Next time when someone suggests to me to quickly paint 64 celtic warriors and then get on with the regular schedule I'll do the been there, done that routine. Except it doesn't work quite so well as a monologue.

I bought the Renegade celtic archers and slingers box (well, technically they didn't come in a box) because I really needed them. I didn't have any archers and a couple more slingers sure couldn't hurt. But then I also bought the Warlord plastic celt box to see how they'd work out. 40 more warriors can't hurt right? Well, not the army but they did play havoc with my painting schedule and motivation.

Sixty-four 28mm figures were just too many for me. Especially given that I really didn't like the Warlord ones. They're irritating to assemble, you don't really have all that much options -- you're just spending time because the technical limitations of plastics wouldn't let these figures be cast in fewer pieces. Most of the bodies only go with a certain set of legs, limiting your real options to choice of head and shield (of which there are far too few in the box).

In addition, they are frustratingly fragile. This is a feature that turned me off the original LoTR plastics long ago and here it is alive and well. I broke one of the realistically thin swords while painting. It's too thin to glue back on. No problem, I thought, I'll just drill out the hand and insert a wire spear... no such luck, the hand is too small for a 1mm drill bit. This warrior will just have to bash the enemy with his pommel. Screw scale accuracy, give me figures that can actually take some handling. Hands with actually visible fingers wouldn't hurt either (some of these suffer from the mittens for hands -syndrome, yet another technical limitation of the plastics).

The idea being to get these guys ready fast, I just blocked the basic colors and game them a wash of Vallejo sepia shade. This had worked pretty well with my Russians and even the modern British in desert DPM, but I wasn't too happy with the results here. It's all just too muted and small details like the gold torcs are mostly lost under the wash.

The saddest bit is that I really like the Renegade figures. Because they were lumped in with the others, I was too burned out to really give them the attention they would have deserved.

As for the fast bit... I started assembling these figures June 14th. Even figuring I was away for a month, it's still two active months to finish these figures. Goes to show that if your heart is not in it, nothing else really matters.

Live and learn, I guess. In the future I'll try to limit batches to 20 figures or so.

P.S. The figures inventory for the celts is not yet updated because I forgot the updated list in my other pants' pocket. Really.

P.P.S. Now, where did I put my box of 44 plastic saxon warriors? I'll just do them quickly and...

maxxon