So, my good lady has deserted me on the boat tonight for the bright lights of Blackpool for her international conference… she is a bit miffed as the last one she went to was in Istanbul… but she is still presenting and I am very proud of her.

Anyway onto the challenge… I was worried I wouldn’t get much done tonight, but I was wrong. I managed quite a bit of total fiddlyness. It slowed me down, but I reckon I will get the Eagle warriors finished tomorrow 🤞.

They are beginning to look very colourful. I don’t know why I did nice feather patterns on the shields…you can’t see them!

Still a fair old bit to do, but getting there.

Off the top of my head… still to go:

Eyes on the helmets

Blades on the maquahuitl

Ornamentation and feathers on the helmets

Precious metal on the back banners, both shaft and tops (yeah I know it probably wasn’t gold, but I cannot think of another way to paint them)

Any other bits of ornamentation I can find

Finally – shield designs

The one thing that is really nice about doing a blog and taking photos for it is that it shows progress… a few days ago they looked like this…

It is really funny, I really disliked doing the Scalian cavalry and struggled to get them finished. These are way more complicated and I am loving doing them… perhaps it is the fact that there is a bit more about them that makes them more appealing.

I suppose I have made the back banners a bit brighter than the codices show… an example of Mendoza below shows some good examples. I really should have done one if my command troops white, the one representing a skeleton looks cool.

Interestingly enough none of the above figures are carrying a maquahuitl, all have the tepoztopilli (sorry showing off now – ain’t google great 😂).

Supposedly the last of these original weapons were destroyed in a fire in the 1880’s. I have seen other ones but they were probably post conquest.

Another of the Codex Mendoza shows more images of suit wearers… but more importantly it shows the progression of the warrior priests

This one is one of my favourite images, it shows the progression through the ranks

One started off the military career as a porter and messenger then sent off to war as an apprentice, once you got your first captive you got to carry a maquahuitl and wear a mantle of specific design… everyone would know of your prowess by the way you looked.

So tomorrow… finish of the Eagle warriors and make a start on the Jaguar bases. On the whole the Jaguar warrior back banners are a bit more simple, so shouldn’t take as long to do.

Things really slowed down a bit tonight, the back banners and the painting over bits that the contrast paint got too certainly made a difference.

Nonetheless I am part way through another nine warriors. These aren’t going to win any prizes. My aim is speed, but with a bit of skill involved. As an example I haven’t bothered painting the belt. I have left it the same colour as the Tlahuiztli. Loincloths are all the same colour blue to save time…all apart from one, I forgot to repaint the loincloth on the yellow suit so his has turned out green.

I haven’t decided on a colour for the banner poles, I am thinking a neutral brown or cream to let the brighter colours stand out.

Whilst having a mooch in a box I found a bit of my leather carving.

It is half of the Aztec two headed snake I made for my good lad (the other half is on the back). She is deserting me for a week to go to a conference in Blackpool. I hope being a single dad will give me some time to paint the rest of the Aztec elites.

So I thought I had better get going on my self imposed challenge of getting the Aztecs finished in 7 days…

As the command base already had one of them in Black I thought I might as well start with them.

So here we have the shield view. To be honest I think the blue shield needs redoing as it is not really working for me. It may grow on my by the end of the week though.

The front view looks like this…

As you can see, I made a start on the Eagle warriors in the background.

I painted up the Tlahuiztli suits in various shades, four of the nine ended up as brown. I think the proportion works. As mentioned yesterday, the back banners are going to be brightly coloured so they should brighten up the drab brown.

The brown I used was the Guilliman flesh contrast paint, it is a nice reddish brown. Tomorrow I will crack on with them and batch paint to some extent. The three I painted today seemed to take a very long time – probably about the same amount of time as this lot…

There was a lot of colour changing so that slowed things down loads.

I had another look at Samurai today, but I also looked at some other manufacturers. These were Two Dragon, Museum Miniatures , Peter Pig and Essex Miniatures. But to be frank, I still like the Tin Soldier ones. The aesthetics appeal to me, if anyone can come up with some other 15mm Samurai that I can have a look at then I will more than likely go with these ones (I probably will anyway, but you never know 😜). The only thing is there are no archetypal ninja in the TS range…. yeah I know they didn’t always run around in Black throwing shuriken about willy-nilly, but hey.. you know NINJA!!!

Tomorrow I have shit loads of school work to do, but hopefully will have time to finish at least one of the Eagle Warrior bases… we shall find out tomorrow…

I went a bit mad tonight and finished the commoners…

This is them all finished. Batch painting worked an absolute treat with these guys, they are so simple a design and I don’t mean this as a negative, it simply means they were a doddle to paint.

It was a simple case of Contrast Skeleton Horde over the white undercoat.

Blood angels red was used for the loin cloth and cockade for the feathers. Leander yellow for the feathers and snakebite leather for the wood on the weapon (I am too tired to remember how to spell the actual name) and sling. Abbadon Black did the hair and obsidian and Army Painter Wolf grey the shield rim. I added Bassilicum grey to the shield front which was different to the last lot…

But you know what, I don’t care 😉 Aztec shields were part of the tribute culture, so one lot came from somewhere else.

The back of the shield was done in Army Painter Oak Brown.

So that was the easy ones over with, I now have a week to do the rest…

The extremely complicated ones. I am going to do a mix of plain and decorated Tlahuiztli suits. Some or all of the jaguar warriors will be in spots (I must be bloody mad) the eagle warriors are probably going to be coloured as a brown suits may look a bit boring ( back to Mendoza et al to have a look). The guy in black is going to have the starry sky Tlahuiztli and shield… basically black with white dots.

Twenty one figures in seven days… so three a night, as there are three on each base then it is a base a night.

I have had a quick search and the few images I can find of the Eagle warriors is a brown suit. I will just have to go mad with the back banner and shield 😁.

As a total aside… The nice people at Tin Soldier came back with the contents in the army pack… question is do I go early or late… something to ponder.

So I got these sprayed earlier and set to work on the skin tones.

These really are lovely miniatures to paint. There was a bit of vent to knock off the bottom of some of the peasant shields and a couple of weird lumps on the end of a couple of Macuahuitl, but to be honest I forgot to ‘clean’ these up and sprayed them before remembering. Apart from the things above they are pretty much as they came out of the packets. I am going to speed paint these, like the other ones as I want them done, not because I don’t like them like the lizards, but because I want to get onto the Conquistadors and then get some Samurai.

https://tinsoldieruk.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=186_207&zenid=vc6tb07rr7gdhuff9qt9grprm7

This is the 15mm lot, there are some 25mm ones too with some different poses. I was considering a 15mm army then enough 25mm miniatures to do a couple of Buntai for the Ronin skirmish game.

I was just thinking there the Aztecs are to replace the exact same ones I got rid of probably twenty years ago. The Samurai will replace another long gone Army. I reckon if I buy some Museum Miniatures crusaders and some Essex 15mm Romans then I reckon I will have pretty much got back to my youth… not quite I would need a 400 figure Galatian army and a similar number of confederate infantry, but near as dammit.

So anyway the challenge is on, I want the Aztecs finished by 9th September which incidentally is my good lady’s birthday. So actually I want them done by Sunday 8th.

She is off Gallivanting to an archaeological conference… it is not exactly as exciting as Istanbul, but Blackpool must have some things going for it. She gets off the boat on the the 9th so I had better think of a suitable gift🎁 .

My package from Tin soldier came, lots more Aztec Goodness…

The thing that suddenly struck me is that errr… My reinforcements actually outnumber the first group… whoops!

So I have six bases of slingers, three of peasant with hand weapon, three of Eagle warriors with back banners and the same for the jaguar warriors plus a command unit. Forty seven miniatures in total.

Tin Soldier also put in a few Samurai samples… I really do like them… I wonder what my next 15mm army or two is going to be 🤔.

So here we have Samurai with katana, a mounted monk, an Ashigaru and Samurai armed with a bow and a lowly peasant with a selection of smacking implements.

I really do like these, they remind me of the 25mm Dixon Samurai range which I always wanted, but never could afford when I was a kid. By time I had the disposable income I was playing at a club where we ran a 15mm campaign.

You will have noticed that I glue my miniatures down before painting, well I do in 10 and 15mm. When I first got my Pendraken 10mm I painted them individually glued to a lolly stick and it seemed to take forever. A few months into conversations in the forum and a guy call Nic Harwood showed how he painted his armies. He did it by glueing everything down to begin with and then took it from there. I tried it and really liked the method. To be honest because of the 3D nature of the minis, it can be tricky to get a brush in, especially with shit loads of miniatures on a base. Which is why I stick to two or three 15mm and maximum of five in 10mm. If things are really close together because of the shape of the mini then I glue the outer ones down and paint the other separately…Mainly this is if I need to do shield designs or the like.

This method isn’t for everyone as, if I am really being brutally honest it is, in my case, used for speed painting and will never ever win any competitions. On the up side it does get minis on the table. If you look through all my 10 and 15mm blog post you will see that I have used this method throughout.

All off the above were done the same way apart from, ironically enough, the Aztecs that became my horde troops for my HOTT force. These were painted individually as I was messing about one day and decided to do a skirmish force of one mini equals one man. I added them in to show the differences between the two.

Oh and I promise to finish the Scalians… honestly Ponestly!

Well when I say all done I am considering getting the command pack and some more peasants. As in reality there were more than likely lots more peasants than there were nobles. I will look to get a couple of hand weapons and then one of slingers.

So that is them all done and awaiting some form of flock.

I am quite pleased with how fast these were finished. From bare metal to finished in seven days which for me is a bit speedy. The models really helped and I think the Contrast paint speeded things up too.

I also made a start on the Scalians, by a start I mean superglued the mounts to the 30×40 bases. I had exactly the right amount left. My Conquistador cavalry will have to wait until I buy some more.

The riders come in three bits… legs are attached to the mount, the body is glued to the legs and finally a separate tail needs to be attached. as with the swordsmen, the shields are separate.

I will have four bases of bow and four of spears. It should make a nice force, but because I am like I am I have been hunting for 3D printable dinosaurs … as if I haven’t got enough to paint already!

I survived my first day in the new job, still another to go before the kids turn up.

I eventually got round to going out to the shed to get my pot of GW Abbadon Black… I swore, but more of that in a minute. I needed the black to paint the hair and obsidian shards of the warriors which I managed to do tonight.

There is certainly less white showing on these now. I need to put the pupils in on the suit wearers helmets and the gold/jade accouterments. The arrows on the archers and the slings on the slingers, but there isn’t really that much left to do apart from the bases. sadly I didn’t get them finished, but it was a self imposed deadline so it isn’t really a biggy.

As for the black… I can honestly say I detest with a vengeance the GW paint pots, I really liked their old pots as they sealed nicely and the paint stayed wet…. to prove a point, I am still using the hex pots and the round ones from before that.

Anyway out to the shed I skipped to get my pot of black and it had fallen over….

The nice black shape is the paint from within the pot, nice and dry, luckily it was in its own little compartment so it only affected the black pot. No matter how careful you are, the seal just won’t stay clean, yeah I know I could attack the pot with a baby wipe after each session to clean it up, last time I did that I was cleaning paint off the furniture as well as the pot. The above is my second or possibly third pot of Abbadon black, the Sunburst yellow is my first and only one. To be fair the temperatures in the shed were hitting 30 C so perhaps the liquid expanded a bit and cracked the seal, I had a brown in a similar state (but much less escaped).

Talking of paint… As I had run out of (or near as dammit run out of) white spray paint I popped into my auto shop to get some more, a snip at £4.99 for 500ml. Gw is £10.49 for 400ml so a bargain in anyone’s money. It was then that the chap said it was buy two get one free, so for under a tenner I got three spray cans to keep me out of mischief for a while.

These cans work really well, if the temperature is down I warm them up a bit first, but to be honestI have been using them for a year and have had no problems. I get four colours, white, black, grey and a red colour.

Hopefully the first day in the new job won’t be too bonkers and I will get the Aztecs finished tomorrow. I picked up sixteen Scalian cavalry today and they be next on the list. Probably the Conquistadors after that.

Well as a I was cracking on with the Aztecs I thought I would have a mooch at what was left in the Aztec box…

The word ‘Bum’ or possibly something more expletive ushered from my lips…

So there are about 60 conquistadors to paint and roughly 20 packets of 8 miniatures so another 160 Aztecs. Problem with the Aztecs is that they are tiny compared to the Tin soldier ones… I got these before the Tin soldier ones as the local club were going to run a Conquistador campaign which never got off the ground. To be honest I think I will get rid of them as they will never get done, not helped by the fact that I am negotiating getting 16 Scalian Cavalry tomorrow.

I didn’t get a whole lot done on the Aztecs this evening apart from painting designs on the shields. Some of them are copied from the codices and others are made from my head!

I also repainted the peasant shields a grey colour.

I was going to paint all the embellishments on the suits gold, however on reading up a bit more they preferred jade to gold so I may change my mind… first I have to find out what shade of green jade is!

I sadly didn’t get these finished today, but I did make some progress on them. After buying some green, I decided to leave the feathers yellow. Still a very long way to go, but getting there. Still need to do the various shield designs amongst other things.

I took my unopened pot of red back and swapped it for the green, I also got the really bright blue and for some reason known only to myself a pot of orange. What makes it worse is that it is exactly (or near as dammit) as the orange I mixed for the Cuachic veterans – you can see them 4th row back – spot the difference in the shades of orange!

I am thinking about doing the shield rims in an off white colour as I do quite like the contrast with the field colour. The advantage is that I can then use a contrast colour to change it as required.

I will see how far I get tomorrow.

On the job front I can now officially resign from my current position and take up the role of head teacher (principal) as my disclosure documents arrived today. I am officially squeaky clean, well apart from my one and only speeding ticket.