A few months ago I decided that I should be working on fantasy pirate related projects. Within days I had surrounded myself with other toy soldier enthusiasts desperate to ply their vicious trade on the miniature seas. So I had to get a miniature sea together for starters.
Firstly, I spent a weekend sitting outside in the sun painting the terrain from the 2011 GW game "Dreadfleet", plus the three monsters in the set. Opinions of the Dreadfleet game tend to be negative and can be read elsewhere, but say what you like about it, the entire production looks absolutely gorgeous. This applies strongly to the terrain in the set.
Those islands and rocks were joyous things to paint: a tiny world full of volcanoes, sacrificial temples, magical stone circles and shipwrecks. The "Dire Straits" had become a tangible location, ready for some buckswashling.
This blog post has more info on those items, for anyone inclined to take a look.
The next thing was an idea that theottovonbismark had about a decade ago. I had zero interest in the idea back then, but times change, and so I took a fairly innocuous piece of turn of the century Citadel Miniatures terrain and created the coastline of "Michael Bay".
Tackling the terrain first in a project like this is a good plan in my experience.
Every game will use the terrain, not every game will require those protagonist models that you want to immediately get stuck into.
Painted miniatures without painted terrain are close to useless anyway, so getting the tabletop ready to represent various idiotically named locations for future battles gave me far more early satisfaction with the project than I would have got from painting a fleet with nowhere to sail. There be
more information and images re the coastline pieces here.
Excluding the three sea monsters from Dreadfleet that I painted while painting the terrain, the first actual gaming pieces that I have finished are... also sea monsters.
The Man O' War "Monsters of the Sea" set of figures was very appealing to me when it was released in 1993 or so, but fantasy naval warfare was not on my agenda at the time. It's still a kick to go back to models like that and slap some paint on them quickly.
More images and info about the Monsters of the Sea here, for those inclined.
Next up... a ship or two, but likely the other set of sea monsters. Then ships for certain.
Thanks for looking!