Getting on with it

Five Terminators, all at varying stages of incompletion, yesterday

After all that preamble, it's about time I actually painted some guys, I reckon.

The issue of Where To Start is, however, slightly muddied by the fact that I'm not exactly starting from scratch but rather starting from a position of having a few guys semi-painted already. Call them "test models" or call them "the product of my inability to knuckle down and focus on the wider objective" but, either way, I'm not starting entirely afresh.

As such, the first task I've set myself is to get all of Squad Lorenzo painted, since two of them (Brothers Valencio and Deino, in the front row above) had already made it part of the way there in the course of me messing about fine-tuning the paint schemes. My intention was to paint them as an initial batch of two, then impatience kicked in and I started painting all the purity seals and fiddly bits on Deino before I'd even finished the armour on Valencio. Then I decided I needed to experiment with painting Valencio's chainfist blade yellow, because (in case this weren't already sufficiently apparent) I am an awful, easily-distracted idiot.

Alice gets stuck into some basecoating; my old flatmate
Mike makes a sarcastic comment.

So the first thing I decided I needed to achieve was to catch the rest of the squad up with Bros. V&D. Basecoating red over a black undercoat is, even with the new Citadel Base paints, a bit of a chore so, wonderful boyfriend that I am, I roped Alice into helping me out, to speed the process up. A few tedious warnings from me about paint consistency and not getting it all up in the ferrule fout of the way, and she bashed the initial coats out with aplomb, although Lorenzo has "too much biz going on to paint the armour properly", apparently. This helped speed up the boring bit, which was totally worth the lagers I rewarded her generous assistance with.

This brought the models up to the point at which the photograph at the top of this post was taken. At this point, to give myself a quick win, I rewarded myself for completing all the highlighting last night by finishing off Bro. Deino, as he was about 90% there already. Stripy chainfist aside, this meant that I just needed to paint some seals/scrolls/ropes on the extra three to catch them up to Valencio.

Broey D. 

For a change, I've managed to be reasonably disciplined about stopping myself veering off course (up til now, at least). Now it's reached a point where the paint jobs are starting to take shape and the end is in sight, it's quite satisfying knowing I'll have a complete squad, rather than just a random couple of guys, to show for it once I get there. So we'll see if I can maintain that discipline until Squad Lorenzo is complete.

Anyway, in a hopeful improvement from all the other photos so far, here's Brother Deino, finished. Yeah, I know, I need to drill out the barrels on the Storm Bolter. But other than that, pretty pleased with how he turned out.