Well, this year has been a bit of a disappointment on the painting front. Not much progress, but there has not been much purchasing progress either. This lack of progress has been driven by me completing my "Pile of Shame" a few years ago, and not deciding what project I want to finish for this year. This process has been made a bit more complicated as my local gaming group has been on a bender playing Games Workshops' Kill Team.
I stopped playing Warhammer 40K at the tail end of 6th edition or so. I think 5th was my personal Peak edition, and I mostly kept up with GW via Specialist Games. In the Kirby years, when they decided to focus only on their core games I completely lost interest in them. They lured me back in for a few teams and the core game with Blood Bowl when they decided to turn back to creating games at Games Workshop. However, they had not managed to lure me in with other games or take more of my money. I was still, semi-interested in their lore and being able to create land, sea, and air campaigns within that lore but was content with my own head canon and using the rules I wanted to play in that world.
Last year, I spent a decent amount of time trying to put together a local game group. I was actually fairly successful, with Castles in the Sky being the go to game. However, that plateaued and the group wanted to attract new members. From there, Kill Team was determined to be the way forward and for the most part it has worked to grow the group and stabilize attendance. To support that effort, I purchased a Corsair Kill Team and have learned the basic rules and have been playing and doing y part to draw in more players ever since.
However, I am personally not keen on chasing the GW dragon so am pretty happy to use my old GW models in new ways. I have used Orks, Eldar Craftworld, Imperial Guard, and Space Marine Kill Teams with my old models. Kill Team is probably my most played game in 2023 so far. However, I wanted to try something a bit different and new. Plus, I really wanted something to paint!
Then, one day when I was organizing my game room I came across an ancient discovery. All the way back from 1988, I found the old Eldar Harlequins. I had probably picked up and painted this set in late 1989, and it showed! Here are some samples of the original paint jobs.
I figured in 2023 I could maybe do a bit better. Therefore, I set about getting them ready for a new coat of paint.
You can see the process and how they turned out on the Blood and Spectacles Blog if you are so inclined:
http://bloodandspectacles.blogspot.com/2023/07/on-painting-desk-back-to-80s.html