When last I posted I was scraping the crotches of 4 dozen Empire halberdiers while on vacation. As that task neared completion, I had to dedicate more of my vacation time to amusing my daughter so that my wife could enjoy her vacation and not decide to divorce me. Marital Bliss and Epic Hobbying rarely coincide.
When we got back from vacation I had to dedicate time to my bees and other chores. Then there was the small house fire, no one was hurt and almost all the property damage limited to one bathroom in the tenant’s unit, but arranging the repair took a long time though the end is in sight and the tenant should be moving back in this week.
Excuses.. excuses…. I have to say that a large part of my lack of painting was Empire fatigue. I got tired of the little buggers… probably due to the intense focus on them this year and also getting many figures sorta done but not many slam dunk done (I am thinking of my swordsmen). The Knights of Moor (both horse and bear flavors) would sit on my desk radiating “unfinishedness” at me while I assembled the halberdiers and got them primed. Fear of them not ranking slowed me down for a while, but I did work out how to angle the arms and position the feet so that they would actually rank. What worked for me was to assemble the halberd heads on the arms first, and let that that set. Then, after working out the right angle on a test figure, glue the arms onto the torso, let that set, then glue to the bases already ranked up behind another unit… this allowed me them to rank. Alternatively, I did some where I glued the feet down then put in the arms… but sometimes that way they would have gaps under their arms or impinge on the area for the head. Speaking of which, the heads were glued on last as I think head positioning is more forgiving than arms. This allowed me to get the faces all pointing the right direction to be where they had to be in relation to the arms which had to be where they had to be to get them to rank etc.. etc… Some feathers were snipped to get thinks to work. I did one rank at a time and let each set (often for a day, partially to make sure that they didn’t get knocked out of place by my efforts to assemble the following rank and partially because of time) before assembling the next rank behind them. All in all I did get a shot of enthusiasm when they were done.
For October I would pick up a base coat color and splash some on some halberdiers for an hour before going off to do something. They would be easier to do if I just painted them all predominately in one solid color and added the secondary color, green and yellow as this is Stirland, but since Stirland is poor and known for its hodge podge armies, I went with the much more time consuming method of using several different greens and yellows as well as a lot of white and various browns to give each model an individual look. Much more time consuming and very painful later in the process when I keep finding bits that I missed have to go back repeatedly. The base coating is probably not halfway done as I write this but I have been pulled back to working on the bear and pony show.
I spent my thunder months ago getting an okay black on most of them… but then lost steam on all the other bits. Recently I have picked them up and decided that I did not like the green hoods and capes I had on them and have started painting the outside black while keeping the interior bone white to make sure there is contrast between the cape and armor. I also went and gave the flesh a wash which had the desired effect of changing the washed out color I had painted the flesh to looking like FLESH! and mostly finished flesh at that. That little thing suddenly makes them much more compelling to me as figures approaching completion rather than half painted miniatures in half painted limbo.
I don’t have time to do any photos now as I have to go take a shower and then empty a storage closet so that the builders can install the new stairs to the tenant’s unit.
