Isambard Kingdom Brunel

Pow, finishing things continues:

Isambard Kickass Brunel from Ramshackle Games, because sometimes you need an engineer, according to a mug of mine:

I always seem to misspell his name Isembard though - I blame Tolkien for having Isengard be a word that is in my brain. I was inspired to finish this particular miniature after having a pint in a pub named after him with my wife and her Nan in February, of all things. 

Also interesting to note, is that it's the first miniature from the occasionally mentioned but mostly abandoned in a drawer VSF project to make an appearance on the blog. Part of the reason that that particular project stalled was my dissatisfaction with the Wargames Factory figures that I was using to convert aether marines, but as the Perry twins have released a nice set of plastic chaps that would be suitable who knows what the future might hold...

The more eagle-eyed of you might have noticed that IKB was not alone in the first picture - I also finished painting this tunneling machine (also from Ramshackle):

It's an absolute beauty, and a hefty chunk of resin; it's just a shame that it's taken me the best part of a decade to get it painted!

Tally

11 vs 40 = -29


Painting these also lets me knock off a couple of challenges, as they both pre-date the blog, and are the 9th and 10th miniature I've finished from the queue without starting anything new:

• Finish 5 miniatures from my WIP drawer before starting anything new (5/5)
• Finish 10 miniatures from my WIP drawer before starting anything new (10/10)
• Finish 15 miniatures from my WIP drawer before starting anything new (10/15)
• Finish something years old
• Finish something SUPER old (as in, pre-blog old) x2
• Finish a piece of terrain x3 
• Empty out my stripping pot
• Paint something from the stripping pot
• Prep all of the monkeys in the monkey box
• Build a wargames board
• Paint all of the miniatures in a boxed game
• Open Star Wars Imperial Assault and paint all the miniatures from it
• Paint all the miniatures needed to replace the tokens in the Imperial Assault Core Game
•  Paint a complete box of miniatures (either a full regiment or starter)
•  Finish a complete skirmish force for a project (at least 16 miniatures, unless it's for a much smaller scale game like Batman)
• Repaint something (either a miniature that I have previously painted, or one that was received painted)

2011 in review, and looking forward to the future...

Well, a year in already! (well, technically the blog is a year old tomorrow, but let's not quibble over details). 9,368 page views is a pretty respectable amount, especially considering the fact that I had a slump that lasted a couple of months and meant no new posts...

Looking back at the projects listed in my original post, we can make a breakdown of productivity for the past year:

Zombies: Miniatures painted, rules lost in laptop debacle.
Three Kingdoms: No progress made, still not a single finished figure.
Firefly: Three miniatures painted.
Strange Aeons: the project that got the most love, I now have just enough miniatures to actually start playing some games! I loaned the rulebook to one of the guys at work though, so I probably won't get a game in for a little while...
Doctor Who: Bits done here and there, but still not enough to play an actual game (although if I could just focus for long enough, I should have enough miniatures to play the Canary Wharf scenarios...)
VSF: no progress made, not even on the converted miniatures that sit mocking me in their drawers...
AEWWII: dead project. The only miniature I have on the go for this is a Captain America, and I can't yet bring myself to paint all the tiny white stars on his shield. There's some Tamiya tanks in a box for this project though, so I might get round to building and painting them eventually.
Warmachine: I sometimes take these miniatures out of their drawers and boxes, sigh, and then pack them away again.
Anima Tactics: Pretty much the same as Warmachine, I've four or five half painted miniatures that just don't grab my attention when I'm choosing what to work on.
Evil Genius/7tv: Only two finished miniatures so far, but tons more to come...
Marvel Superheroes: Percentage-wise, one of the most expanded projects. It's probably the fact that each part is only a single miniature, which is so different to everything else in my collection, that keeps me interested.
GW: combining all the projects into one, we get: blah. Yes, that's a giant in the picture. No, he probably won't get painted next year either.

...

Well, I'm not swearing off GW completely, I'm still halfway through painting my Blood Bowl team, planning to paint a max-size unit of Dwarf Slayers, epic Zombieslayer-inspired Undead army (I've got Kemmler, Krell and the Wyvern) as well as being tempted by Skaven, but who knows what I'll actually get done.

As far as new projects go, it's the generic fantasy that is the biggest, and most likely to get other bits added to it, purely due to it's breadth, and my inability to focus on an particular thing for more than a week or so.

As it's the last day of the year, it's the last time we see the tally looking like this:

122 vs 295 = -173

before we reset to zero tomorrow. Hurrah! Although I kinda wish I'd bought a load of miniatures to go on this tally rather than next year's, since this one was already beyond redemption...

Looking forward to next year, there's a number of new projects I'm considering starting. I'm loving Halo at the minute, and so quite fancy repainting some Heroclix for that. Star Wars is a project that's been nipping at my imagination for some time now, primarily due to the number of plastic prepaints I own - I think it reveals something about my character though that I haven't yet started the project because I don't have enough miniatures to make a detachment of Stormtroopers as described in the old miniature battles book - despite the fact that I'm unlikely to ever need a detachment, and the fact that if I started painting a detachment I'd rapidly get bored and wander off to do something else. Gundam and Evangelion would be awesome to do too, but luckily the fact that they're not in God's True Scale has stopped me from starting either of those (yet). Ooh, and Planet of the Apes - I could use survivor miniatures from the Zombie project for this, meaning I'd only need to convert and paint various chimps, gorillas and orangs armed with makeshift spears... well, an expansion of a project doesn't count as a new project surely?

I might need to do something to sort out my productivity too. These days, I have a couple of drawers of miniatures in various stages of completion, and spend almost as much time going through minis choosing what to paint as I do actually painting, which combined with the fact that what I fancy painting changes from session to session results in how rarely I ever actually complete a miniature (the Christmas Zombies posted recently were the fist time I'd painted something in one session in longer than I can remember). A few years back, when I was just starting my AEWWII project, I had a system. I had three tiny trays (that were originally dividers in the box I store most of my paints in), each probably 2x3". I'd only paint what was on one of those trays, and couldn't start something new until I'd cleared a space by completing something else. Each tray could hold maybe three miniatures at a push, and you'd be amazed at the number of miniatures I finished purely because I'd just bought something else that I really couldn't wait to paint. Admittedly, I don't think I have the willpower to be that strict with myself these days, but it's something to consider...

The beginning...

I'm only 24, but a month or so ago I was digging through the lead mountain and found a miniature that I honestly had no recollection of ever acquiring. So, this is why I started a blog. In all honesty, I'm not that great at the hobby (I'm a mediocre converter, slow painter, but excellent purchaser of shiny new toys), but hopefully having a blog will encourage me to actually finish stuff.

As for the name of this blog, yes, that took two of us about ten minutes to come up with (and yes, there were index cards involved) - many of my miniatures are zombies, but also there's the risk that some of the miniatures I've purchased will never get painted, effectively rendering them 'dead lead'. You don't want to hear the rejected titles...

And so, to the post proper, whereby our intrepid hero outlines the ridiculous number of projects he has on the go, to provide a basis and foundation for further posts:

Primary Projects:

Zombies



My main project is the zombies - currently I have 58 zombies, 3 brutes, and 5 survivors (including a cyborg ninja and a girl chained to a big rock) painted, with a herd, king, and more zombies currently WIP, and I don't really want to put a definite figure on the number of unpainted zombies that I own in case the missus happens to see...

Rules are a homebrew, using LOTOW as a base, and are currently half done (I'm aiming for participation game style pick up and play rules, which unfortunately will mean producing about a kerzillion cards for ease of reference...)

I really need to finish some more survivors if it's ever going to get played though...

Three Kingdoms

Three Kingdoms, warfare in one of the most tumultuous eras of China's history - aka Dynasty Warriors using adapted War of the Ring rules - no pics yet, as everything is currently either WIP or still in the bag it came in (from Curtey's, Black Hat, and Renegade - we're probably approaching 200 minis, with not a single one finished yet...). And yes, I should hasten to add, this is not neccesarily a historically accurate project. It's inspired by a computer game, the Osprey I ordered on the period took ten months to arrive, and the miniatures I'm using technically represent troops in use four hundred years earlier. Phew, it's good to get that out in the open before the button counters arrive...

Firefly/Serenity

Another project with not a single miniature finished yet, although an almost obscene proportion of my WIP miniature are for this project - also, what better rules to use for cowboys in space than adapted LOTOW?

Strange Aeons

Yup, I got tempted by Uncle Mike's game of Lovecraftian horror - so far it's only these few minis painted (speedily, to meet the deadline of  painting competition), but there's more of Uncle Mike's minis, the LE King in Yellow, and some minis that were originally purchased for my VSF project (see later) have been pressed into future service here. Plus, I'm already considering a few future purchases from Artizan, em4, Pulp Figures, Rattrap...

One more thing, I found the perfect vehicle for one of my future cults:

Because what sensible cultist is going to be driving around in a van with 'evil wagon' plastered all over it?

Doctor Who

I didn't use to like the new Doctor Who (which would come as a surprise to most people that know me - I keep my files and knives in a Davros bucket on my desk). Someone I used to work with spent a lot of time and effort trying to persuade me of the error of my ways, to no avail. Until I held one of those bendy plastic Micro Universe Cybermen in my hand, at which point I got over myself and realised 'I like this! Don't be stupid!'

Handily, there's a whole slew of Who miniatures available, as well as a large bag of the aforementioned MU plastic chaps stashed away on top of the lead mountain, purchased when a local clearance vendor had them on the cheap...

Future plans for this project seem to be heading towards recreating 'the Next Doctor', with a load of Victorian civilians already acquired/on order from Blue Moon and Foundry, although I still need a couple more Cybermen to convert into Cybershades...

Secondary projects:

VSF

In what is becoming a recurring theme, another project with zero finished miniatures - in my defence though, there's a whole bunch of converted ministures in this project's drawer (both brits in space and savage martians in the style of Greg Broadmore's excellent 'Victory'), as well as a Ramshackle tunneling device that needs a bit more paint before it's done... (I think I stated this project a couple of years back, had a buying spree, converted some miniatures, then got distracted...)

AEWWII

One of my first loves when I got back into fiddling around with little lead men, Darkson Design's AEWWII is a project very much on the back burner. I originally found out about the game in Harbinger magazine, which I think was the first few steps down the rocky road of relapse. But I digress, we might see some additions to this project if my prize for winning the DD scenario design competition a couple of years back turns up, or I get round to building and paintng the tanks that I bought for this project oh so long ago...

Warmachine

Mercenaries, Cygnar, Cryx - a project I started years ago, that I always mean to come back to, but never seem to finish anything...

Anima Tactics

Again, a project that I have several half-painted miniatures for. Handily though, due to the small scale of the game, it'll only take finishing a couple of miniatures to be able to declare this a 'finished' project (although we all know that there's no such thing really...)

Evil Genius/7TV

Crooked Dice are bringing out their 7TV rules this year, so I rushed out and bought a load of Copplestone and Artizan miniatures in preperation.

Marvel Superheroes

Less a project, more that I fancied repainting some of theHeroclix that I have. Pictured here with some urban scenery (that I forgot to stick in the photo of my zombies) we have Spider-man and Sandman (please ignore the massive, unmissable mouldline across his fist), with Vulture, Doc Ock and Daredevil currently half painted, and Scorpion awaiting undercoat.



GW:

Games Workshop gets it's own heading, seperate from other projects. I have far too many GW projects on the go, many of them dating back several years. I'm not a GW fanatic, but I always seem to come back to these projects a little at a time. There's so many, I'll bullet point them:

Fantasy

• Night Goblins - a couple of half-painted regiments and squig herds, a giant awaiting undercoat, and several boxes of stuff.
• Skaven - the new boxed game for WFB came with skaven, so I set about buying up old 90's skaven miniatures. I then put them in a box for safekeeping.
• Dwarves - I may have accidentally started a Dwarf army by buying loads of slayers after reading the latest gotrek and felix novel (although I also planned to start an epic undead horde too, in the style of the olden days when you could have a necromacer lord and a horde of zombies, but I've managed to hold back from buying anything... for now)
• Mordheim - I have the boxed game and enough miniatures for three warbands. Other than that, nothing doing.

40k

• Witch hunters - a squad of stormtroopers and a squad of sisters of battle are painted, with about 3,000 points worth of bare metal awaiting my attention span.
• Chaos - a couple of squads of marines and berzerkers painted up, some half painted possessed and a rhino, some undercoated terminators and Huron Blackheart, some unpainted converted daemons, and boxes and boxes of stuff.
• Space Marines - largely boxed, mint on sprue. I did draw a chart of what colour the armour would be on different squads though...
• Orks - I used to love the orks when I was a wee nipper, but buying the codex after getting the Black Reach box left me somewhat cold... I'll probably come back to them one day though...
• Blood Pact - a squad and a half converted (guardsmen with grotesques made from cut down goblin faces), the rest in boxes.

Well, I've probably missed a few things, and not even mentioned the other projects clamouring at my brain for attention so that I'll start them (Fallout, for one, which should really be on the main list as I've already bought some miniatures for it), but there we have the starting point for this blog. I might start a running count of miniatures received vs miniatures painted, just to see how bad I am, and I promise all you brave adventurers that made it all the way to the end that not every post will be as long as this one...