Recovery Round 3

(Image used without permission)

I am finally home (again) after over a month in the hospital (minus a brief 6-day trip home). This procedure was only supposed to be a 3-4 day stay, but it turned into 3 surgeries, and a total of 12 days in ICU & 23 days in a regular hospital room.

I still have another week or two of recovery at home. During this time, I am not supposed to lift more than 5 pounds, cough, sneeze, sit up more than an hour at a time (or as tolerated), avoid stairs, or do any strenuous activities.

Over this endeavor, I have had many days to ponder my current projects (plus my desired future ones), and when I get back up to "painting strength" I will be re-prioritizing the "work bench que". However, right now the stairs to my garage (and my workbench) are more of a deterrent than my wife is (who stayed home from work to make sure I don't over exert).

Back on my Feet... sort of

Well its been a week since I came back from the hospital, and I finally had the strength to get out to the workbench last night. I've spent 3.5 weeks on my back after 2 surgeries (there is a chance I am going back for a third next week), so I'm a little week in the legs right now.

I spent a few hours last night and a few hours today painting. I didn't worry too much about completing any challenges or working on armies... I just painted what caught my eye.

The first thing I worked on was a small unit of RT era Penal Legion troops. The sergeant and 3 of the troops were acquired in the 80's and I recently picked up the other 2 troops from Laertes. They will perform double duty as Dark Heresy NPC's and members of a Rag Tag IG army I've been brewing up.

These guys were painted with a base coat, 3 layers of washes (2x Devlan Mud, 1x Badab Black), and then "highlighted" with the base coat.


I also worked a little bit on the wholesale repainting of my BFG Space Marine fleet by repainting a squadron of Hunter class destroyers, and painting 2 Grey Knight Strike Cruisers. I ordered the cruisers from Forge World about 2-3 years ago and I never got around to assembling them. The destroyers were ordered from GW around the same time, along with a pack of Gladius and Nova frigates and all three squadrons were painted straight away.

Battlefleet Gothic on the Brain

Another subject that has been keeping me occupied over the last few weeks is Battlefleet Gothic. Lately I have been trolling Google images and blogs, sketching out some plans for new terrain, and making plans to improve my existing terrain (a bunch of foam balls painted brown and glued on flight stands).

I have some Armageddon Sector ships and some Rogue Trader ships burning to get out of the box and get painted too... I may have to appease the pewter gods later this week.

There are three shelves of my "project organizer" dedicated to BFG: Imperial Fleet, Space Marine Fleet, and Generic (orbital platforms, space stations, rogue trader, terrain). I pulled all 3 shelves out to re-inventory what was done and in progress. Then I started assembling some of the ships from my stash.



[Edit] I wrote this yesterday, and scheduled it to post later today. But I got a little over zealous with things... there are far more projects than I mentioned in my last two posts that I actually worked on. This is a quick list off the top of my head of stuff that that I pulled out and started working on yesterday:

1. Aquilla Lander - I combined some of the smaller pieces of the Crashed Aquilla Lander terrain piece to make 3 pieces total. I traced the shapes onto foam core , and started gluing them to their base.

2. Blastscape - I started trimming the flashing off the edges.

3. Necromunda Objective Markers - I worked a bit on 5 objective markers discussed in this post.

4. Fences & Walls - I fussed around with a WIP cyclone fence project and some resin tech walls.

5. Bases - I trimmed excess plasticard off of WIP urban bases for my Adeptus Arbites squads.

6. Hills - I recently bought a new foam cutter and experimented with cutting out different shapes and textures. I have had a "P" shaped foam cutter for years, but before Xmas, I purchased a straight "I" shaped cutter.

7. Necromunda Terrain - I have a bunch of small (about 60-80 mm) terrain pieces for Necromunda. They are mostly stacks of crates and oil drums that we position around the board to add cover and they are based on square patches of plasticard. I decided it would look better to trim the plasticard to the shape of the actual foot print of the pieces. Since I had bashed some of the terrain to work on my Necromunda objective markers, I had some loose pieces, plus I have some new WIP pieces. I played around with combining different pieces to create both small and large finished pieces.

8. Drones - I assembled (and magnetized) 4 Tau shield drones from my stash, and completed assembly on the 4 converted WIP shield drones. I completed 2 WIP marker light drones, and started 2 converted marker light drones.

So much for taking it easy until surgery!!