Let's start again, for reals this time... October painting commitment!

Right, forget that last post because I finally did manage to get my gear moved over to my new home, which means...

Hobby commitment for October!

So, my overall plan is to participate in a year-long hobby progress challenge for 2014, which will be for 1850 points, I think.

In order to prepare for that, I'm going to paint a unit each month for the remainder of 2013. This is also good because it will allow me to finish off the units that are already in progress and start (more or less) with a totally unpainted 1850 for the challenge.

This month, my goal will be to complete an infantry squad:

These poor guys have been 'uniform gray' for far too long...

And when I say complete, I mean totally finished... fully painted, decals done, bases decorated and varnished - ready to hit the table. This is almost unheard of for me, having even one squad totally finished would be a big win... all the more so if it gets me into the swing of things so I can complete the challenge! A fully painted army would be a big achievement, I don't think I've had one in about... oh, when did the Tau first come out? 2001 or something like that? Yeah... then. Given that I now have thousands of points of IG and almost as many Tyranids... I really need to paint some dudes.

You may notice that a couple of these guys are actually already painted - I did these several months ago as the test pieces for the whole army... I then proceeded to not paint the rest of the army, but that ends this month!

Behold! The entirety of my painted infantry!

Overall the scheme is quite drab and a bit grim-dark but fairly realistic, I think. I have the Forge World Elysian decals ready to go, which should liven them up just a little. My original idea had them with gold visors but it didn't really work. I can thank Starship Troopers for the core colour scheme concept. I should maybe have gone with desert bases for contrast but I wanted to maintain a kind of ruined urban wasteland feel to the army - a few tufts of grass will be added and some models have green crystals sprouting from the base, which is pretty cool. As I proceed with painting the other seventy million dudes I'm sure I'll come up with new ideas and hopefully learn how to paint human skin...

Each more gray than the last.

I've already proceeded beyond the image above and will probably post the next update once the full 10 man squad is painted to the same stage as the three sample dudes. I better learn to paint stuff quickly because in November I have to do a Vendetta...

Despite my terrible record when it comes to painting, I have actually finished a few things for the army - these guys for example, have a painted Chimera to ride around in:

I have yet to learn the ways of weathering stuff so this is not "finished"... but it is painted.

Finally, and also painted but not weathered properly, a trio of drop sentinels and some cool battlesuits, aka my 'ogryns':

You know, I might even learn how to take photos of stuff as I proceed through this challenge...