Monday, May 21, 2012

Avoiding Painter's Block, Part 2- Multiple Armies


Welcome back to Scratchbuilt 40k, fellow hobbyists.  Today I’ll be talking about yet another way to stave off Painter’s Block- multiple armies. 

As I’m sure many of you have discovered, it can become quite tedious to be painting and modeling the same models in order to achieve a workable higher points list.  In my area we generally create our 2,000 point lists and begin to assemble them.  This, however, can lead to some serious burn-out and has caused more than a few of my friends giving up on the hobby for months at a time, and in a few cases permanently.  So how do I avoid these same problems?  By working on multiple armies, of course.

If you are a regular reader of the blog you may have noticed I started out working on a Chaos Daemon all Tzeentch army, with flaming, floating heads for troops and slews of armless Flamers, 2 Soul Grinders, custom made chariots with Heralds, and Screamers.  Since then I’ve built a custom Space Marine chapter to completion and begun rebuilding and painting my oldest 40k army, the Eldar.  However, Harlequins have left me a tad bit burnt out on Eldar, and so I started dreaming of an all Nurgle Daemon army.



I can hear it already “Ugh, Epidemius”.  Early on I did use Epidemius, and while he certainly played his part, I’ve decided to move on to a completely fluff inspired list, built from old Pink Horror models (the ones with the big hands) where the arms are chopped off and replaced with Bloodletter and Lizardmen arms.  I have yet to finish adding the bits which will make them truly disgusting.  All Plaguebearer units will be in groups of 7, Nurglings will be in groups of 7 and 7 to a base, I’ll use 2 Great Unclean Ones and 3 Plague Hulks, the Nurgle Soul Grinders.



The only thing which won’t technically be Nurgle are the 3 units of 3 Flamers, but I’ll be using 9 modified Plaguebearers with some wings and appear to be, to put it bluntly, blowing chunks.  I’m hoping this will be visually interesting and will convincingly fit the theme of the army.

In the end, it’s a huge change from the Space Marine and Eldar armies I have been working on previously, and I believe it’s just what I need to continue feeling the projects I’m working on are fresh and innovative.  As we all know, too much of a good thing can become bad.

2 comments:

  1. I agree entirely. With one army I was running out of desire every few weeks to carry on painting. Now that Ive added a couple of other armies to that one I have enough to keep rotating it and keep things interesting, which keeps me painting, which is a good thing in regards to completing the armies I have.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Oh, absolutely. What is nice is I have one completed army which I can fall back on while I'm painting/repainting the other armies. Takes the stress off trying to 'hurry and complete' the models.

      Delete