The last couple of months have passed in a bit of a blur. I married my partner at the end of April and we went on a mini-honeymoon the week after. We had a lovely wedding and fantastic few days away, but settling back into a routine has taken us a wee while, especially as life continues to be busy for both of us.
Despite the hectic pace of the last few weeks, I've managed to keep chipping away at the reinforcements I showed off in March and they're now finished:
These four Warriors bring the total up to ten and check off the foot contingent of Faramir's warband that I'd planned out.
Since the last update I've also picked up and assembled Anborn and Mablung from Forge World and I very glad I did because the sculpts and cast quality are absolutely fantastic - they'll be a treat to paint up like the trio of Rangers they'll be joining.
There have been a few things that have been pretty helpful in keeping this project ticking over despite how busy I've been and I thought I'd highlight a couple that I plan to keep in mind going forward:
Bases bypass - there's no two ways about it, I'm a slow painter. There are some things I can do more speedily, particularly if it's something I'm already familiar with painting but I usually find that when I try to paint quickly, I make more mistakes and consequently take more time correcting them, which can cause frustration, leading to more mistakes and/or overworking an aspect of a mini. As a result, I've come to adopt a slow is smooth, smooth is fast approach to painting which stands me in fairly good stead for working through projects. But no matter how fast or slow you are at painting, once you've finished a miniature, there's still the base to be done which can extend out the completion time of something considerable, particularly if there's a batch of bases to be done.
One step I'd already taken to remedy this has been to apply texture paint, slate, skulls and other details to bases once miniatures are built but before I've primed them, so that the base becomes an extension of the miniature in that regard and is primed at the same time. Another step, somewhat unique to Underworlds warbands has been to, where possible, keep the bases separate so I could paint them before, or alongside the miniatures.
What is likely to be blindingly obvious to most folks though, but for some reason hadn't occurred to me before was that even if the base isn't separate from the mini, as long as you're careful, there's nothing to stop you painting it before you finish the mini off. I'm not sure why I hadn't thought of it before, but Edd Ralph mentioned it recently and I thought I'd give it a try with the four Warriors of Minas Tirith.
Once I'd blocked in the basecoats and got everything shaded, I spent an hour or so one evening doing the bases from basecoat to drybrushes and painting the rims black. I then motored on with painting the minis saving the grass until they were finished so I could still get to the legs easily and I have to say it definitely felt like it took less time to finish them so I'll probably be repeating this on some projects going forward.
Minis on the desk - the other thing that's helped me push on with painting these four minis is just having them on my painting desk to work on. I often find I have a short time in which I could do some hobbying, but f I'm not sure what I want to work on it can quickly get wasted trying to work out what to do. However, it's been really useful to be able to think "I've got half an hour this evening so I could get the black fabric of the gambesons highlighted up" or "I'll layer up the silver armour during my lunchbreak tomorrow".
Little and often is not only helping to sustain more regular progress with hobbying, it's also assisting in keeping my eye in so I'm finding I'm getting more consistent results from my painting sessions as well.
I know this isn't rocket science, but given my propensity to lose focus on projects over time, I'm quite pleased that I've been able to keep this project moving around other ones.
Planning for the next phase of the army, I picked up box of Knights of Minas Tirith as well as a set of the new Gondor ruins which I'm minded to use to make a wee display board with, but I'm still sketching out ideas for that.
As I don't plan on using all six Knights in the army, I've also been thinking about using one of the spare lances to kitbash a warrior on foot with a banner, but we'll see how things go! For the time being though, the loose plan is to get the Knights I will be using assembled and then get some paint on Anborn and Mablung, but I might have a crack at assembling the ruins as well depending on how other hobby projects progress in the coming months.
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