I’m the baby...

 ...gotta love me (brief side note - how disappointing is it that Dinosaurs isn’t on U.K. Disney Plus after them advertising it for a month?)

Finished this little chap:

That had been sat almost finished on my painting tile since the end of last year when I frantically tried (and failed) to get my painted total up to 52 for the year to tick that off the Challenge. Speaking of which, this is definitely something old, as I’m fairly certain it’s been waiting a lick of paint longer than this blog has been around, and that’s been ten years...

I wanted the skin to look plasticky, like one of those terrifying baby dolls that my daughter is so fond of, and I think it reads as that rather than just looking like I chose the wrong base colour and didn’t highlight it enough! 

Doing the text on the dragging scroll was also stressful fun, squiring away with a micron pen after scruffily trying to make it look like I could freehand an illuminated letter!

Now, before we get to discussing the Tally, I need to confess that despite my plans to keep the Tally in the black this year, I have in fact not managed to paint enough miniatures to offset the number that I have received.

I got a box of lovely scenic bits from Zealot miniatures that you’ll be seeing soon (and may have seen some of IG you follow me on Instagram and squint a bit at some of my WIP pics, as well as a box from Northstar where I took advantage of their subscriber only offer last month. They warned that’s it would take a few weeks before orders got despatched, to which I thought ‘well that’s fine, better in fact, as it gives me time to paint up a buffer to protect the Tally’. Then January sort of flashed past and this box of 10 miniatures arrived (although in my defence unthought it was only going to be 7 minis - the pack of vultures that had three birds in its picture actually came as a blister of six, although one of them will have a new home as soon as I can safely drop it off to the pal that tempted me with Rangers of a shade Deep in the first place).

Then my wife picked me up the latest copy of Wargames Illustrated. With its accompanying sprue of Hoplites:

Which I’d added to the shipping list mostly for the solo Frostgrave Ghost Archipelago scenario, but between that sprue and the 2013 Salute mini of Jason of Argonaut fame I could probably knock together a little Greek mythology warband of some sort, a temptation I’m currently resisting (although that hasn’t stopped me idly browsing the Foundry website!)

Tally:

2 vs 19 = -17

Hmm, not where is planned to be, but not irredeemable!

So what’s next? As my wife has been working on a print, I’ve been sat with her at the table and took the opportunity to get some drybrushing done on a couple of scenery bits I’ve made, which may or may not be the subject of the next blog post...

Challenge:

• Finish something old
• Finish a piece of terrain
• Finish some scatter terrain (1/3)
• Prep all of the monkeys in the monkey box
• Paint all of the miniatures in a boxed game
• Play a game with fully painted miniatures
• Finish a complete skirmish force for a project (at least 16 miniatures, unless it's for a much smaller scale game like Frostgrave)
• Repaint something (either a miniature that I have previously painted, or one that was received painted

• Convert a miniature and show WIP pics

• Finish the last member of the Nextwave team
• Complete the classes project (and when I do that, start a project to have painted miniatures to represent all of the Races in the Players Handbook)
• Add at least 3 entries to the Monstrous Alphabet Project
• Average at least a miniature a week by the end of the year (so, paint 52 miniatures)
• End the year with the Tally in the positive!