Wrapping up the challenge

After a hectic 3 months the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge is over again. 72 painters, of which 66 submitted at least a single entry, managed altogether roughly 65,000 points worth of painting. The average between participants was 983 points, which puts me slightly above average with my 1019 points during the three months :) However the top 5 painted over a quarter of all the entries so that tends to raise the average quite a bit. I ended up with fewer entries than last year and less points, but this year round I didn't really participate in the bonus challenges so not so many points gained by "cheating".

As with most my hobby plans, my painting plan for the challenge didn't really survive first contact. I had planned to paint up my Panzerschützen force and 28mm Napoleonics with some Saga and a Ronin warband thrown in for flavor. I also prepped some Warhammer monsters. In the end the only planned stuff that really went forward was the Panzerschützen project with 3 battalions of Middle Guard painted up on the Napoleonics side. The monsters and my vikings and samurai were just put back in the cabinets without much love being received from me. During the challenge my hobby time was cut a bit short with the addition of our new family member so that affected my painting output quite a bit. When going into the challenge I didn't know yet if we would receive the puppy or not so I did plan a bit too optimistically. Still all went rather well with one project nearly finished and the Waterloo project receiving some much needed additions.

Now to my final entry or the "Curtgeld". In order to gain entry to the challenge a participant must submit one themed figure that will be sent to Curt's collection. This year carrying an anti-hero theme I had to come up with some character to paint up. At first I wanted to do Sven Dufva from The Tales of Ensign Stål, but with no suitable minis being on the market I would have had to do quite a bit of converting and sculpting. I went the easy way and bought one of the excellent Dark Sword Miniature's Game of Thrones models. Tyrion would have been my first choice, but I figured it was a bit too obvious so went with Samwell Tarly of the Night's Watch. Overweight, useless in a fight and cowardly behavior makes for an unlikely hero, but he is extremely smart, well educated and can be extremely courageous when needed so ends up acting quite heroically at many points in the series.

Painting wise it's bit of a dull figure with nearly all of his equipment being black. I'm still not really at ease when painting black as getting a good balance between enough highlights and the painting still looking black and not grey, is quite difficult. To counter all the black I decided to make his leather equipment a bit more colourful with reddish tones. On the base I didn't want to go overly wintery so only a slightly frosty ground with some small snow patches here and there.

So with that done it's back to the painting desk then :) No need to worry about submission schedules so should be slightly less stressful :P However the Waterloo centennial is drawing close and our Russia 1812 campaign has gotten underway so there are quite a few painting deadlines to be met.