Now With Title!

My latest endeavor.  

Fun fact: this is version three of this post.  The previous two were lost while trying to get the phone and tablet, and multiple apps on both, to play nice.  The future, it is not yet here.  This third iteration brought to you the old fashioned way, with a keyboard and mouse.  I had missed natural, effortless typing.  But I digress...

My lack of hobby progress over the past month or two has been unsettling.  Things are fine on the gaming side, but modelling and painting has slowed as much as possible without hitting a full stop.  The only sensible thing to do in this sort of situation is to add more models to the queue, which is exactly what I did thanks to Black Friday sales.  It took a while, but I finally pulled the trigger on Menoth.  I settled on a list of (what I consider) core choices, ran it past my locals, and finally gave Spikey Bits a shot.  Now I have many more mans waiting (and waiting) for some TLC.

Not so sure about the masking tape.

Like every other army I've ever started (except for the Axis), I want to do something special with this new force.  Mostly this means freehand on all those large, flat jack surfaces, but there's also the small matter of basing.  Considering how long I've been painting army mans I'm still relatively new to the simple glue and sand technique, but I want to step it up anyway.  When I got the two player starter box the plan was to do a street/sand mashup, with broken cobbles/bricks giving way to sand.  Now I'm considering doing a Northern Crusade thing to tie all my (current) armies together in one place (Llael).  If that also paves the way for an Ashlynn Llaelese resistance army, packed to the gills with gun mages, then that's just an extra bonus.  To do this I'd like to add bits of walls, columns, various city things, which may be reaching too far.  For now I'm starting with the TFG bases because there were a lot of them and I didn't have to open any bags to get to them (unlike the Errants, Cinerators, or jacks) and I'm keeping them to just street and sand (sand not yet added.)  After picking local brains I'm making the bases before pinning the minis to them, which is the exact opposite of my usual approach.

Love the packing material.  It must be used for something.

To make this new army experience even more surreal, I also took KR up on their Black Friday special.  After consulting more locals, doing arcane calculations, studying star charts, and a number of animal sacrifices, I came up with an assortment of trays that should accommodate what I have now and also what I expect to add in the future.  I've been pondering a swap to KR for a while.  Now that I've at least dipped a toe in, I'm in serious physical and emotional distress because I don't have anything to put in the new foam.  (Not 100% true, I do have a pKreoss, but a single mini won't satisfy the itch.)  This is the tail end of a horrible hobby traffic jam that starts with the basing, which will take a while thanks to all the drying times required, through assembly of the models, then into priming before I can finally stick things in the new bag.  (Priming is required so the ballast doesn't just rub off.)  I want nothing more than to glue some Errants and Cinerators together so I can stick something into the new soft foam, but that will have to wait a bit longer.

Speaking of waiting longer, there's the troubling case of the last army I bought in a single swoop: Empire.  I'm approximately a month and a half past when I wanted to have my 800 points of learning painted and ready.  With Jan 1 already circled with a Menofix on my mental calendar, things are looking grim for the psuedo-Germans.  The plan now is to finish up whatever is partially finished, up to and including basing, and then roll with that.  It's been long enough since I last took stock of where the project stood that I don't have a firm handle on what kind of task I'm setting myself, but I'm confident that the bulk of it is just basing and that it will go quickly.  With a smidge of luck, plus a little determination, I'll be able to limp to this new finish line before the calendar flips over.  Then it's just a matter of getting in some games so I can learn the system before it's time for a new edition...