Post vacation update.

Well, that took me a while now...

Lots of stuff took my attention away from the hobby for a bit:
-Studying for a qualification that would net me a "permanent" contract at my workplace. (I succeeded on the exam, so now I'm once more in permanent employment. Yay for financial security!)
-Work was busy, so often in the evenings my batteries were drained.
-The efforts to get my mother into the necessary psycho-geriatric care are still ongoing. But there seems to progress.

But I've now arrived at the last day of my three week summer leave, and have remedied the lack of hobby progress...  I had to spend the first week of it studying for the qualification exam. After that was done I could get down to serious relaxing.  I had brought my painting kit along on vacation, plus a squad of my Word Bearers and a squad of Chaos Cultists I'd paint for a friend. I figured I'd finish one or the other this vacation. That's not exactly how it went.....

I finished both! As well as a second squad of Word Bearers, when we went home for a day in-between!

Here they all are:

The gunnery squad. Both the unit champion and the specialist have been partially magnetized, to give them a measure of flexibility in their loadouts.

The assault squad. Here only the specialist is magnetized.

The cultists are un-based, as my friend will handle the basing himself.

Part of the reason they all went so fast is because I had a clearly set out goal to paint these to a tabletop standard and not lavish too much time on them (I will be taking more time for centrepiece models, but rank-and-file I'll be focussing on speed and looks en-masse.)
I had taken a headstart on the basecoat a while back with the airbrush, giving them a zenithal primer and airbrushing on the red of their armour. After that it was mostly just basecoating the details, giving the models an all-over wash and adding some selective drybrushed highlights here and there. Basing was done equally quickly with a GW basing mix (Agrellan badlands, I believe) followed by a wash and a drybrush.
I've currently got an Aspiring Champion, a (Finecast) Dark Apostle and a Master of Possessions ready for primer. Those I'll spend some more time on painting. And I'm building a unit of 10 possessed and a Hellbrute to be the second batch of rank-and-file models to speedpaint.
That should get me the core of a Word Bearers army in a relatively short amount of time.

My goals for this project are to:
A. Get an army done within a (for me) reasonable amount of time spent. (Not counting the occasional hiatus. Like the one the past few months, between doing the basecoat and actually finishing the models this month....)
B. Finally do something with the stockpile of Chaos models I've had since 4th/5th Edition 40K.
C. Actually, finally, own a fully painted, functional army, other than my Orks, which are now 3-4 editions behind the times. (They still work, but I lack all the fancy gear from the Post-Stompa era...)

Ofcourse, this throws a spanner in my plans to work on preparations for the release of Reality's Edge, the Cyberpunk skirmish game from Osprey... But eh, the muse flies where she flies.

See you next time!