Already focussing on Challenge 9

Well, I admit, the Painting Challenge is mightily addictive, and I had ginormous fun with it this year.

So much in fact, I'm already going to look forward and prepare for the 9th edition in 9 months time.

Now, with all the round up posts on the various blogs, and inspired by "BigLee" and his words on Facebook, the trick is to plan ahead instead of the hotch-potch I did this year.  While the hotchypotchy way yielded a fine result, deadlines looked far more looming when compared to an actual battle plan.

Seems this is a wargame but with brushes instead...

To that end, next year I'll be assembling and priming all my figures beforehand.  Something that didn't happen this edition, being drafted in 2 days from the start as I was a first reserve placed participant.  But that will also mean I will be shopping towards that goal, and with a budgetted plan this time instead of at random.

The first thing I'll be doing for that goal is grab me a box of miniatures every month and put them aside until the challenge.  Like I said before, I'm aiming to create a Mongol army (blame Netflix's Marco Polo) and I'll be on and off buying a box of Fireforge's Mongol cavalry just for this goal.

Another era and manufacturer I'm looking at is Warlord Games and the AWI sets.  Next challenge will be the hopefully perfect motivator to expand that small regiment I have painted up into a decent battleforce.  Nothing to fancy, but probably two more infantry regiments, a cavalry unit and a canon section, decent enough to join mega battle events.

The Shang dynasty chinese I painted with this challenge picked my intrest, and to that end I want to build a usable army out of them.  Nothing fancy, but based and "play ready" for the Mortem et Gloriam ruleset, so I'll be ordering the odd bit and bob from 1st Corps / Curtey's Miniatures for those, chariots and dagger-axemen galore.

Other things I have currently lying around and I *might* save up for then are my WW1 Belgians and WW2 Italians, both in 28mm, though it might be those will get painted up sooner.  the Republican Romans I won at this years club raffle for the good cause however will definitly be held back until then.

Those projects will be the "core" on which I'll be setting my goal at for Challenge 9, taking into account how personal life and time has evolved by then.  I'll have to look at what is feasible and work upwards from that point on, and going through periods and projects one at a time instead of mixing them all up and break routines I guess.

Of course, with my goldfish attention span, it'll be hard to keep up the focus, but I'll try it out this year already with aiming to work on the oneside on my ACW orbat, and doing some ECW for the next 'house rules' era at TSA.

Also note the lack of fantasy and sci-fi figures, but that is for a future post as the dilemma still rages in my head...