PACTS: low level goons

Here is a horde of goons for my Firefly Stargrave campaign:

These will be ruffians for the PACTS faction, the Pan Asiatic Crime Tong Syndicate (the name might not stick, I think I was just desperate for an acronym). The plan is to have a couple of different factions of enemies, from scavengers to gangsters to Alliance law enforcement, which should between them cover most results that I can roll on the table of humanoid enemies.

I’d originally planned to have an alternating red and yellow colour scheme, or maybe blue to make them look like they are sponsored by Blue Sun, but settled on charcoal and red (which I like, it makes them look a little bit like they’re trying to cosplay as Harley Quinn). To try to disguise the duplication of sculpts, I mixed up the colour schemes a bit between models, so if one of a sculpt had charcoal trousers and red accessories, the other would have that flipped, or one leg of each colour. 

I like these Rezolution sculpts, but I kind of fell out of love with them a bit during the painting process - it felt like things kept going a little bit wrong, and I was spending more time correcting mistakes than making actual progress on the paintjobs, until it got to the point where it felt like done was as good as I was going to get. My original idea of adding some messages down the sides of their cloth bits got abandoned, although I did apply some shonky freehand to the head of the rocket:

I was going for a shark like look, but ended up with something that looks more like Deadpool as a cartoon dog, but I’ll take what I can get.

The Tally has also taken a hit between me starting the draft of this post and actually publishing it, as I nipped into GW on my way home to grab a pot of grey paint and also came away with this month’s freebie mini:

It’s a repeat of an older one that I missed the first time round - while I’m not overly fussed by space dwarfs, it does come with a cool female head wearing an aviatrix cap and flying goggles.

All in, the Tally now stands at:

30 vs 181 = -151

While there are several things that I should paint next (like the rest of my Stargrave crew, the orcs I need for D&D, or monsters for Warriors of Athena), over the last couple of weekends I’ve shown my kids the first two Lord of the Rings movies, and so am tempted by a family build and painting project to play some Battle Companies. And I’ve even picked up some elves for my daughter already, which don’t touch the Tally as she’s hopefully going to paint them:

If anyone has any oddments of LOTR minis knocking around in their bits boxes that need a new home, let me know before I buy Uruk Hai scouts on eBay. My wife has even said she’ll play with us if she can have hobbits, so I need to see if I have any unofficial minis that could stand in for those…

Forklift certified mid-boss

This week (well, technically last week, but I’ve been so wiped I was only able to snap a pic a full week later) we have another offering for the Firefly Stargrave project, à test model for one of the enemy factions:

He was originally a Rezolution APAC Enforcer Lieutenant (as you can probably tell from the micro crop top and tie combination), but for my purposes he’s going to be a fixer and potential bounty target that is a mid level boss for a vaguely future Asian themed crime family - I haven’t yet decided what they’re going to be called, but I vaguely recall planning (back when this project was originally planned, fifteen or so years ago) to call them something like the Pan Asiatic Crime Syndicate or Pan Asiatic Syndicate Tong (because, y’know, acronyms).

He’s a beautifully sculpted little mini, from his abs to his tiny cigarillo, and the back of his jacket also has some sculpted detail. I think it was supposed to be a dragon, but with some careful brushwork I was able to turn it into a tiny rendition of a tiger:

In order to reference the most famous jacket worn by a forklift certified individual, Ryu Hazuki from Shenmue. It’s not an exact copy, but I think is close enough in vibes:

Which brings the Tally to:

20 vs 29 = -9

What’s next? Probably painting the other dozen or so APAC mooks I have undercoated for him to boss around! Or some other low level enemies, or the rest of the crew. I finished my for research rewatch of Firefly a couple of weeks ago (very handy, as there are some law enforcement types that appear that I can paint some Grenadier cops to represent), and now this week they’ve announced that they’re going to being back Firefly as an animated series - it’s nice to be ahead of the zeitgeist curve for once, even if only accidentally!

In summer, we can taste, the rain…

It’s late, which is the only explanation I have for using an Alien Ant Farm lyrical reference that is only tangentially connected to what I’m writing about as a post title. Painting time has been sparse recently (mostly due to repeatedly falling asleep after putting my children to bed), but having a week off work to celebrate my daughter’s birthday means I’ve actually gotten to occasionally put brush to miniature and have finished the next member of the crew for this year’s Firefly Stargrave project:

It has rained all the time recently, so apologies for the slightly dark pictures.

My First Mate is a River Tam expy, a girl that has found herself on the crew in mysterious circumstances. She has clearly been experimented on by the Alliance, and vacillates between terrifyingly deadly in combat and down right nonsensical the rest of the time. She can kill you with her brain, though.

She’s a Hasslefree mini that I’ve had for years, potentially since I initially planned this project which I think was at least fifteen years ago. Looking at it blown up like this, there are a couple of rough spots - a little blister on the front of the dress and a crack on the back of her coat, but fixing them would involve stripping her to the bare metal again, so I’ll have to live with them if I want to get any games in this year. The paint scheme was inspired by River Tam rather than any one particular costume, although I have googled ‘Summer Glau Firefly Red Dress’ and other similar variations enough times in the last week that I probably appear on a list somewhere now…

Although it’s the months leading up to Salute, where I traditionally save my hobby funds for the big spend in April, but a couple of packages have arrived since my last post. First of all, I took advantage of Checkpoint Minis January Sale to grab some 15mm plant monsters to use as tiny 28mm plant monsters, and a frog for a planned conversion. They also threw in a freebie frog, because they are too nice and don’t know some of us work on a Tally system:

I’ve been prepping the plant monsters, and realised that I actually had far fewer 20mm bases than I thought, so I’m waiting for an order of those to turn up so that I can get these painted (and the family D&D game is currently on hold until I do).

I also received a package of Rezolution APAC figures from a kind gentleman over on the LAF, as I had fewer than I initially thought in my project drawers, and I feel like 10-12 is probably a goodly number of Ruffians to menace my crew in Stargrave. 

Plus, there were a couple of minis that I didn’t already have that could potentially make good NPCs or bounties, which is nice…

All in, the Tally now stands at:

6 vs 24 = -18

I’d hoped to keep the Tally in the black a little longer than usual this year, but that’s jus5 how it goes sometimes. Hopefully I can wrestle it down a bit before Salute though… 

Take my love, take my land…

Take me where I cannot stand /

I don’t care, I’m still free /

You can’t take the sky from me:

Or more specifically, you can’t take the sky from Captain Tim Reynolds, ‘ex’- Browncoat, who found himself on the losing side of a war but still isn’t convinced that it was necessarily the wrong side. 

As I’ve alluded to, my Stargrave by way of Firefly game is going to be inspired by rather than a direct recreation of Firefly and Serenity, and so we have a Captain called Tim, spiritual successor to a beloved Necromancer, leader of a rag-tag band of misfits and ne’erdowells that I’ll talk about more as soon as I get round to painting them.

He’s a Heresy mini that I’ve had tucked away for at least a decade, and possible even two, so happy to finally get some paint on him. The painting process was a little fraught, with a few things going wrong like going far too heavy on highlights on the face and then having to try and knock it back with glazes, but as always, there comes a point where done is done and he’s definitely good enough to see some table time! 

I also painted the back, because this is no catalogue shoot - I wanted his brown coat to look absolutely battered, as if it’s literally been through a war - I might have gone a bit heavy handed and had the weathering end up too light, but as always, he’ll look fine at arms length on the table.

Finishing him brings the Tally to: 

3 vs 2 = +1

Next: more crew of the spaceship… wait, I haven’t chosen a name yet! More crew, and a name hopefully then for the next post…

I am a robot

I go beep beep beep beep bop (probably, it’s been a while since my daughter has tried to explain the song stuck in her head that goes like that, to my absolute bemusement). Niche references aside, I recently painted this handsome chap:

Which you may or may not recall was sculpted by the needlessly talented SpaceCowSmith as part of a trade back in July:

You’ll notice that his arms are positioned slightly differently than when he first came to me, as well as having a missing knuckle - this is due to him falling off a table battling in space.

He took a very long time to get painted, mostly due to getting option paralysis after undercoating. In the end I went back to the source material and settled on red (after considering yellow, blue, multi-coloured…), and then weathered it to within an inch of it’s life, because I wanted him to look like a grubby little space robot. The rear panel looked like a perfect spot for a decades old transfer:

Thankfully it was still good. I imagine it being a warning not to shoot that bit, as that’s where the power plant is - so considerate! Also, hazard stripes on the gun - frustrating to do (so much tidying up and straightening!) but worth the effort, I think.

Tally:

38 vs 23 = +15

So, if I finish a mini every 2.2 days for the rest of the year, I’ll hit the average of one a week for the whole year. Challenging, but theoretically achievable…

I am a robot…

 …I go beep beep beep boop bop, to quote a song that my six year old regularly seems to have stuck in her head.

Just a quick post to show off what I received in my trade with Tales from Farpoint:

A fully sculpted robot! He’ll see use as a warbot or perhaps a bounty in Stargrave, and I can’t wait to paint him! Although my children seem keen to get their hands on him too…

The Tally also looks much healthier this week too, as something I listed on eBay weeks ago finally sold, partially offsetting the money spent on this year’s Hellboy board game Kickstarter and leaving the Tally looking like this:

19 vs 4 = +15

What next? I’ve still been chipping away at the last few bits needed to play the first Rangers of Shadow Deep scenario, but painting time is rare currently - I had planned to get some done last night while watching a movie, but when the movie is Dynasty Warriors you can’t take your eyes off it (or keep them open, at one point, but that’s more to do with tiredness than the quality of the movie). Also, I added to the pile of ‘last few bits to do’ with some more lovely resin scenery, because I couldn’t help myself…

Oh, and I might have challenged some pals to build Warhammer armies, as the announcement of Warhammer the Old World got me tempted, and the as yet unannounced release date is far enough away that it feels like we might actually show unprecedented levels of focus and finish the project in time, so if anyone has any old Skaven in their trade pile let me know…

Distant tooting

It’s May the Fourth, and with that comes my annual Star Wars themed post!

This year’s offering is a handsome Bounty Hunter known mostly as Mando, a Diehard Miniatures sculpt that my wife bought me for Christmas, as we’d thoroughly enjoyed the Disney+ show.

The details are clearly only ‘inspired by’ the star of the Disney series (being different enough to avoid any Imperial  legal entanglements), but he’s still a lovely miniature that I’m glad to now have painted! He’s a little more on the heroic end of scale though, especially when you compare him to another Mandalorian miniature that I previously painted:

All he needs now is a little space goblins buddy!

Tally:

19 vs 18 = +1

Although typing that reminds me that I got a freebie Daemonette from GW with two right legs:

which drops the Tally back down to 

19 vs 19 = +0

I really must nip into town and get a left leg for her... although after the whole ‘Cursed City is now only a sold out limited run’ incident happening so soon after my disappointment in not being able to get hold of a copy of Blackstone Fortress Escalation after having my order cancelled I may be done with GW for the foreseeable...

What else has been happening in the more than a month since my last post? Not a great deal of painting, truth be told. I’ve almost completed the first Kingdom Hearts game, which has been taking up the evening time that would usually go to painting, although I have had a couple of cracks at finishing the scatter and treasure tokens on my painting tile finished but it still feels a long way from being done. We also finally got round to watching Pacific Rim, ten minutes into which my wife turned to me and said ‘I didn’t think it was going to be this silly’ so evidently she had high expectations of the robot vs kaiju slugfest...

Next, who knows. I want to play a solo game, so should probably crack on with that, but on the other hand my having played D&D in a year means I’ve got a hankering for painting something from the Monster Manual...

2020 in review

Happy New Year, and welcome to ten years of Dead Lead Project! I'd like to say that so much has changed since that very first post, but alas I'm still flitting from project to project painting what I fancy and then badly photographing them to show you all!

So, as is tradition, we analyse the year that was:

Tally:

47 vs 147 = -100

Looking on the bright side - that's one more painted than the previous year!

I had such hopes that I'd be able to pull my usual last minute eleventh hour hail mary to push that painted total up to 52 to hit that Challenge target, but having been burning the candle at both ends since being furloughed the week before Christmas, my 'evening painting time' often turned into 'falling asleep putting the toddler to bed and then blearily stumbling downstairs to make a cup of tea and try to dab paint at miniatures for twenty minutes'. But honestly, of all years this one is the one where we shouldn't be beating ourselves up for what we have achieved.

So, ten years of stats!

2020: -100 (47 painted)

2019: +3 (46 painted)

2018: +52 (52 painted)

2017: -14 (47 painted)

2016: -287 (56 painted)

2015: -96 (59 painted)

2014: 0 (80 painted)

2013: -416 (25 painted)

2012: -103 (68 painted)

2011: -173 (122 painted)

Here’s a graph of that, added the day after this post went live:

I've no idea how 24 year old me managed to paint 122 miniatures in a year. He had fewer hobbies and no children vying for his attention, which might have something to do with it!

Posts:

25 this year, unusually quite evenly spread throughout the months rather than the usual summer drought (although lockdown might have had something to do with that, as my making terrain for Rangers of Shadow Deep kept posts going even when painting was sparse!). Nowhere near the dizzying heights of 2014 where I managed 69 posts, but the secret to that was that I got a lot of painting done while my heavily pregnant wife napped!

Last Year's Challenge:

• Finish something  old
• Finish a piece of terrain
• Prep all of the monkeys in the monkey box
• Paint all of the miniatures in a boxed game
• Play a board game with fully painted miniatures
• Finish a complete skirmish force for a project (at least 16 miniatures, unless it's for a much smaller scale game like Batman)
• Repaint something (either a miniature that I have previously painted, or one that was received painted

• Convert a miniature and show WIP pic

• Finish the last member of the Nextwave team
• Complete the classes project (potentially adding the races from the Players Handbook to the mix)
• Add at least 4 entries to the Monstrous Alphabet Project
• Average at least a miniature a week by the end of the year (so, paint 52 miniatures)
• End the year with the Tally in the positive!

The less said about this this year the better I think! A few things were half done (there's an unfinished conversion I was hoping to polish off and post, for example), but as previously stated, this isn't the year for anyone to beat themselves up over what they did and didn't achieve... Even if not for the ongoing global pandemic, the Challenge has always been something to hopefully guide me if I'm looking for some direction, rather than a stick to beat myself with!

Projects (according to the last end of year post):

Warhammer Quest Blackstone Fortress

Nothing painted in 2020, as so many other things took my focus! In hindsight, this could also work perfectly well as a solo project, so here's to hoping 2021 sees more BSF love!

D&D

I saw myself painting a lot more D&D miniatures this year than I actually did, truth be told! With the pandemic and various lockdowns though, solo war gaming was my main focus (not that any actually has happened yet) instead. Having not played D&D since March though, I’ve got a bit of a craving for it, enough that I’ve worked out the basis of a campaign to run at some point when the world rights itself. Who knows when I’ll find the time to actually play it though, but that’s a problem for future Olly...

ASOIAF 

Nothing added this year. Got some character miniatures for Christmas though, so who knows what next year will bring...

Hellboy

Nothing painted, nothing played. I think the thing stopping me getting started on this is that absolutely everything is unpainted, which is a bit daunting when you aim to do it all, and there are other projects on the go that use existing painted miniatures that you can add a little to, or a small project that you can paint a handful of miniatures for and call it good...

Star Wars

May the Fourth completed, but nothing else. I’ll always love Star Wars though, so it’s likely to continue on as a main project even if nothing major gets added to it for long stretches of time!

Zombies

Zomtober successfully completed again this year, and added more to the positive Tally than anything else, truth be told! With Salute’s cancellation (well, technically delay I guess) there were no Walking Dead bargains to be had, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing given my existing backlog of unpainted miniatures...

The Thing

I still need to find a suitable dog head, as converting the dog thing is the mental roadblock between me and polishing off the rest of this project.

Reality's Edge

I painted a Cyberpunk! I have a couple of other bits in the painting queue, but they haven’t made their way to finished yet. Probably not helped by the troubling launch of Cyberpunk 2077, which I’ve held off on getting until they have a chance to fix it a bit (which was a bit of an awkward conversation with my wife, having to ask if she’d bought it for me and telling her not to if not!)

Backburner:

40K - I was sure I'd painted a Howling Banshee in the last year, but apparently that was in 2019!

Necromunda - nada

Fallout - nada

ROTPOTA - At this point it’s almost a joke keeping this on the project list, but one day, one day I’ll come back to you my sweet monkeys...

This year was mostly zombies, peasants to play RoSD, and very random odds and ends that caught my fancy!

Before we set the projects list for 2021, let's have a look back at the projects list from my very fist post and see how much progress has been made over the course of a decade?

Primary Projects:

Zombies



Not necessarily my main project these days, but every year I strive to complete Zomtober and add some more miniatures to the collection! Rules are half done, but whenever I work on them I tend to end up having new ideas that involve redoing whole chunks of what has already been written, and I start to wonder if it's the best choice or just me being excited at thinking of a new mechanic, and I walk away for a bit...

Three Kingdoms

I have finished exactly one miniature for this in the last ten years. There is a unit of 24 half painted chaps sat on my desk (and has been for around seven years), but it turns out I'm not the hugest fan of large batch painting!

Firefly/Serenity

The odd miniature painted here and there. 

Strange Aeons

Apparently I haven't finished anything for this project in the last 8 years, which feels wrong but is alas backed up by hard data! 

Doctor Who

We've gone off Doctor Who a bit, the last episode we watched being I think the first Capaldi episode, and so not many miniatures painted for this! I'd like to go back and start watching from the beginning again, as I hear god things about the current Doctor, but it's the sort of thing I'd like to watch with my daughter, but I don't think at five she's ready for some of the mild peril yet...

Secondary projects:

VSF

A couple of miniatures painted - any day now Northstar will release their VSF ruleset and I'll be galvanized to convert some more martians and paint the ones I've already made! I bought a pot of special GW Mars basing paint this year so that I could try it out on a test miniature at some point, so who knows where the future will take us...

AEWWII

The game that got me back into miniatures after some teenage time away, but alas, it's dead on the project radar. 

Warmachine

I finally got around to painting Alexia and the Risen! There are also some Cygnar bits having a nice soak in my stripping pot after I rediscovered Warmachine largely for the fluff...

Anima Tactics

Despite only needing a couple of miniatures painted to call it finished, I never did! 

Evil Genius/7TV

One day I'll get around to painting up a horde of hard hat wearing minions! In other news, I believe they're releasing a sequel to the videogame Evil Genius, which would be exciting news if not for the fact that my laptop is dead as a dodo! 

Marvel Superheroes

One of the projects that has actually had things added to it multiple times over the last ten years - in fact, one of the miniatures that was part of my desperate push to get the Tally up between Christmas and New Year's was a Heroclix repaint!



GW:

Fantasy

• Night Goblins - with Warhammer dead, I've not had much motivation to paint for it! 
• Skaven - same. We could still play an old edition, I know, but there are so many other games vying for our attention these days!
• Dwarves - I managed to paint Gotrek and Felix, but again, with Warhammer dead I've not been particularly motivated to paint any Slayers, which is a shame because I'm still inordinately fond of the little orange haired psychopaths!
• Mordheim - during the first Lockdown, I was struck with a sudden urge to dig out my old Mordheim stuff, so I started working out some warbands to build and paint, but then a chum pointed me towards Rangers of Shadow Deep as a solo game, which then took all of my attention...

40k

• Witch hunters - I'm so far out of the loop these days that I don't even know what the rules are for these any more. I still have vague plans to convert the occasional Inq28 figure, but no sweeping plans for adding to the army...
• Chaos - have I really had Huron Blackheart undercoated for ten years? I've been building and undercoating stuff, but that's mostly as far as they get!
• Space Marines - I made some nerdmarines!
• Orks - My claims that 'I'll probably come back to them one day though' didn't come to fruition. 
• Blood Pact - that squad and a half of converted guardsmen with grotesques made from cut down goblin faces are still sat unpainted in a drawer. Looking back, the conversions are a bit clunky, but I'd like to get some paint on them one day regardless..

Discussing this with my wife, she suggested that so many of my old projects making no real headway suggests that we should stop buying my miniatures, but I disagree, it's just that I've started new projects since then! To whit, the projects list of ten years ago looks very different to this one:

2021 Projects

Rangers of Shadow Deep

I want to get my 2020 Lockdown project to the point where I can play some solo games! Last time I checked (back at the end of August), this would mean making:

• Mystery additional structure
• Trees
• Cart
• Well
• Woodpile
• Crates and barrels
• a playing surface!
• Treasure tokens 

The trees are underway, as is the woodpile. I’ve got some food supplies undercoated, but I think I want some more general crates and barrels too (2021: the year of scatter terrain?). The mystery structure, cart and well would all be self contained mini projects, and treasure tokens shouldn’t be too much hassle to knock up...

Frostgrave

Again, solo play is the target, although I’m not nearly as close to being ready to go with this as I am Rangers. In order to play through Dark Alchemy and Perilous Dark, I’d need some generic fantasy ruins, scatter terrain, wandering monsters, and although I could probably scrounge up a serviceable warband from my already painted miniatures, I'd probably want to paint up a few fresh bits for the occasion!

Stargrave

It’s not out yet, so who knows what I’d need! However, some more generic sci-fi terrain will surely be needed, and once the book is out I can start painting up a crew! I'm dissolving the old Firefly/Serenity project, half of the miniatures will work neatly for Stargrave, whilst the rest will go towards the Cyberpunk project.

Blackstone Fortress

Paint and play, same as ever. While I missed out on the majority of the smaller expansions, even the base game (plus the White Dwarf content) is a decent amount to be getting on with! I've got a copy of Escalation of backorder, which will make a dent in the Tally when it finally arrives...

Current progress on having the base game painted:

Explorers: 0/9

Enemies: 8/35

Mordheim

This should really be a back burner project, but here we are - I’ve got enough miniatures to make a couple of warbands, and I’d like to do that. I kinda want the Sartosan pirate vampire miniature for my Undead warband, but he’s pretty expensive on eBay...

A Song of Ice and Fire

I’d like to expand my Lannisters up to the point where I could fill some War of the Ring bases, so up to 8s of each troop type at the very least (mostly because I love the look of ranks of pikemen that I keep seeing on the Never Mind the Billhooks Facebook group). 

Japanese Fantasy

We showed our daughter Princess Mononoke (brief aside - I did not remember it being that violent until I showed it to a five year old) while I was reading the Rangers of Shadow Deep rulebook, and the wheels in my head started turning... No definite plans per se, beyond the temptation to call it Ronin of Shadow Deep, and take inspiration from everything from the aforementioned Princess Mononoke to Ninja Scroll! I’ve had a dig through my drawers of unpainted miniatures and come up with a few suitable minis to get this project started, time and attention span willing... In doing so, I'm dissolving the old Afro Samurai project that I'd been stashing miniatures for - half fit neatly into this project, whilst the other half will get folded into the cyberpunk project.

The Witcher

Yet another Rangers of Shadow Deep based project (because low model count projects seem to be the way my attention falls more often than not), I have some nice Brother Vinni miniatures that cover the named characters, with the potential to then expand the project out to include scrappy mobs of Redanians, Temerians and so on...

Zombies

I’ll do Zomtober at the very least!

Star Wars

I’ll do May the Fourth, anything beyond that is a bonus! Some minis may get painted that have cross project appeal between Star Wars and Stargrave...

Dungeons & Dragons

I still want to paint some more generic fantasy beasties, especially as not being able to play for the better part of a year has left me with such a craving for it that I've plotted out my own campaign to run at some point in the future...

Back burner:

40k - odds and ends for Inquisitorial warbands, as and when they catch my fancy. There are also some Black Legion miniatures undercoated in the basement, in case my attention swings towards the pointier end of the scale...

Cyberpunk - not a main project, as I have no particular plans for it, but I may well add a mini here and there to it. As previously mentioned, some older projects have been dissolved and their miniatures offered up to this project instead, so it's entirely possible that I'll get distracted and accidentally paint for this like it's a main project!

Zona Alfa - my enthusiasm for this project waned a little when a deal to get hold of the gas mask heads I needed for a couple of conversions fell through, but I've got both scenery and miniatures prepped for this, so may well add to it in the year to come. 

Mass Effect - there’s a remaster of the original trilogy of games as well as a new one coming, so maybe I’ll finally find some heads I like to convert some Cerberus troops? I think I bought minis I planned to use for those conversions when my daughter was born, and she turns six soon...

Rise of the Planet of the Apes: because it just wouldn’t be a year in review post without including this!

Next Year’s Challenge:

• Finish something old
• Finish a piece of terrain
• Finish some scatter terrain (0/3)
• Prep all of the monkeys in the monkey box
• Paint all of the miniatures in a boxed game
• Play a game with fully painted miniatures
• Finish a complete skirmish force for a project (at least 16 miniatures, unless it's for a much smaller scale game like Frostgrave)
• Repaint something (either a miniature that I have previously painted, or one that was received painted

• Convert a miniature and show WIP pics

• Finish the last member of the Nextwave team
• Complete the classes project (and when I do that, start a project to have painted miniatures to represent all of the Races in the Players Handbook)
• Add at least 3 entries to the Monstrous Alphabet Project
• Average at least a miniature a week by the end of the year (so, paint 52 miniatures)
• End the year with the Tally in the positive!

I also have a sort of secret challenge, to try to keep the Tally in the positive by not buying new miniatures until I've painted existing ones (this is why I'm digging out old miniatures for the Japanese fantasy project rather than going on a spree and ordering myself some lovely new miniatures), but sod's law is my backordered copy of Blackstone Fortress Escalation will turn up before I manage to finish anything and sink that straight away!