Happy New Year!

It's time to look back at 2017 and make plans for 2018. One of the best things about running a blog is the ability to sit down and have a scroll through your own collection. While spending time in the realm of other bloggers is often motivating, seeing the progress you made over time can be inspiring on it's own...

...or not.

I think 2017 was the least productive I've been in the hobby in years. I had all of twenty-three posts last year. Two. Three. Some of them had nothing to do with painting. All told, I managed to finish around eighty models, half of which fell into one project. There have been times when I 've painted fifty models in a month. So let's take a look...

My FIRST model painted in 2017 was posted in FEBRUARY, and wasn't even one I kept. I painted this massive Lord of Change model for my brother's Tzeentch army. Games Workshop is releasing Nurgle's counterpart to this monster this year - the Great Unclean One - and I plan to paint up one of these beasts for my own Chaos Age of Sigmar army. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

March was better, and more indicative of my normal output as I managed 18 cavalry for Beneath the Lily Banners. Slightly annoying to me is the fact the second squadron of Clare's Dragoons has been sitting on the corner of my painting table since last March. Maybe this year.

My next post with any painting involved a conversion I built to lead my Warhammer 40k Ork army, inspired by the pending release of the new edition of that game in the summer. Grimteef da Widowmaker was posted in May.

June and July were my most productive months even though I only managed two posts. I painted a force for Donnybrook Dark, an unreleased fantasy version of my skirmish game that I was keeping under wraps. Also again, inspired by the release of the new edition of 40k, I painted up some of the new Primaris Space Marines. I actually managed three more models over the course of the rest of the year that I never got around to basing so I'll get a quick 'n' dirty post out of them sometime soon.

In August I painted one model...  the lad in the center, the Pack Master for my Donnybrook Dark force above.

I don't know what happened in the fall. In November I painted over twenty figures. A handful of Daeleks (really no idea why) and a unit of Oldhammer Slann. In an effort to give my production a kick in the ass I joined the Old World Army Challenge and these models were my first completed entry...

... followed by the Dread Lord Biddliplop, the general of my growing Slann army, in December! This was a fun model to paint and a rare one as even some members of the Oldhammer community commented they were unfamiliar with it. As far as I know it was never featured in any of the old Warhammer books and only appeared in a couple of White Dwarf ads.

That's it. Well, sort of. I also maintain another blog, Stro'Knor Macekiller,  focused on my Oldhammer and Rogue Trader aspect of the hobby and I managed another dozen oldschool 40k adventurer models over there.

So what happened? I'm not exactly sure. There are a couple of small projects I haven't posted. A friend got into Konflikt '47 this fall and I painted a couple of weird war models (that still need weathering) for that to augment my existing US Airborne WW2 army. We actually played a couple of games and I'm planning on expanding my collection in 2018 with some more tanks and few support units like a howitzer team, a sniper, and unit of Firefly infantry (think Airborne with jump packs).

I also became the sole US distributor of Warfare Miniatures. This involved quite a bit of work early in the year setting up the store, organizing inventory, and navigating the joys of being a small business.

I took a trip to Scotland and Ireland in April. First I attended a LoA weekender and met a bunch of guys I'd only interacted with online for two days of gaming in which I proved my ability to murder horses. Then I spent a week exploring the battlefields of my favorite theater for Beneath the Lily Banners with Barry and Bob. I just realized I have at least two more posts waiting in my 'Wandering Around Ireland' series. Guess I need to finish them off soon.

Speaking of Beneath the Lily Banners, Barry and I also managed to finish the third edition of the game, The War of Three Kings. It will be 190-pages, hardback, and available for pre-order in January! Hmm, I haven't mentioned this here at all? I suppose I think anyone interested in this period follows our LoA blog, but maybe I can put together an exclusive preview for the folks who just follow me!

Ok. maybe I wasn't as idle as I thought, but hopefully 2018 will be more productive. In a few days I'll post the obligatory plan for the future which I will probably then proceed to ignore.

Happy New Year!