The Butterfly's Tally 2020

As is customary, in this first post of the year, I take a look back at what I did last year and make resolutions for the new one.

Pict 971: Uruk-Hai Army

Hobby Tally 2020

If you want to have a look at the tallies of the past: The Tally 2017, The Tally 2018, The Tally 2019

And these were my resolutions for 2020:

• Paint all of my Infinity models
• Paint the Uruk-Hai army to a playable level of 600 points
• Paint 25 miniatures for D&D, concentrating on the Critical Role miniatures
• And of course paint more models than buying them...

Pict 972: Sekban Naval Unit

Quite obviously I did not manage to paint all of my Infinity miniatures. In fact I bought some more and only painted the five Sekban in June. Since I played almost no games of Infinity, I lacked the motivation to do more, even with the release of a new edition of the game.

Pict 973: Uruk-Hai Army

Pict 974: Lutz and Friends

The Uruk-Hai however are quite a different story! The same week I finished the Sekban, I also put the finishing touches on a phalanx of Uruk-Hai Warriors. But the stand out for this project will have to be my conversion of Mauhur. All in all, I painted about 1850 points. Great sucess!

Pict 975: D&D Miniatures

Almost all of my miniatures could be used in D&D, but some of them are specifically to play RPGs. I'll have to add in the Shadow Deep miniatures as well as Valten and Bertrand's Bowmen of Bergerac to reach the 25 I wanted to do. But I will still count this resolution a sucess even if I did not paint that many CR miniatures. My highlight here has to be the Hill Giant - I'd venture to say he's my best painted miniature, barring maybe the Unicorn from the end of 2019.

And lastly, as you can see with a look at the Tally to the left, I once again failed to buy less miniatures than paint them. I did however sell quite a few as well and thus improved my ratio of painted to unpainted miniatures nontheless. And 283 painted models in total is also quite an impressive number!

Last year, I also decided to swich my postings to every other week. This shedule worked better with my life outside the hobby and I pretty much kept all of the dates. I count this as a sucess as well and will stick to this shedule in 2021.

Hobby resolutions for 2021

Seeing as I could not quite keep my resolutions this past year, I think I may have been overzealous especially with the goal to paint all of my Infinity miniatures. So for 2021, I will try and keep it simple: As per usual I want to paint more miniatures than buying new ones. Other than that I will only add one more goal. I want to paint a 4x4 gaming board and at least 4 pieces of terrain to play smaller skirmish games on.

Rangers of Shadow Deep and Shelob's Lair

These past weeks I painted a bunch of the official Northstar models for Rangers of Shadow Deep - a Skeleton Knight, two robed skeletons as well as eight giant flies. Like many others, who are into the Middle-earth SBG, I was very exited by the release of Quest of the Ringbearer and painted up part of the Shelob's Lair box.

Pict 930: Skeletons of the Dungeon

When I first saw the Skeleton Knight by Northstar, I immedeately fell in love with the sculpt. Seen from the front the miniature has an elegant curve through the flowing robes. The diagonal of the sword follows this movement but gives it a hard and imposing edge.

Pict 931: Skeletons of the Shadow Deep

Pict 932: Skeletons of the Shadow Deep

The robes of the skeletons reminded me of the skeletons in the Capuchine Crypt in Rome and I had to paint them as such. Why catholic monks would have need of ceremonial daggers I don't know, but it simply fit! You can see that the sculpts were done digitally but they are still chunky enough to paint up nicely and have a unique feel to them.

Pict 933: Giant Flies

Pict 934: Giant Flies

These flies are also very cool models but sadly only availiable in one pose. I tought about converting them but when assebling them I was to lazy to do so. To make them somewhat distinguishable I looked at different fly species and painted the eight flies in differing colours. The Giant Fly miniatures are used in one of the Rangers of Shadow Deep campaings, but I will probably also get use out of them in D&D.

Pict 935: Sam and Frodo (Shelob's Lair)

With the new ME SBG book, my butterfly syndrome demanded that I start a new army. Quest of the Ringbearer has new rules for a Legendary Legion of Cirith Ungol with animosity between the Uruks and Orcs as well as the option to take Shelob. Obviously I had to go for that and painted up the Hobbits from the Shelob's Lair box and thus nothing to be used in this army... Sam and especially Frodo, however, painted up very fast.

Pict 936: Shelob (WIP)

I also started to wok on Shelob. I allowed myself a bit more time and looked through pictures of Shelob on the internet as well as the concept art for the film to do justice to this amazing Trish Carden scuplt. For now I simply established the base colours on the body and plan on blending them together to get a nice gradient from the belly to the back of the beast.