The State of the Hobbiest

With work and school taking its toll on my schedule, it's been a while since I've been able to work on any hobby goodness, let alone post about it here. In response, here's the current state of my hobby progress and where I'm headed in the future.

Before I begin, I'd like to take a moment to recognize my favorite podcast: The Masters of the Forge. These guys are single-handedly keeping me interested in the fluff and keeping my mind on the hobby while I'm spending time away. Snorre and Adam are always coming up with new interesting ways to play the game and going into detail about the parts of the background that I've always loved. In a world of responsibilities, they're my one last bastion of hobby goodness. If you haven't listened to them yet, go check them out.

And now, on with the blog post.

Gaming Table:

The table itself is complete and the first set of tiles is finished. I only have one set of trees to place on it, but I'd like to make a whole lot more as well as a little farm to put next to the road. I'm hoping to do some more work on it after I've gotten a sizable force of Knights Bellicose completed.

Current Knights Bellicose Project:

Right now, I'm working on the third Tactical Squad for 4th Company. My goal for now is to duplicate what I have in my Ultramarines force, then expand on it from there. Ultimately, I'm planning on completing the entire company, then move on to other companies until the entire Chapter is complete. Once this squad is complete, I'll have three full Tactical Squads to work with, and they'll all have options of which specialist weapons I want to include. Here's how they currently look:

Having recently completed my skin test, I'm confident I can add some radial diversity to my Chapter, which is something I've always wanted to do. In the spirit of that, this squad will feature three separate Marines without their helmets on. In order to better facilitate the painting process, I'll be painting the heads separate from the rest of the Marine.

Future Project:

Once my third Tactical Squad is complete, the force still won't be playable. I'll need some leadership for that. To help me break up the monotony of painting so many Tactical Marines, I'm going to work on 4th Company's Captain and Chaplain next. I'll probably even do the whole Command Squad, so the whole leadership section will be completed in one go. As of now, I've purchased the models and made sure there were no defects since I went with Finecast in an effort to build a whole army with no metal in it. Here's the models I chose:

Hopefully, I'll be able to devote more time to the hobby in the future. I really miss being able to work on my models as much as I used to and I miss posting on the blog as often as I used to. Once I get a little more homework out of the way, I'm hoping to spend a very large amount of progress in the hobby room. Keep checking back to see how things turn out!

Have fun painting!