I spent a few evenings with Hulu on the laptop near my painting desk working on the models' armor and made some decent progress.  I'm still working on some more detailed shading at the moment, but I'm going back and forth between wanting to take the time to do some really detailed shading and getting burnt out working on them.

This has me thinking - I wonder if army painting is causing my abilities to stagnate.  It seems like there's less motivation to push my skill to the next step when in the back of my head I can always fall back to "Well, this just has to look as good as the rest of my models."  Might be time to shake things up a bit.

I've been asked a few times how long it takes me to paint a model.  Most of the time I don't keep track of how much time I spend on a given model - I usually don't want to know how many hours of my life I've spent on this hobby.

Usually I listen to podcasts, music, or DVD's while I paint, and the length of one of the podcast episodes I was listening to happened to correspond to a painting step that shed a pale sickly light on how long I had been at work on my exemplars.

First, a little setup.  Painting exemplar armor is a fairly complex process because I prime in gray.  I tried priming in white on my Knights Exemplar Errant, but the time I saved on the armor plates was quickly lost in the recesses of the model.  From prime to finish, my process goes something like this:

1. Base coat the armor Reaper Master Series Yellowed Bone (usually multiple coats).
2. Two light coats of Applebarrel Goosefeather.
3. Wash the white areas with a thinned 2:1 mix of Goosefeather and Territorial Beige.
4. Blackline the edge of each plate where it has a border that will be metallic.
5. Base coat the metallic areas in GW Boltgun Metal.
6. Paint the metallic areas in a 1:1 mix of Vallejo Game Color Glorious Gold and Vallejo Game Color Polished Gold.
7. Highlight the metallic areas with Vallejo Game Color Polished Gold.
8. Was the metallic areas with a mix of P3 Armor Wash and GW Brown Ink.
9. Touch-ups & final highlights (plates and edges).

The time I spent on step 6 for all 5 Bastions and the Honor Guard pretty much corresponded with the running time of the podcast I was listening to: about 1 hour.  That got my models to this point:

Exemplar WIPs

Unfortunately, I've been able to estimate roughly an hour per coat to get this point; so roughly 8 hours so far.  And there's still plenty left to do, including all of the purple areas after I finish cleaning up the metallics.

Aren't you a little short for an Exemplar?

As a side note, I've found working on the Bastions and Honor Guard at the same time to be mildly humorous.  As medium based models, the Bastions are far and away the largest models in the exemplar ranks of the Protectorate of Menoth, far huskier than any of their compatriots.

On the other hand Juviah Rhoven's supposed Honor Guard are vertically challenged even by Knights Exemplar standards.  Yet as pewter miniatures, the two Honor Guardmen weigh far more than the five Bastions.

Gius and Cassian sure have been packing it away.