Attack Bike and Inventory Ideas

Well, I'm certainly not going to finish all my vehicles before the end of the month.  Part of that is because, well, I've been painting a lot of blue boxes lately and I'm a little tired of it.  So I've not been painting as much as I could have.  Shame on me.

Tonight, I decided to paint an attack bike instead of another box.  I think this makes 6 or 7 of them now.  I'm not sure.  Took a little longer than I remembered, but not much.  I think I'm getting my painting fu back.  Well, maybe not.  I've been noticing lately that I have much more of a "publish and the rest be damned" mentality.  I don't care about a lot of mistakes because I know that most of these will never be seen at much less than arm's length anyway.  I'm less interested in "pretty" than I am in "painted and done with".  I guess that's always been the great strength and secret of my army: even though I have some nice minis, most people like to play against it because it's painted and uniform.  How many people can boast a painted 15K+ army?  Not many, I think.

In line with my curiosity about how many attack bikes I have, I think it's about time to pull everything out and look at it.  I'm not even entirely sure what all I have anymore.  I have some good guesses, but I'm not entirely sure.  Besides, when I see chapter elements incomplete (I'm probably two or three squads shy of three companies [and one of those is the Termie quad that will complete my Terminator Company]), I get inspired to actually complete them.  I already know that I have a couple of Dev squads that need doing to fill in a company.  I'll probably put the unpainted Predators and Rhinoback on hold for a while...  There's a small chance that I've already made a dent in a fourth company.  Yeah, I think I'll whip it all out in the next few days.  Of course, I'll post pics.  Not often I have it all out for viewing.  I may even pull out my new allied Templar force.  It's probably good for a thousand points on its own.  And once I have that done, I may try to take an inventory of what I have unpainted.  I've never done that.  And I know I could make an entire new Marine army with the stuff I haven't painted yet.

Most importantly, when am I going to find the time to do all this?

Vindicator and Attack Bike Touch-Up

Alright, the second Vindicator is done.  Took me long enough, right?  It's only been two weeks since the last one.  Actually, I did most of this Vindie last week, but didn't feel like getting back to it.  So, I guess this means that I won't have all my vehicles done by the end of the month.  At least, not unless the wife and kids disappear for a week...

As for the attack bike, well, I noticed that I had never gotten around to painting the multi-melta.  So I did.  It's a bit of a rush job, but it's good enough.  With the others, you wouldn't even notice the rushed nature of it.

My best friend got three Dark Vengeance box sets.  I must say that the Chaos stuff they have in it is pretty freaking good.  Not all that jazzed about the Dark Angel stuff, but I have more than enough infantry so no big deal there.  The important thing is that he gave me one of the mini-rulebooks.  Awesome.  Nothing beats having dead trees in your hands.

Lastly, it occurs to me that one day I'm going to have to replace my paints.  I do not look forward to that day, thanks to the new paints.  I find it hilarious that neither Calgar Blue nor Guilliman Blue are good old fashioned Ultramarine Blue.  No, that honor goes to Altdorf Blue.  Altdorf?  Is that some kind of Fantasy crap?  Not a clue.  But it is dumber than the proverbial sack full of hammers.

Vindicator

Well, that's one Vindicator down, one Vindicator left to go.  It's funny, but I don't remember these things taking so long to paint.  I've been noticing that for the last few weeks.  I assumed, at first, that I was just out of practice.  Now I'm starting to think that maybe the greater detail is causing me to be more...careful about what I'm painting.  Or perhaps it's a combination of the two.  Either way, this one take took me most of a day.  Bit of a shame, really.  I had been hoping to get more done.  That and I've got quite a bit left to do.  I've still got a Vindicator, two Preds and another Rhino-Back, not even to mention multiple Speeders and a Dred or two.  At this rate, I might not even have my vehicles done until the end of September.

Note to self: don't acquire any more vehicles in the next month (Though, who am I kidding, because I don't think that's going to happen and not that I'm going to turn down anything anyone just decides to give me).