Rockfish’s Hobby Year in Review

2020 was a strange year, I basically spent all my free time either painting or biking what with the apocalypse and all. This weirdly resulted in my most hobby productive year period, which is a bit unfortunate given I was planning on actually going out and doing people things after being stuck at home with a broken back last year.

The year actually kinda started off as I intended, I got a decent number of 40k and even Titanicus games in, including my one and only tournament attendance! I was also fortunate enough to have played a few games of 9th while it was still nice outside for garden hammer, so I at least got to experience some of the new stuff. In the last couple of weeks I have even managed a few TTS games of Infinity, which has been pretty enjoyable if time consuming in part through being new to the game and part TTS jank.

I got a decent amount done I think… Credit: Rockfish

Forgive the poor image quality, but as you can see I have been fairly prolific on the painting side of the hobby. I end up painting stuff for six distinct game systems, twelve factions, and a lot of models!

Tervigon. Credit: Rockfish
Tervigon. Credit: Rockfish

The first half of the year was a big mix of stuff, I added to my existing nids, cleaned out my backlog of assorted 40k stuff, as well as starting forces for Adeptus Titanicus and Necromunda. Its hard to narrow down a theme for that part of the year, it was mostly just whatever was relevant to games I wanted to play or lack of ability to order stuff in the initial chaos of the pandemic.

Salamanders Primaris Techmarine. Credit: Rockfish
Salamanders Primaris Techmarine. Credit: Rockfish

The back half of the year was a bit more consistent, I mostly worked on necrons and marines up until December. Without the incentive of playing games it has been a bit harder to muster desire to paint more for those two factions, so I have been doing sensible things like starting another army, craft worlds eldar in this case, and a entire new game system – infinity.

Favorite models of the year

I thought I should probably throw in mentions of some of the models I thought were pretty notable from my last year of painting, some are not exactly the best work of the year but I like them nonetheless!

5 – Skink Starpriest

Skink Starpriest. Credit: Rockfish
Skink Starpriest. Credit: Rockfish

This fellow was from early in the year and was relatively basic, but I liked the feathers a lot.

4 – Commander Shadowsun

Shadowsun. Credit: Rockfish
Shadowsun. Credit: Rockfish

I cannot deny that I like my tau scheme, and of the handful I did for the army this year Shadowsun was a clear stand out.

3 – Foetid Bloat-drone

Foetid Bloat-drone. Credit: Rockfish
Foetid Bloat-drone. Credit: Rockfish

I tried out a ton of things on this model, like mixing the pus into water effects to make the drips from the guns and the fading trails in the swamp below, so I thought it deserved the a mention!

2 – War Walker

War Walker. Credit: Rockfish
War Walker. Credit: Rockfish

Not the fanciest model by any means, but it came out so clean I could not deny it this spot.

1 – Szarekh, The Silent King

Szarekh, The Silent King. Credit: Rockfish
Szarekh, The Silent King. Credit: Rockfish
This is kind of spoiled by the featured image but there is no way I was not gonna put this guy right at the top, its just a insanely cool model and I think mine came out pretty good! You can see more about how to paint this guy in my How to Paint Everything: The Silent King article.

What’s next?

I still have a handful of 40k kits hanging around that I should get to before too long, but who doesn’t? At the moment I am pretty big into infinity for both painting and playing, but some of that is just because it’s the only game I actually feel like playing on TTS. For stuff I have yet to purchase, I would like to build out my Titanicus forces a bit more as the game is pretty fun and there is a solid player base around where I am.

I am also hoping to get some in person games in once the spring rolls round, hopefully covid is not nearly as bad where I am by then but that is by no means a certainty.

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