The April Update - James' Hobby Progress

Turns out being shut away at home has allowed me to be remarkably productive with my hobby time. In my last article I set myself a series of goals, little bits of my backlog that I wanted to have cleared out by the end of May. As April is at a close I wanted to get an article up detailing the things I managed to get done in the last month.

My hobby time this month was split between two projects - Blackstone Fortress and Warcry. Below I'll breakdown what I managed to get completed from each game system and what I'm planning to complete in May.

Blackstone Fortress

I'll start with the system I made a bigger amount of progress on and I must say, I'm actually pretty happy with how much I managed to complete for Blackstone this month. In total I ended up adding both squads of Traitor Guardsmen as well as the Rogue Psykers to the completed pile and they've ended up looking pretty nice overall. 

The Traitor Guardsmen were good fun to paint, with a variety of textures and character keeping everything interesting. I wanted to keep both squads to the same colour palette but change up where the colours went on the model to give a unifying feel to the squad whilst keeping a more rag tag look like the individuals have all been pulled together from disparate parts of the galaxy. Every model has a section painted in bright red to denote them as being part of the Servants of the Abyss, something I've kept across all the relevant hostiles in the set. 

As well as the Guardsmen I also completed the Rogue Psykers. These guys were a bit more of a challenge given there's larger areas of flesh, as well as the fact it's then all been heavily distorted by their newly enhanced connection to the warp. Again I kept the colour palette the same but varied their location on the models. I took more time on the heads of the models as they're the real focal point of the minis. A bit of mixing and blending later and I'm really happy with the end result I've achieved. I like to believe the warp is barely contained in the shell of the psykers mind and as such I wanted there to be the look of this unrestrained power coursing through their minds.

So that's the painted additions to Blackstone Fortress for this month. I also put together the Dread Ambull expansion ready to get playing once we're freed back into the world. All that's left for me to complete now is the two Chaos Space Marines and their master Obsidius Mallex and I'll have the core box of hostiles done, a crazy thought as I never really expected to have the box fully painted.

Warcry

My additions to Warcry weren't quite as large as those to Blackstone, but nonetheless they were still nice to complete. In total I've painted another 3 pieces of the terrain from the core box bringing me up to around 50% of it done now.

I didn't do anything special with these pieces and it was largely an attempt at trying to optimise my painting time and get to better grips with drybrushing. I was really shocked at how fast I began cracking through things once I got used to the whole thing and now I'm looking forward to finishing off the rest of the set. The overall look I want for the terrain is a former settlement of Sigmar that's been left abandoned to the elements and is now starting to cover in moss and lichen. There's a few close ups of some of the details below.

So that's everything I got done in April. I made a list of things I wanted to complete in my last post so let's have a check at my progress one month later

James' Hobby To Do List
- Assemble the Dreaded Ambull expansion  - Done!
- Assemble all Necromunda terrain from Dark Uprising - 25% complete
- Paint all of the hostile miniatures for Blackstone Fortress - 3 left!
- Paint all terrain from the Warcry starter box - 50% complete
- Decide on paint schemes for my Imperial Knights and Necromunda gangs - Done!
- Maaaybe start painting an Imperial Knight (that's a big maybe)

- Start building my newly purchased Adeptus Titanicus Titan Legio (this will only be if I get everything else done, or if my willpower fails dramatically)

Not too shabby for one months work. My plan is to now crack on and finish the Chaos Space Marines to wrap up Blackstone Fortress and then move onto the Warcry terrain as that was surprisingly simple to paint. 

I hope everyone reading is getting the chance to sit down and crack on with some hobby of their own. I'll be back at the end of May with another update and, hopefully, the chance to cross a few more things off the to do list (before I add another pile of plastic onto it).

Until next time,

James