Half Year Checkpoint

First up, last week I managed to get this Reaper Bones USA Bugbear painted. It's a simple tabletop job, but he looks fine. He's sold as "Bhonk", which I suppose helps people remember which specific Bugbear model he is due to the big club, but I'm not a fan of the name myself - it feels a bit too goofy.

I'm not too unhappy with this month, as it goes. I got the Blizzard Templates done for Infinity, along with three D&D figures. If I can keep that level of consistent painting going in between projects, I'll be getting a reasonable chunk more painted than I currently do. The issue historically has been big gaps when I end up not painting.

The problem, though, is that the whole "buy less than you paint" thing has not been followed through at all. I've got 44 miniatures painted, which is great, but bought more than 300 I'm intending to paint myself over the same period.

So, lets work out some sensible solutions to this. First up, I'm going to reset my "yearly tracker" for the second half of the year to see if I can moderate buying miniatures. The start of the year's plans to get Dungeon Bowl have been completely derailed and I'm in no place to get a big purchase right now. I am deeply tempted by Horus Heresy, but I'll look to get some existing projects done before buying into anything significant there first.

Painting wise, I keep daydreaming about vanilla Combined Army or Morats, but right now I have a big pile of Shasvastii to paint. I'll focus my time on getting them done, and slow the pace of sending off models I'm not going to paint this year to get assembled when it takes me a bunch of time to sort them out when I get them back. Next year, I can worry about O-12, vanilla Combined or Morats...

I have a handful of Battletech Miniatures, so they'll be a good "stretch goal" project or a palate cleanser between Shasvastii. They're not so big a job as to become a stress. But I'm leaving that for later this year, and for this month, the focus will be on getting some Shasvastii painted. Assembly wise, I want to clear the decks of all the Infinity models I have assembled but not based and undercoated.

This all said, looking at what I have time to get done, I'm going to be selling off my Skaven. I've not got to them in ages, and looking at what I've got to paint, I won't be getting to them in a year, at which point, if / when I do get to them, I can buy them as I go and not have cluttered my tiny flat up in the meantime.

There's probably a whole bunch of other things I can clear out, but I spent enough time listing stuff on eBay this weekend!

Looking at the pace of the past twelve months, I've worked out a year's worth of projects I've not started, that I'd expect by July next year to have all assembled and ready to paint. My current list is the Dungeons and Lasers set, the Defiance scatter terrain, the Battletech miniatures, Arcworlde, my Blood Bowl team, a Stargrave crew and the Fenris Games Rubble City terrain I started on a while back.

The list might change as my whims do, but it gives me a reasonable idea of how much I can get done, and stop me from over-buying more in the coming months. It should also help as I sort through these piles of miniatures if I'm reasonably going to get something done soon or if I may as well sell it on.