Dodgy Knees.

I realise that I've been very quiet lately - a slight explanation: I've suffered with knee problems all of my life - I've had 6 operations that have basically temporarily patched up the issues in both knees without actually solving them. I struggle with them daily and take painkillers to try and manage it - lately, the pain has been a lot worse. I'm going back to the doctors tomorrow to see about a referral back to a orthopaedic consultant, but in the past few weeks I've been a bit withdrawn and anti-social. I couldn't even quite concentrate on painting to be honest - I'd sit at my desk, pretty much staring at the many undercoated figures. Recently though, I've started playing Song of Blades and Heroes on a regular basis, with my housemate and then my gaming mates (housemate's younger brother and step-father!). It's actually been brilliant to get back to regular gaming - it's really made me focus a bit and get some of the lovely figures in my painting backlog completed... 

I've been off sick from work the past few days, and I've got a nice chunk of painting completed - I've had a load of miniatures built and undercoated for my Fantasy Skirmish project for a while now, and I've been adding to the regularly from the lead mountain (and eBay...). It'd been a while since I'd completed anything, so I decided to set myself a little challenge - complete at least 25 of the undercoated miniatures before assembling any of the other stuff...

As of tonight, I'm currently up to 16 miniatures completed! I've just had some lovely figures arrive in the post (Copplestone-sculpted Barbarians on horse and some shamans (inspired by a fantastic blog - more on this in another post!) and 12 of the Heroquest human troops (who will become a town guard for some scenarios in SoBH), who did get clipped from their slotta bases and shields removed, but work halted there...), so I will be setting to work on more undead tomorrow to get up to the 25! I enjoyed painting the beastmen - I started out with the normal grey primer, washed the full figures in thinned brown to basecoat, painted their bases black then scorched brown, followed by an all-over drybrush of tan then light stone grey. It left a perfect base to start with - I was so happy that I've ended up doing the exact same for all of the undead that are due to be painted soon! 

• I dislike doing a text-only post, as I know eye candy is always better, but I'm posting this from my phone and it doesn't seem to want to play nice - check out my Instagram linked from the sidebar for pictures of the things I've been working on today!  Call back soon for content-dripiping posts!