2018 was a slow year for me. Between finishing up a degree, having a baby and starting a new job miniatures and gaming took a back seat. 2019 is upon us, the baby is almost a year old and I’m settling into the new job pretty well. I started thinking about what I want to get accomplished this year and decided to set myself a goal. 350 miniatures painted by the end of the year. This sounds lofty, but there are several reasons I think I can get this done.
- On a normal week of painting a couple hours a night for 2-3 nights I can usually get done about 10 figures if it’s batch painting uniforms, 6-8 if they’re individual characters.
- My main project of the year is a Soviet WWII army. This will require me to paint over 100 soldiers, which I’m going to use ‘The Dip’ method on to speed up the process.
- The other project I’m working on this year is the Terminator Genisys game. I have a little over 60 Terminators, which are easy as pie to paint up by the dozen since they’re simply prime black, drybrush gunmetal, wash, drybrush silver, paint eyes and the plasma gun. The resistance is almost as easy since I’m sticking to batches of 16 figures with a simple camo pattern (it’s the future, I can make it up!) and armor. The sculpts are pretty basic but well done so they should paint up pretty quickly. My guess is once I get going it’ll be 8 resistance and 8-16 Terminators a week.
- I have two batches of zombies and one batch of Nazi zombies to finish up. This totals about 50 figures and most of the zombies are simply going to get basecoated, dip’ed and then a simple highlight. They’re zombies, they’re dirty, and they’re meant to die by the bushel load.
These three projects account for roughly 250 of my 350 goal. The rest will consist of D&D minis, finishing up the German and US WWII armies I have, finishing up some German minis for a friend and a whole bunch of 6mm stuff I dug out of storage when my Ogre Minis II pledge showed up.
The second part of my New Years pledge is to not buy hundreds of minis this year. I’ve made several allowances if the prices are right. For years I’ve been drooling over two lines of minis. I missed out on the Starship Troopers game when it first came out and Dreamforge games makes a line of Eisenkern minis that I like. I have some of each already now and keep looking out for good prices. I still need some vehicles for my Soviet army, and if Warlord runs another sale after my raise comes in I will grab a couple vehicles. I already have enough to paint for this year though.
The year has started well, it’s the last week in January and already I have almost 60 minis finished for Terminator and another couple dozen random minis that were assembled and primed so I could clean of the paint desk.