If you can't be an example, be a cautionary tale

 

If, on the eve of a forecasted heatwave, you are looking for a very specific model to put into a commission batch, you observe that your hobby boxes are badly organised, may I gently suggest you don't start trying to sort them then?

Everything is boxes. I'm not taking a photo. Mostly because so many of those boxes have addresses on and I'm not daft enough to post my address all over the internet.

After simply lying in a cool room for several days avoiding everything, I realised I'd had a good amount of time to actually Think About Stuff, so you're getting another rambly post today. And hopefully not just because I can't get to my painting desk.

So, I settled down, filled up my amazing Fenris Games mug with the good tea, and had a think. I find these sort of blog posts super useful because it also helps me actually sort them out in my head as I try and get them organised to make them into coherent sentences.

So, I'm pretty happy with the progress I'm getting on my Shasvastii. I had my second vaccine today, so I'm looking forward to getting out to some in person games in the future. In the meantime, I've signed up to another short online league to get a bit more practice in with them.

I'm writing up a big spreadsheet of how I find all the different units, both to help remind myself and with the ambition of maybe writing some tactics posts for them in the future.

My fluorescent NA2 forces have some more models away at the painters, but I'm not sure when I'll next pick up painting them. The focus is really on the Shasvastii right now, but a couple of fun brawls with my "previous season" armies is definitely on the cards at some point. I also have White Company being slowly worked on to pick up in a future season once enough models are ready, but there's no rush. I'm also looking at the new Nomad models coming out, but they're very much for when the current project I'm painting myself is finished!

Rather than expanding the Sisters, I decided it was better I get my Deathwatch sorted next for 40K, which did lead to a revelation of quite how many Marine kits I have kicking about my house. This one is a simple "once I get out, play a game and see what I'm enjoying and what I want to do next".

The next project that I'm looking to paint myself is a Stormcast Eternal force for Age of Sigmar. With the new edition out, the Stormcast are a low model count army that should be forgiving to learn with, and will be having an updated Battletome for the new edition pretty soon.

And the thing here will be trying to just focus on the one project. There isn't a specific deadline as such, beyond "try and get a playable force by the time the Battletome is in stores". I'll still pick up bits and bobs of things as palette cleansers in between Stormcast, because I go just as fast on the project and end up with more things painted in total by the end of it.

And that said, I'm going to try and be a bit more sensible with my palette cleansers. I'm hoping to one day run an D&D campaign with miniatures, and also to try out Frostgrave and Stargrave, so that can give a little more . . . structure to models I'm painting because I like the look of them.

With all that in mind, you might see the painting speed slow a little on the blog as I put more time into clearing out the stuff I definitely don't need any more. The flat is still super cluttered and knowing what I can do when "flat out" now means that a lot more projects move from 'the future' to 'I'm really not going to get around to this, am I?'... An army box of Ad Mech has already been swapped for some more Marines to flesh out the Deathwatch, and they're all going straight back out the door to the commission painter...

So, it's really more of the same, hopefully with a little more focus and less stress. I'm pretty happy with how the hobby year is going, despite the world's best efforts. The real challenge is avoiding over-committing to things, which I am a master of...