Planning the last quarter

As it's three months since my "half year check point" in July, I thought it would be useful to pause and take stock. There's still a bit too much untidy around the place. I've done some tidying, but there's still a bunch to be done.

The Combined Army I got back in July from assembly are still not undercoated and prepped, for paint. I'm focussing on my White Company for the first part of ITS 14, but I'd like to get them ready for paint before I put them away.

You can also spot the three Nox and a Cadmus that are still not done. I'm taking a break from them before picking them back up to finish.

Some have even only had basing paste added. They've become a bit of a mental block, so I've got a new plan of getting four or five a weekend along another step in the process until they're all done.

Thinking forward with Infinity, I'm quite happy with the idea of playing my White Company for a good while, and as they're commission painted, there's no real painting obligation for my gaming now. That feels like a little bit of a weight off, so I'm going to spend a bit of time focussing on my other projects. I've dropped them all into an "on hold" column in my Kanban board for now so they don't stress me out.

Putting all the undercoated Infinity models that were out away has left me with just one tray of "ready to paint" models. There's another tray of part assembled metal models I'm going to need to look at at some point, but that's also in a little box of not thinking about it for now.

In my rolling "twelve months of projects" tracker, the Corvus Belli painting competition is more than twelve months ago, and as I've not managed to hit that pace of painting, the 'forecast' of what I'm likely to get done in twelve months has dropped down again.

The current "ready to paint" project column are two Horus Heresy characters, a Battletech Griffin, the Defiance crates and corpses, my Malifaux crew and three 54mm figures - and that's already more than I "should" get finished before the end of September next year.

Lined up to get "ready to paint" by September next year are the Dungeons and Lasers figures, the rest of the Defiance scenery pieces, the Battletech Armored Combat box, a Siocast Sargosh for Infinity, the Fenris Games Rubble City and my Halfling Blood Bowl Team project.

I'm hoping to get more done than that, but I need to accept that history currently tells me that's a realistic goal.

So, I've cleared my hobby tray to help clear my mind, and settled down to get some painting done. Sometimes it's best just to put all the half finished stuff aside and pick up something new that you're going to get done and finished in one go.

Rather than finish off the ever-stalled Nox Troopers, I decided to start off by painting some of the little things from the paint queue. Here's a work in progress shot of this Heresy Miniatures Liche. You can pick one up yourself if you want, and the original model comes with some alternative heads to make him a warlock or apprentice mage depending on your preference.

He should be finished in time for next week's blog. And some time soon, I'll get back to those last handful of Shasvastii...