Finished a batch of Swordmasters

With the clock counting down to this year's Raze and Ruin I decided to try and get a bit of a mammoth undercoating session done this weekend.  As usual though, the best laid plans were thwarted by something, in this case running out of primer.  As I'm planning on using a Dragon Prince bus at the event I decided I'd best get on and prime my Dragon Princes. On Friday I started doing just that only to find out, just over half way through, that I'd run out of paint.  To be fair I didn't think I'd got much left in the can but I thought I'd got enough to do the job.  Apparently not.

Ordinarily I'd have just dropped into my local plastic crack emporium on Saturday after doing the fruit and veg shop in town but because I'd got the car I was taking the sprog and my mum out on a day trip and so was going to be in and out of town before the shop opened.  That was when, possibly sensing a potential husband nerd tantrum, the missus volunteered to pop to the aforesaid store during her lunch break and pick a can up for me.  Problem solved. Or so I thought.

The day trip out went well - the weather stayed nice, the sprog mostly behaved herself and didn't end up costing me or granny an arm and a leg but when I had a chance to check my mobile phone mid-afternoon the wife had texted to let me know she'd had a wasted trip as the shop was out of the particular primer I wanted.  Brilliant.

That left me with a quandary for Saturday night.  I could have done some more work on my Sisters of Avelorn but at the moment I'm not planning on using them at Raze and Ruin (a decision taken mainly due to the amount of work needed/available time rather than not wanting to start fielding them in anger) so while they needed doing it wouldn't help me regarding RnR.

On Sunday I had the mini brainwave that as the two Prince models I've got for dragon riders are mostly armoured I could get away with priming them in black and as I still had a bit of black primer left (although not a massive amount) they got primed on Sunday ready to go to work with me on Monday for the resumption of lunchtime painting.

That pretty much brings things up to date for now.  With the latest batch of Swordmasters finished I've now got a total of 70, including two lots of command, I can put down on the table, as you can see in the pictures below.

Latest batch completed

All the painted rank and file

With command 1

With command 2

Year to date

As the latest entries in my old blog available on the Internet Archive cut off around the turn of the year, what have I been up to from Christmas until now?

Through most of the year so far I've been working on the batch of 23 Swordmasters I started painting back in November. I've also spent a fair bit of time clipping out, cleaning up and assembling some of my stockpile of models to try and expand the units I have available to me for games.

Despite the (as it turned out accurate) rumours of what was to come with Age of Sigmar, I've still been buying models and components to round out units or plug gaps in the collection. With all the turmoil at the moment I've been keeping an eye out on ebay for any bargains to ease the pain of finishing off an army that I may not be able to use in a few months for Warhammer. (Note to self - must stop looking at dragons. I have three already...)

Some work in progress shots so far this year

The batch of 23 Swordmasters

Assembled White Lions

Assembled Sisters of Avelorn

Work in progress on my second dragon - unfortunately made the hole for my pin for the left wing in slightly the wrong position and ended up having to enlarge the hole

My free Stormcast Eternal Liberator.  Despite having primed him with the Rhinox Hide spray I'm now wishing I hadn't made the rookie mistake of gluing him to the base before painting him as I'm now quite fancying doing a black base armour and need to re-spray

Welcome to "The all new blog of a barely competent painter"

Back from the dead (or at least arisen from the corpse that was my blog on the Heelanhammer podcast forum painting section) for a while at least, this is my all new painting blog.  If you're not familiar with my old painting blog, head on over to my About page where you can find links to what's left of it on the Internet Archive.

For those of you who don't want to wade through my About page, the TL:DR is that I've been an active Warhammer player again for about seven years now and this is my painting blog (with possibly the occasional battle report thrown in for good measure).

I collect High Elves and have been, very slowly, trying to get all my collection up to tabletop standard.  Don't expect to find any examples on this page of models and armies vying for the top painting awards at tournaments.  Do expect lots of posts along the lines of "haven't got anything done this month because I didn't have the enthusiasm" or "ran out of paint X so I'm now a month behind where I wanted to be"