2019’s goal: 350 figures painted!

Hello Wargaming Recon readers! Jonathan put out a call for bloggers and I answered! I’ve been wargaming for about a decade now and playing RPGs and board games for almost 30. I spent 15 years as a photojournalist and recently went back to college to change careers. I’ve been craving a creative outlet and decided this was the perfect opportunity to revive my neglected blogging hobby.

2019 is almost done and I haven’t blogged since the beginning of the year! I set out in January with a goal of painting 350 28mm figures. Major projects were a WWII Soviet army, Terminator Genisys miniatures, and a mix of zombies including some Nazi zombies for a convention game in my hometown I attend every October.

I never got to the Soviets, as a matter of fact I’m trying to sell them off since I don’t think I want to do the Warlord Games plastics.  They’re too fiddly, the weapons are too prone to breaking, and I didn’t do nearly as much as I thought I would of the other three. I wound up only getting 16 Nazi zombies, 8 modern zombies done, and 28 of the Genisys miniatures completed. Considering how easy the Terminators are to paint that’s a pitiful amount.

I took on two commissions from friends, one is a continuation for Murph’s German WWII army and another from a new player at the club just south of me for another German WWII army. It helped fund some hobby purchases and is part of the reason I got so many of my own Germans done this year, but it did cut into my painting time.  I was worried I wasn’t going to make my goal, but I picked up speed as fall hit and the convention stuff was done.

So what DID I get done? WWII got a lot of attention this year, despite the Ruskies getting no love. I painted up 49 US Airborne to complete my full company for D-Day and Carentan.  Plus 25 additional Fallschirmjäger to face off against them for our convention Carentan game. I also finished 20 German casualty markers (the only good Nazi!) and 21 random Heer that I had laying around waiting for paint. My friend Murph needed some WWII era pulp figures for the game he was running on our table, so I painted up 10 of them. That’s 125 of my goal of 350 just for a couple of convention games!

Dungeons and Dragons got some love too with 22 civilian NPCs (non-player characters) getting painted up, 51 monsters, and 12 small pieces of terrain getting finished too.

As of this post I have finished off 356 miniatures. This was the first year I set a goal for myself, and I struggled to keep it. I was lucky enough to find enough time to finish the commissions and my own painting, but I’m confident that I can make the same progress in 2020!