(Lead) Mountain Musings - "Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge” December 2023

"There are fixed points throughout time where things must stay exactly the way they are."

This month's increasingly desperate drive to 'whittle away' at my bloated backlog was originally going to see me start a sixteen week 'purge' of any half-finished or simply 3D printed miniatures surrounding my hobby space.  However, having been kindly contacted by Curt Campbell, I have decided to significantly change this plan and join the Fourteenth Annual Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge (AHPC) instead.

Luckily the event doesn't actually begin until the first day of Winter (December 21st), so I intend to spend the intervening period busily 'priming up' enough models to successfully complete my usual 500-point target - albeit I do intend to significantly lessen this burden by gaining bonus points throughout the event's various themed challenges. In addition, I also aim to begin completing a number of the aforementioned 'nearly-done' figures and vehicles I have already set aside for my own personal Partially-Painted project, predominantly focusing upon a number of miniatures by "Crooked Dice Game Design Studio".

"Crooked Dice Game Design Studio" WIPs - Three Sci-Fi figures at various stages of completion

An embarrassingly large number of these models have sat gathering dust within my storage drawers for far too long, and should 'close some gaps' in a few of my tabletop ready collections. First up are the two Federated Security Command models I recently re-primed, shaded and dry-brushed after a seven and a half year delay. I'm hoping this pair of "Blake's Seven" influenced villains will be pretty straightforward, even if I have decided to apply a predominantly red colour scheme to the Supreme Commander figure - having already used Servalan's more usual all-white palette on the range's Classic FedSec sculpt some time ago.

To mix things up though, I've now added one of the Lincolnshire-based company's 28mm metal science fiction Heroes to the queue, who was perhaps unsurprisingly Out Of Production (OOP) for quite a while whilst "Warlord Games" owned the official licence for "The Doctor Who Miniatures Game". Like the Psychotic Renegade and his evil mistress, this silver-haired time traveller's initial undercoat had become somewhat chipped over time, so he has received a "Citadel" Abaddon Black 'touch-up', before having his smoking jacket base-layered in "Vallejo" Heavy Red.

November 2023 - Little movement amongst my Top Five Manufacturers of the year

Despite getting many a model ready for the battlefield over the last thirty days, I must confess to being a little disappointed in my overall output. This was perhaps somewhat due to so many figures stemming from the Napoleonic range of "Wargames Foundry" and resultantly requiring some considerable time to fully complete. I did intend to off-set this 'burden' with some much more straightforward 3D prints, such as a giant Laputian Robot by "Big Mr Tong" and Vlad Dracul by "Wargames Atlantic". But clearly such 'quick' paint-jobs were not enough.

Furthermore, towards the end of November I became rather distracted by the plastic 32mm miniatures found inside the "Marvel Zombies" starter sets for Zombicide. Of particular note was the cooperative board game's undead Hulk sculpt, which took an incredible amount of patience to pigment - especially after a varnishing mishap meant the large figure required some significant touch-ups. I am admittedly hoping to get some more completed before the New Year kicks in. However, I doubt I'll be willingly tackling any models quite so formidable to put a brush-tip too...