A completed army...kinda

 January has been a productive month. I received a few extra toys from friends and family at Christmas and this has spurred me to get some painting done. Far too often in the past I've received gifts only to leave them unpainted and sometimes unused altogether;

Scattered through out you can see pictures of my work. You'll have to forgive the poor photos, the camera on my phone died and I'm having to use my inferior tablet camera. Dave from Zen and the Art of Miniature Painting is coming to visit at the end of the month for another weekend of gaming and I'll try to snag his camera to get some decent shots of the whole army.

My Trygon I brought in early 2010 after my house mates at the time bought me some Games Workshop vouchers. I've used it in a handful of games, back before I vowed not to play with unpainted miniatures, but it remains unpainted to this day.

My Tyrannofex and Tervigon I received for my birthday in 2012. I had to go and check my twitter just now to remember the year and the accompanying tweet contained the words 'best get painting'. Almost three years on and I've just got one of them painted and they've never seen the field of battle.

We all have our grey plastic piles of shame, this is not unusual. It's one thing to buy yourself new miniatures and not get round to painting then, but what's played on my mind of late is that other people spent money on some of my miniatures for me, and I've just let them sit there unused. Now while my family may not be able to tell one Tyranid from another, I can, and it's made me feel ever so ungrateful for the gifts I've received.

Well no more.

While some of these older gifts still lay unpainted for now, I vowed this year to get my new miniatures painted as quickly as possible and sure enough within a month of getting them, all of my new miniatures from Christmas were painted, and I even managed to get a little more done.

My Hive Tyrant, finally finished. I have already finished his base. Expect better pictures soon, along with his Tyrant Guard, which I only now realize I have no pictures of

Before I knew it my Tyranid army has reached 2000pts of fully painted miniatures. And it feels good, really good, not only to get a full army completed but also to get new miniatures that move almost directly on to the painted pile and not the grey plastic pile.

I say completed, but this army is never going to be really completed. About this time last year I wrote a post cataloguing my painted and unpainted miniatures, and those of you that remember that will probably realise I still have a lot of unpainted Tyranids. And this is before you take in to account all the new models I want to get. This army was created, after all, with the intention of becoming an apocalypse army.

Having reached this mile stone, however, I thought it might be a good time to take a quick stock check of how many points I've still got to paint and of how much progress I've made over the last year.

My two Zoanthropes and Broodlord, which I painted last year

Counting nothing but the WYSIWYG upgrades and using the latest codex, at the start of last year I had 637pts of painted miniatures. I'm not counting my Hive Tyrant in this even though he was fully base coated. It doesn't sound a lot, but this little lot accounted for over 50 miniatures, being made up mostly of gaunts. Including the Hive Tyrant, this left me with 3026pts worth of miniatures to paint.

In 2014 I finally finished painting my Hive Tyrant after it languished in base coats for almost two years. I also painted my Broodlord, two Zoanthropes, three Tyrant guard and this January I painted my Tyrannofex. This accounts for 753pts taken from my unpainted pile.

In addition I painted my aforementioned new miniatures last month; two Tyranocytes, 12 spore mines, two Mucloid spores, a further two Zoanthropes and a Neurothrope adding a further 465pts on to the painted pile.

My second Tyranocyte and Spore mines. Once again all bases have been properly finished now

For those not doing the math as you go, this gives me 1855pts of painted miniatures. With a few upgrades here and there this brings the army to 2000pts. Of cause this still leaves me with 2273pts to paint but this no longer feels so bad. 

Roughly 700pts of this is simply Genestealers, of which I'm in no rush to paint, and about a further 700pts is made up of just four monstrous creatures, which no longer seems so daunting now that I've got five under my belt.

As I mentioned earlier, I've got a weekend of gaming planned at the end of the month, so I'll get to put these guys in to action then. I'll let you know how they do.