Return to painting Legion

Wonder twin powers activate! 

I've had my Shepherds on the painting table for a couple months now.  Since I'll be playing Legion this weekend I needed to resolve that situation.  With painting time at a premium this week, I girded my painting loins and got to work today.  They were mostly done already, just waiting for me to figure out how to paint Legion infantry.  The method I employed?  Get it painted.  Continuing my painting regression, I'm now aiming for "looks nice as a group on the table," which is an easy standard to hit.  This is a bit of an evolution of my outlook on the relation between gaming and painting.  Typically I paint each model as well as I can, or at least to a standard that each one looks good(ish) when viewed up close.  While this produces an army that looks good both together and individually, it does so very slowly.  Until recently I've looked down my nose at people who seemingly slather the paint on as fast as possible across all their models.  Surely they're missing the point by neglecting one of the pillars of wargaming.



Then I realize everything they have on the table is painted, plus everything they have in their bag, while I have 1/3 finished and the rest primed, plus plenty of silver in my bag.

So today I made the decision that I would actually follow up on my intention to make Legion a side project, one of limited scope that is around just for fun.  The Shepherds were doing nothing but gathering dust and making me feel guilty for not finished them, so I got them done.  Are they my best work?  Far from it.  They're finished though, done (aside from snow) and ready to serve, which is just as (if not more) satisfying as spending another couple months figuring out and implementing a scheme.

Ready to mutate into Flight and kill your dudes.

My painting success was not limited to pooping out some Shepherds though.  I also pooped out Absylonia.  As my hands-down favorite Legion caster, and a lock for go-to caster for this weekend's tournament, I felt compelled to get her painted.  I took more time with her than the Shepherds since she's a caster and all, but overall time investment was still much lower than usual.  Are all the leaves on the hem of her skirt as pretty as I'd like?  Not at all, but like the Shepherds she's done.  (And if I can toot my own horn for a minute, she still looks better than the vast majority of the paint-slathers out there.  Quality is relative.)  Looking at the six Legion models I worked on today all clustered together left me satisfied with my efforts.  They look coherent and the beasts (the models I've really enjoyed thus far) look fine up close or at arm's length.

As if all that wasn't enough, I also got arc markings painted on Typhon (not that he needs them) and put letters on the two Shredders painted in my scheme.  Some time last week I picked up a pot of the new Citadel texture paint Mourn Mountain Snow.  My current method of snow basing has left me wanting more, so I figured I'd give the new GW product a shot.  I hoped to get a finished base out of the pot, but the reality was somewhat less (as you can see on the Shepherds above).  The "paint" was more solid than liquid and probably would have gone on better with a palette knife/spatula than a brush.  The paint part did cover fairly well, but the texture part was too sparse for my purposes.  I may go back and do another layer or three, but the current plan is to stick with what I had been doing (watered down glue + Gale Force 9 snow) on top of the texture paint instead of just plain white.  Next on the list is getting the bases finished on the Shepherds and Aby, then I'll proceed to hoping that the weather breaks long enough for me to get some varnish applied in time for the tournament.