I also thought I’d take the opportunity to have a play with the new Waystone Green technical paint Games Workshop released a couple of weeks ago. So far I’ve mostly seen it used to paint Eldar spirit stones (and this is very much what GW has been pushing it for) but I wondered if it would make for suitable looking warpstone as well. Following the guide detailed on the GW blog here’s the part of the warpstone core from the warp-lightning canon. At this point I’d given it a single coat of Fulgurite Copper, followed by a single coat of Waystone Green.Passable I reckon but not quite there yet. And with most of the work done in mere moments (probably about a minute of actual painting interspersed with twenty minutes or so drying) I reckoned I could afford a little more time on it. Here it is again following a quite highlight with Scorpion Green (still out of an old hexagonal pot I’m afraid – no idea what the kids call this stuff nowadays).

I think it’s looking pretty good, especially when you consider that the surrounding area is still mostly black primer, but as usual if you have any thoughts let’s hear them.