Stalled projects, or Oh Shiny! The road to 350.

We all have projects we started and then ignored for awhile. My biggest issue is when I put a wash on something and wait for it to dry overnight, only to immediately start on something else and ignore the first project. This is one of the reasons why when I’m painting my D&D monsters and NPCs I stop after the wash and simply seal them. I don’t need to have a top notch paint job on a monster who will hit the table once or twice, so it’s base coat, wash, heavy varnish since it’ll be abused, and shoved in the plastic tubs I keep them in.

Unfortunately wargamers are basically hoarders. Every single wargamer that I know, and role player for that matter, has piles of unfinished projects, rule books and instruction sheets from everything they’ve ever done. 14 pairs of spare arms from a finished box of plastic infantry? Better keep them, you never know when you’ll need 30 left arms that only hold a specific SMG!

The Road to 350 isn’t simply a goal of cranking out tabletop paint jobs, it’s a goal of keeping my gaming collection manageable and usable. At the core of it is the fact that I can’t really use miniatures until they’re assembled and painted, but I also have a load of projects that need to be finished. Some just need final touches, like a couple hundred 15mm sci-fi figures that were quickly based for a convention game years ago and need those bases painted and flocked to be done. Some are sitting there barely opened and need to be started, like my Mongoose Starship Troopers collection that has eight assembled Warrior bugs out of the about 120 that I have…

Recently I’ve been going through those 15mm projects that are almost finished. The first case I brought out had Rebel Minis forces in them. Earth Force Home Guard and Titan Marines used ad DPRG forces for my Tomorrows War games. They were one of the sets of minis with unfinished bases, but they also weren’t complete! The Home Guard had no NCOs or officers! A quick search found several packs of them that need to be based and painted to make the force usable. At some point I picked up some packs to round out my Titan Marines too, including mortars. I wasn’t planning on painting these up this year, but they’ll be a nice change of pace so they’re on the schedule for after my current projects. Here’s a quick video on the figures with comparison photos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BPjGYzisUA

Another bad habit of gamers is buying projects and putting them on a shelf to be started ‘tomorrow’, but tomorrow never comes. As Dreamforge Games was closing down their warehouse I missed the sales of their remaining stock. By the time payday rolled around they were sold out. I was fortunate enough to pick up someone’s stalled project though, a heavily reinforced company’s worth of Eisenkern, including FOUR packs of heavy weapons which would constitute a couple of platoons by itself. I didn’t realize it but the seller included the 15mm scale mech with it too, which made the price I paid criminally low.

I already had a couple squads painted up in a ‘Space Germans’ scheme and I was determined on finishing a platoon up with some support elements. I’ve finished a platoon with three squads and a command element and enough wheeled vehicles to turn them into an armored cavalry platoon. Next up is heavy weapons and infantry power armor.

A couple of years ago I picked up some Blood and Plunder figures when our club was talking about the game. unfortunately no one else bought in. I continued to pick up bits here and there for my Blood and Plunder force… that was sitting in the box, on a shelf. Now I realize some of you are going to say that two years is nothing, but honestly you shouldn’t be proud of having twenty year old miniatures unpainted in your hoarder closet.

Miniature Market had a sale and I picked up an English starter set for Blood and Plunder and that spurred me to break out the Spanish I had and start on them. I’m not going down this Road to just add more stuff I won’t use. I painted up a couple of test pieces and the Spanish are going into my painting rotation. I’m not sure what I’ll use them for but I enjoy painting them and they sure are a change from dozens of WWII Germans.

Late last year I picked up some 1:100ish scale Battletech plastic kits from Russia to go with my existing mech collection. Can you guess the status of that mech collection? Some pieces from an almost completely delivered Kickstarter are painted with unfinished bases, most were primed before I decided to change my bases to MDF hexes, and some are still in the package. I started painting up the Battletech pieces this week, I just need to keep up the progress and then get them on the table.

I don’t know when we’re moving. Between this virus, what I’m hearing about mortgage loans currently, family health issues, and the weird housing market around me its starting to look like we won’t move in 2020. The last time I was getting ready to move I came across a dozen boxes of RPGs that were moved into the attic TWELVE YEARS before and were still sealed. I dumped them on Ebay and at the local convention for whatever I could get and was glad to not move them. I’m dedicated to painting as much as I can before we move so I’m not packing up boxes of still shrink-wrapped sprues to just shove them in a new closet to be hidden from the wife…

As I write this in April my progress for the year has been OK. I picked up some slack in March and brought my painting total up to just over 100, which puts my on track for 350 by the end of the year. Here’s a link to March’s The Pledge post on TMP. Unfortunately I need to put in a bunch more work on two commissions and finishing up my 15mm figure bases don’t count towards my goal since it’s not painting figures. I expect I’ll catch back up in May and June though.