T'au

My T'au were the army that I got back into the hobby with back in 2017. I have around 3000 points now, though only about half are painted.

For my birthday last year my girlfriend surprised me with a trip to Warhammer World (as surprising as "we're driving to Nottingham on your birthday, I'm not telling you why" could be) and while there I decided to cave and buy a Y'Vahra. This model's rules have swung between good to great to trash and back several times, but it looks awesome and if nothing else it's hilarious to use. In April I finally finished painting it:

The base is the Riptide kit and it's a fantastic model to pose.

I'm happy with the paint scheme I went with for this army, but in retrospect white was a poor choice for my first force. The airbrush improves it immensely but it's still scheme that I burn out on regularly.

I will revisit the T'au more soon, in particular I want to paint the Kroot I have, and I'm looking forward to using it as a benchmark of how I've improved as a painter.

A Tale of Many Lamers: Quarter 1

I had sporadic hobby time in 2019 - I was renovating my house so I switched between not having hobby space and having to paint walls instead of minis. In 2020 I was looking forward to getting more time to paint, particularly with the set goals of the slow grow.

Project Management

Being a somewhat analytical person, I usually start projects via a spreadsheet. I have a Google Sheets document entitled "Shame" that tracks all my models and their status, quantified by their wounds characteristic. More than anything else this does as it's name implies, it shames me into not buying a mountain of grey plastic that I'll never get around to painting...or at the very least makes me aware of when I ignore it and do this anyway.

For 2020 I wanted to follow in the footsteps of my friend John, who through the course of 2019 painted his entire model backlog through a rather wonderful burndown chart. I'm not a fast enough painter that I was confident that I could paint everything over the year, but I felt like I could put a good dent in it.

A snippet of my shame.

I set myself some goals in January - chief amongst them the slow grow but also including finishing up my Flesh Eater Courts, putting a dent in my Tau and at least building/basecoating a load of LotR models and terrain so I could play with them.

Progress

My cadence for quarter 1 was erratic. January was extremely productive, driven mostly by it starting with a weeks holiday, while February was not. A combination of illness (I was off work more in that month than I was in the entire 3 years prior) and trying to plow through some DIY meant the only hobby I completed was painting 12 Hormagaunts. This snowballed into a very frantic March, where I ended up having to take a couple of days holiday to reach my goals.

Completed first was my Hive Tyrant ("The Withering Horrification") and a unit of Hormagaunts:

At this point the bases are plain - I have plans to jungle them up but time constraints and a delayed basing material order meant it wasn't going to happen for a while yet.

Not pictured are 12 Termagants, which I failed to photograph when complete for some reason.

Finally, there are two Carnifex:

I'm really happy with how all these models came out. I tweaked the scheme slightly as I painted more (notably leaving the tongues pink instead of yellow) and I started to get more comfortable with it as I went on. I still need more practice using the airbrush, but I'm starting to feel fairly comfortable with it.

I had plans for quarter 2 that involved more models that Q1, as well as hopefully better organisation to hopefully stop me rushing so much at the end...