I have not been doing well with my resolution to blog more, but, here we go …
The HAWKs have been busy painting 54mm plastic American War of Independence figures for the annual Armies for Kids give-away event at Historicon, now just a few weeks away. We are giving away six army sets, each consisting of 6 American units, 6 British units, plus a gun and crew and a mounted officer for each side. Units are just four men, so every kid is due to get about 55 painted figures this year, including one Indian unit in each British set. We usually get together as a group for the painting, but I wanted to give the Indians a little extra attention so I volunteered to do the 24 of them as homework. I also had extra spray paint and volunteered to do the six 4’x6’ground cloths.
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| The Indians; project organizer will do the basing |
As of Friday, I finished this task up after much procrastination. Now, I don’t know about you, but when I am procrastinating on a particular task (e.g. painting) I usually will fill time with something completely unrelated (e.g. bicycling), because I feel too guilty about
almost doing what I am putting off.
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| Three ground cloths starting with tan felt |
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| Three ground cloths starting with green felt |
The ground cloths, by the way, turned out to be more of a challenge than I had expected, and I can tell that I am getting old, as my forearms were sore and fatigued the next morning after a couple of hours with a succession of spray cans. Nevertheless, by Friday morning everything had been dropped off to the Armies for Kids coordinator and I was free to paint whatever I felt like without guilt.
I noted to the painting group assembled on Friday that I have been spending too much time watching hobby videos on YouTube rather than actually doing hobby activities. (There’s probably a blog post in that …) One of the channels I subscribe to is the
Medieval Wargamer, and he posted a video last week debating the perennial topic of whether this hobby is getting to be too expensive. (That’s probably a post by itself too … ) I was reminded that Uncle Atom of
Tabletop Minions had posted a video back in 2023, and I had taken up the
$100 challenge, deciding to build a medieval skimish project starting with an Italeri 6108
“Medieval Tournement” (sic) set.
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| The figures I’d finished in 2023 |
I had only finished 9 of the figures, but had left another batch on tongue depressors in various stages of painting.
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| The next batch, left in progress |
In an uncharacteristic fit of organization, I had sequestered all of the materials for the project including the paints, brushes, and bases, in an 11-liter Really Useful Box. I remembered that I had put the “in progress” tongue depressors into the RUB later, but not all at the same time.
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| The sorted project box |
Enjoying the lack of guilt over the Armies for Kids I pulled out the Tournament project box yesterday and decided that it would be prudent to count the miniatures and make sure that I had actually gotten everything stowed away properly back in 2023. According to my blog post (linked above), I was looking for 55 foot figures and 20 cavalry figures, and I could only find 51 of the foot figures. Three hours later, after moving and looking into every RUB full of half-completed miniatures in my basement, counting four times, and comparing the sprues from the box with an intact set of sprues twice, I concluded …drumroll please…that I had miscounted or mistyped back in my 2023 blog post, and the real answer really was that I had 51 foot and 20 horse. So, the good news was that all figures were present and accounted for, but that bad news was that I had run out of energy for the day to actually do some painting. Oh well, better luck today…
