Calm After the Storms?

Its been quiet lately around here. With all the snow not many games have been going on and not many people have been making it for paint nights. The north jersey crew seems to be getting along just fine though. Revenant Dan posted a few WIP pics of his tau army and Joey V has been painting and talking strategy on his blog. TQ and his awesome wife Karet have been working on their new WARMACHINE / HORDES armies and managed to somehow get me to buy the new Khador Heavy Warjack. Since I was wading into the world of WARMACHINE for the first time I took the advice of BoLS and picked up the faction deck while I was at it. My brother Jon realized that if he painted his nids he could win the painting prize for our league and is supposedly working his brushes like a mad man after school every day, and I have been steadily working on my new years resolution to not buy any new 40k until I paint all my armies.
Here are a few of the things I have accomplished in the last few weeks.
I painted my 500 point Tau doubles army, and once I figure out how to base them they will be ready to go! I'm thinking a desert theme with some dead looking foliage or something along those lines.I cranked out my 19 remaining genestealers from my old Nidzilla army Once I figure out a basing scheme for them they will be ready to go too! (Notice the recurring theme here?)I finally got my Iron Clad Dreadnought ready to bash in some tanks! I love Dreads! They don't need to be based!And last but not least I painted my first Ultra Marine! This is most likely going to end up as a 3rd company "counts as" Sicariaus for Scott's army. I think the conversion turned out pretty well for a 5 minute butcher job on the black reach captain. I actually based him with a generic looking base because you can't get more generic than smurfs!

Other than that I've been painting a few non GW minis I have sitting around and trying out some new techniques. My wife keeps telling me that my biggest problem with painting armies is that I jsut batch paint them so I can get done. So my reasoning is that if I paint a single mini it will force me to try harder and get away from my "tabletop quality" mentality. On From the Warp, Ron talked about how he has improved and I can see where I have been getting better over the last year, but I still feel I have a lot of room to improve.

I plan on painting my Sisters of Battle army once I get my last few nids painted up but I can't decide on a color scheme. My first squad had blood red armor with bleached bone cloth and gold trim, but lately I have been considering silver armor with red cloth, or white armor with a gold or stone trim and black or red cloth. Every one says white can be a hard color to get right, so it may be just the challenge I need but I do like the look of the silver... Seriously I think I spend more time debating over colors than anything else...

Oh yeah! I can't forget the most important thing I worked on! I made a snow man with my boy!