A couple of
months ago I decided to set myself a hobby challenge, to paint a full Warhammer
40k army for the Summer Solstice tournament which is held at my local club
every summer. After a bit of
deliberating I ordered a bunch of Eldar and officially started the project at
the start of November meaning I had about seven months to complete the army.
So, coming
up to the end of month one where am I at?
Pretty much where I started to be honest!
I’m
admittedly a slow painter so this was always going to be a challenge but my
lack of progress is almost laughable.
There’s a total of 66 individual pieces in my army (including some big
stuff like a wraithknight and a crimson hunter), so far I’ve painted a whopping
three of them (and they’re not even exciting pieces!).
In the past
I’ve been fairly critical of the painting standard of 40k armies, I’m not going
to win any painting awards but in comparison to most 40k stuff I’ve seen, I’m
Raphael (which also happens to be my favourite flavour of turtle). Sure, there are some great looking armies at
my local club (Dave Williamson’s Tyranids and Andy Richardson’s Grey Knights
instantly spring to mind) but they’re vastly outnumbered by bare plastic,
undercoat or, at best, three colours and a wash that look like they were
applied by a retard on a rollercoaster.
What this
project has taught me so far is that the poorly painted 40k armies you see may
not come from a lack of painter skill, they may just be a product of necessity. Most tournaments have a minimum painting
standard of three colours (and based) and have to be fully painted. Based on my recent experience, even that is a
significant challenge! Based on my
current paintin speed, my army will be fully painted to a decent standard in a
little under 2 years.
The big
question I have to ask myself is do I rush the painting to enter the tournament
or do I go at my own pace and risk missing the tournament. That took me less than a second to answer,
the reason being my reason for spending money on the hobby.
If you stop
and think about it, spending vast amounts of money on small lumps of plastic is
fucking insane! That is until you stop and
compare that to other things. Let’s say
you go to the cinema, you pay £8 for the chance of a couple of hours worth of
entertainment and then you go home having gained nothing. If you go to the cinema three times, you will
have spent the same £24 that you could have spent on a box of Eldar Fire
Dragons.
The Fire
Dragons may not give you a fumble in the back row but you do get some value out
of that £24. If you’re a slow painter
like me, that money will get you much more than the six hours of entertainment
you would get out of the cinema. Hell,
with finecast you’ll still be trying to clean the models up after all the films
have finished. On top of the hours of
painting pleasure you can get, there’s also the sense of achievement at the end
where you can appreciate the thing that you have beautifully painted. Then you can stick it on eBay for a profit
and buy more because people will pay silly money for painted armies (wonder why that is?!).
As this post
has been a bit ranty in places, I’ll leave you with a picture of one of my
completed Fire Dragons (taken before adding grass to the base).
D.F.T.B.A.
And
