Journeyman Painting Log # 8

Salute! 

 First things first, Happy Birthday USA.  Let's all celebrate with some eye candy.

I took a pass on Huzzah yesterday to get some painting in.  Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to post about it, but considering the crapfest that was the previous post perhaps that was for the best.  Remember all that planning and analysis I put into which models to paint next from the so-recently slandered last post?  Out the window.  Instead of painting up some beast torsos I went in a direction no one expected, myself included: Swordsmen.  A couple factors entered into this move.  First was how our Journeyman league works.  To boil it down, for the first four weeks I need to paint 5 points worth of models with small bases being 1 point, medium bases 2, large bases 3, and huge bases being something else that I don't know because I don't have any huge bases.  My tally for the week was sitting at 0, which was the same number as the odds of my finishing two beasts this week (considering that those two beasts don't have heads and arms ready for painting.)  Since I've been working on that Spell Martyr for the past few days I wanted to get it done, which would then require another four small based models (as I have no medium based models ready to paint either).  I could have done four Legionnaires, but I didn't want to paint just part of a unit.  I could have done the other two Forsaken, a Deathstalker, some Shredders, or any combination of those, but frankly that didn't occur to me until just now.

Who doesn't like weapon masters?

So why did Swordsmen win out?  Ultimately it was down to the two that I've been painting for ages.  These guys have sat around in my projects box collecting dust for months.  Since I'd already started painting them before the Journeyman league started they wouldn't count for scoring.  Normally this would be bothersome but in this case I could finish them off along with four other Swordsmen, finish a minimum unit off, and not "waste" any points in the process.  The painting itself was fairly painless, which I'll attribute to all the sweat and anguish that went into Saeryn and thus the scheme for Legion infantry in general.  In retrospect I wish I had done the masks on the skewering guys in cream instead of purple, but I liked the idea of purple masks at the time and only thought about how the scheme should work later.  They look fine, so no harm was done.

Horrible pic, but it does the job.

I also finally finished off the Spell Martyr.  There wasn't much left to be done aside from the blight spikes, but I did nail down some details.  I did the ribs as ribs instead of beast upperplates, which seemed appropriate.  The chest meat became just that instead of a blighty chest-burster, allowing me to again dodge glow effects.  Not a lot left to say about this guy.

In other Legion news, while waiting for paint to dry I took another flip through Domination and finally read the Kallus fluff.  Something in the art caught my eye, so I flipped to the models section and found what I was looking for: Kallus is probably 95% armor, which means he'd paint up super fast.  When I looked again at his stats and other crunchy bits I found him more appealing that previously.  A large part of this is the quick painting aspect.  I've done two so far and need to finish five for the Journeyman league.  While I have more than enough models in hand for it (eThags, eVayl, Rhyas, pThags, pLylyth), all of them either need to be assembled or stripped and all will require far more attention than Kallus would.  Of course I don't have any Incubi, which would hamper his feat somewhat, but it's still somewhat appealing.

Took a pass on the rivets this time around.  Way too many.

As a final bit of text to couch this final picture in, I really need to get those magnetized kits ready to go.  I could paint one of them along with the other two Forsaken for next week's total and end that week with all my heavies painted, plus all my Fury support, which would put me in a great position for the Journeyman games that start the week after.

As a related side note, I got in a Hardcore style game last week, which went a lot better than I expected.  Turns out the Nova Open is running 100% deathclock, or at least Hardcore, so my worries about getting turns done in seven (or five?) minutes was unwarranted.  37ish minutes for the game is still not comforting, but it's much better than short short timed turns.  I still need to settle on a list, and a caster for that matter, but with Saeryn painted up she'll be seeing much more table time now.  Having seen eVayl in action a few times now she looks very appealing as well, but since she took the Hardcore at Adepticon I feel like she'd be a flavor of the month type caster.  I've also had a hard time coming up with a list I like better than the one that won that event, which has seen a fair bit of play at Game Parlor.  Add the two together and I feel like I'd be taking last year's tech that everyone has had lots of time to plan against and prepare for, which seems like a bad recipe for success.  Plus I'd have to actually assemble and paint eVayl.  Stranger things have happened though...