 I'm cheering for Tom and for Vince. I'm a big fan of the show. Thank you. That can be a danger zone, but yeah, every time you see me look over here, I'm looking at Vince's forehead. We have padding separating us. Who sounds terrible? That's the question. They said you sound terrible. Perfect. How is my video? Is it better or is it still terrible? Hold on. Okay. Oh man, Vince is cutting out of here already. I've got to carry the show. I mean, I don't know. We'll be close the door as well, further separating our voices. Always. Hey, A plus quality material here, folks. That's what we're doing. Okay, awesome. So Vince is going to work on that. We're going to jump right into the news. At the top, we have our rumor engine, folks. And so now for those that you guys can see it, it is not up on the screen. Thanks, Vince. So good. So good. Okay. Well, we're not going to do the rumor engine yet. It's probably not anything important. Maybe it's an old thing. Who knows? We're going to move on. It's a hat. Who knows. Exactly. So we had the New York Game Fair expo thing. Was it New York? I don't know. Yeah. And we had some new models dropped. Iron Jaws warbands for Underworlds. Did you, Sam, did you see these models? I did. Yeah, yeah. I was, I saw them the day they were released on the internet. Super cool. Love the shirtless dude. And it's always good to have a variety of sculpts to pepper into your Warhammer army in the midst of, you know, semi monopose kits and all that. So I love to do with the beak, like the weird, like that helm is just so not iron jaws. I love everything about it. It makes me want to like green stuff, a cloak around him, and make him look like the like one beaked dude from like the Middle Ages plague. You don't know. By the way, can everybody hear me okay now? Hopefully my audio is fine now. I hear you. Indeed. What were your thoughts, Vince, on the New Iron Jaws models? Yeah, they're fine. They didn't blow me away. I mean, but it's cool. I like the Brutes. The Brutes are some of the best models in the range. They were always some of the best models in the range. And these are more good additions to that. So I'll probably pick them up and just use them as some more Brutes. That's cool. Yeah. Actually, I'd use two of them as Brutes. And I'd use one of them, the sort of naked guy with his arms up in the air as another war chanter. I knew that. Yep. Yeah. He just screams to be made into a war chanter. Yeah. No, I agree with that. What we also had, it's like the New Iron Jaws set of releases. We also had the White Dwarf battalions that dropped. Vince, obviously, you've been playing Iron Jaws for the last couple of years and you are prepped on all things Iron Jaws. What are your thoughts on them? Yeah, I like it a lot. Hopefully now my sound is coming in fine. We'll keep trying. We'll keep adjusting. There's one good battalion in there. And there's two that nobody's going to take. But the one is actually interesting. It's an interesting alternative to like the Iron Fist. You can actually fit both it and an Iron Fist in the same thing, but then you basically lose all your war channers. So that's a non-starter. The Boss Fist, it's not super competitive, but it could be super fun. I'll say it that way. Okay. It's a good casual, if nothing else. Yeah. No, that's fair. That's fair. Yeah, I love Iron Jaws. I love that they're getting some love. And so we're talking about First Armies and I'm like my son's building one right now. We're in the process of putting together a mall crusher. And so I always love seeing more IJ stuff. I'd love an airship. Probably not going to get that. Sure. You've got to make it happen, man. Exactly. It's time to convert some terrain again. So that's most of our IJ news for this week. We had a Luminath article drop. And so now we were talking about horses traveling at the speed of light. And yeah, Sam, what are your thoughts on the new elves? I have a mixed opinion about it. Generally, I like it. I was telling Vince this morning, they kind of remind me of a lot of the old Rackham sculpts. There's kind of a high elf-ish army within that mythos. There are parts of Teslas that I or Techless that I like. Vince and I were going around about people got mixed opinions on that. I love that the creature has a human face. It reminds me of a kind of a medieval demon, the way they would imagine things like what about a bear with a human face and like a scorpion's tail. It's all just animal parts and human parts. Very boshish. Yeah, exactly. Everyone was bosh. Yeah. I'm into it, man. As long as there's new models, I don't think I'm going to build that army. But being more of a painter, there's a couple of cool releases that come along with everything. So I'm always just kind of eager to see, you know, I like that the Hollow Man that's cool. Yeah. That's good. Vince, I know that you had some thoughts about the weird poses on the horses. Obviously, the article this week was about the horses. What were your thoughts? Yeah, I did. So let me say two things. One, somebody in the comments is saying, Sam, that they do hear the little weird whistle. So try like unplugging your headset and just going at your speakers or something with your microphone or uncrossing cables or something. I don't know. Play around with it for a minute and then you'll talk and we'll see if it fixes it because it shouldn't be. I think I've handled everything out here and it's not picking up anything. So it's something that's interference. It's not me. That's all that matters. Cool. I can't hear Tom now. Let me try plugging my earphones into this. So we keep plugging things into things. That's what I do. I'll watch the comments and then we'll figure it out because we can't hear the whistle. So it's very hard for me to diagnose because it's not coming through for any of us. It's all just very normal sound. It's got to be on the actual line. There you go. It's gone. You got it, Sam. Whatever you did, it worked. I got it. You got it. Yeah. All right. Let me plug back because now I can't hear Tom. I can hear Vince because he's in the other room. One second. This is literally, this is seconds of time. All right. So anyway, I can hear him. Told you. There we go. All right. Cool. All right. So my thoughts on the horsey poses. Yeah. It's like, I knew they were realistic to have the arms way kicked out like that, like they're in chorus line, but... Yes. Yeah. It's a weird snapshot to take, right? Exactly. Like every miniature is a cinematic moment. Yes. And at what point do you want to capture this? You know, do you want to say, tell them to say cheese or do you want to take the picture after everyone has relaxed their faces and they think that the picture has been taken? You know what I'm saying? Yeah. I don't mind so much the one with like his legs kicked out. The chaos warriors have a bit of that going on to this full extended extension of the limb. Yeah. It just feels so extreme, right? Like it's just a weird moment to capture it. Like, I get it that you can watch the frame by frame and a horse's leg does look like that for a millisecond as they're running, but that's just not how we think of a horse galloping, right? It's one of those times where yes, it's reality, but okay. I think there's a larger trend that we've seen amongst the sculptors of wanting to like really capture the mobility in the action for GW stuff. And like, it reminds me of like the donkey face on the Magister. Like the Magister of Hammer, Aventus Hammerstrike, like the Stormcast, like the Mounted Stormcast guy nobody takes. And the donkey that is, it's like lips are all like screwed up, like it's braing. The celestial drake aligned? That's the character? No, no, it was the, what was he called? Was it just Aventus? Yeah, Aventus Firestrike. He turned with the one on the toralon? He's the big on the toralon. Yeah, but yeah, here we go. I'm going to pull it up because this is like, I feel very strongly about this. The like, I think we've seen this type of like attempt at action and sometimes they're, they're capturing it a lot like more broccable than others. That dude in his face, that donkey face. I don't mind it. That's what you're saying though. It does look like that, but it's like the dip of the lips. I don't know. Anyways, I say all that to say that like, there are some aspects that like, I love the dramatic pose here of it perched, but then the face there, something just strikes me as a little bit off and I see that like, with lots of miniatures where they're pushing the boundaries where sometimes they really get it. And then sometimes I'm like, it just doesn't feel right for some reason. Yeah. I mean, that dude looks like a horror movie, like the, the scary little girl ghost in a horror movie where her face is like, and gets real long. And that's why I like it. Yeah. It's, it's like a monstrous distortion. You're crossing line between like true anatomy and animation. Yeah. And that might be like looking, you know, talking about Tesla or Techless again. He's like a Castlevania boss. Like I'm, I'm the monster. This is Techless. He just floats around in the pose. And then he just stops and zaps you. But I like that. I like where it's going. I like the high fantasy, you know, just I like the freedom. Yeah. No, and I love that they're pushing the boundaries. And I, and we've seen that with the luminous, like I'm still super mixed. I've decided to, despite my love of high elves completely, like rain in all expectations. So like, I put like all of my like hype under a basket. And then I'm going to wait and see the whole range. I'm going to take a look at the rules. And then I'm going to be like, and I'll make a decision then. Yep. Better from the top of the mountain and looking down. Like I just, I've been on this roller coaster too many times. And so like, well, we'll just wait and see. We'll see what happens. I like it. It's a good attitude, Tom, way to not build yourself up. And then inevitably have the what we call the Tom roller coaster happen. Sure. Thanks. The Tom coaster. And then Vince, you're teaching some classes or something, right? Mr. Tom's Wild Ride. I've got like 50 of these to go through, Tom. It's going to be a while. This is the rest of the show now. It's just me making fun of your emotional turbulence that happens when you, when an army comes out. So I'm glad to see this. You taking a passionate man. Thank you. Thank you. The whistling is back by the way. I don't know who's doing it, but I think it's from the bounce around and Vince is in a wooded room. You have many hardwood floors and a rich mahogany here. And that could be what it is. I hear it too whistling around. Now it's gone. Yeah. Now it's gone. There's going to be waves of 10 people saying it's a back and then it's gone. It's fine. It's back. It's gone. Yeah. It's just like my emotional roller coaster. I'm excitable. What can I say? So when I'm passionate about something, when something raises my ire, I generally do something about it. Yeah, man, you've got the flame inside. I like that. It's a burning brazier for Warhammer. I'm excited about this stuff too. I started to swear I'm becoming impassioned. No, it's good. It's good. Vince, are you actually doing the show or what's going on? Yeah, man. I'm trying to answer everybody's things. Like now I tried to fix the light for people and when I tried to fix the light, then it's all dark. So I'm going to scoot around here. Geez, people. I'm doing our, we're doing our best here, okay? You know, trying to bring in Tom. It's really all Tom's fault. It's sure. Sure. It's always my fault. What can I say? Yeah. Now I'll be lit strongly from the side and that's fine. Hey, I'm like, I'm in a yellow submarine. So I can have dramatic side lighting as well. There you go. Is that better? Let's talk about the luminous. Yes. Okay. Yeah. Many people are saying the whistles back. So I don't know. I have no idea. Something, something to say on. It's not my fault. That's all I'm going to say. No, it's not. I don't know. It's not Tom's fault. Let it be clear. It's my house. I want to be honored. Like, hey, by the way, here's the news piece. This is the first week that we are on, we're on fiber for my internet. So there should be no bad, like, connection stuff anymore. I should not have bad internet. It's not that. It's got to be something to do with your headset wires, Sam. That's probably what it is. And then I can't hear anybody if I, if you, probably. All right. I unplugged my headset wires. Is there a whistle carrying through as my voice goes in and out of a speaker into a microphone? No. Good. There's a little bit. Hold on. I hear it again. I intentionally whistled that time. Yeah. I don't know. I think it's Vince. That's what I'm saying. I think it's Vince. Yeah, I can't hear anything. Does somebody have a mobile phone next to their like computer or microphone? Not anywhere close. It's far away. My phone's over sitting next to me. All right. It's not you, Sam. There you go. I said it's still there. I just, no, I just plugged my headphone in for a second. I think it is me. Damn it. Sorry. Sorry. You guys aren't hearing what Vince is talking, are you? Now that I can see anyone's comments, I should pull this up live and I can see everyone's comments. Rumor has it, Nicholas. Rumor has it. Oh, geez. Oh, geez. Well, I've got a solution. I can walk in there, Sam, and give you my headset if it's your headphones, or you could try to run it out of your speakers. You should be fine since we're not both in the room. You shouldn't need a headset. You should be able to unplug your headset and just use your speakers. Yeah, let's try that. There you go. We're professionals. That's what we do. Yeah. Well, we're playing with audio because, again, we can't hear any of that. It all sounds completely normal to us. And there's no whistle. War whistle weekly. Nice. Yeah. I think it's been I'm going to say it. I can see you in my living room, Vince. Dude, let me just, should I just come in there? Well, then we'll hear Tom. The other option is I come back in there and we go garden state. That's the other option. I'm just going to come in and stand next to you because I like the living room. There's a fine German shepherd painting in the background. I'll pull that into focus. Let me just come in there and join you. Okay. I think that's the right answer. Did he mute himself before he left? No, but I'll mute him. There he is. Here, we'll do this. I'll take Sam. Hold on. In the hangout. Nope. Stop that. Give me my little button. Nope. You've got to go mute yourself. Just exit your hangout. Just exit it. So I'm shutting it all down. Thanks, Adam. I agree. I blame YouTube. It's fantastic. Actually, it sounds a lot better. Whatever just happened. Okay. It really was, Sam. Okay. So let's talk about your show. You're joking about how we weren't going to have to get to do this. You need the other one. You need this one. Dude, here we go. All right. I love this. So now we're now we're doing the garden state. Now all whistling should be gone. See the comments there. Oh, God. It's gone. It's fixed. Oh, AOS coach. Table top minions. Awesome. Emily. We're super classy. That's all I'm saying. Look, it only took the new section to fix this, like a half hour. That's fine. Perfectly normal. Yeah, you're all welcome. Hey, I kind of still hear it. I'm not going to say it though. I mean, whatever. We're going to deal with it. Okay. This is what it is now, people. Damn, I'm just a ghost behind you. Yeah. This will light me up. There you go. I told you, I think it's Vince. I don't know what it would be if it's me, but okay. Let's just keep going. Good day, coach. I love your stuff, man. Okay. So, Vince, talk about your classes. All right, sure. Oh my gosh, there's a light bulb. Now we're actually lit. What is going on here? Behold, the Luminous. All right, the Luminous Comet. I'm teaching classes the week after Warhammer Fest. It's in at Darksphere in London. Would love to have people come sign up. So that would be fantastic. We're going to do two two-day classes. And we're going to focus on what one, two days going to be on characters. One's going to be on monsters. I'm also doing a follow-up class, a big night class, Imperial Night Class in Michigan in June. So if you're in Michigan, come visit there or in the surrounding states. Sam, you have a class as well. You should talk about that. I do. You can visit my big cartel, bigcartel.com slash Sam Lenz artwork. I'm teaching a class in Michigan as well, but that's in April. And I've got class in Colorado and Wisconsin, Virginia, working on one in Portland. But you can see them all listed up on my big cartel page. Awesome. There you go. So the point is, is that that's what Sam, that's what I'm doing here. Sam and I were just planning curriculums. That's, that's all it was. Just many days of curriculum planning. We've become close, as you can tell from this Garden State situation we're currently involved in sharing a headset. I'm going to get Bluetooth headsets just for this situation and bring them with me. Neversod coming. All right. It's like, it's like the time you spent like $150 streaming our, uh, one of our shows in like France or something like that because you're tired of their internet. Yeah. Bluetooth headsets, but cool. Good. Good, good. Well, we'll work on it. I'll work on that. I just need to talk more. And I think the, the kettle whistle goes away the more I talk. So I think that this is just, this is the universe's way of saying that I need to have a bigger role in the show. So in light of that, Vince, what side do you have any pick of the weeks? Sure. Yes. Yes, I do. So for my pick of the week, I want to direct everybody to, to Sam's Twitch because we all did an episode and hung out yesterday myself and Sam and Uncle Adam himself from tabletop minions. We had a fun time hanging out for a couple hours. I'll throw the link in the description. So go check that out. And I will change it so the VOD is not subscriber only after this. So you guys can actually watch it, but do subscribe. That's right. Please. Thank you. All right. It's gone. It's gone. Oh, the whistle? Yeah. Okay. I don't know what, I don't know what position you're in or what's going on, but just hold that right there. Okay. I think I know what it was, but that's fine. I know exactly what it was, but we'll keep going. It's cool. It's not a thing we can fix. It's just a thing that's there. Okay. Awesome. Okay. So, Sam, do you have a pick of the week? I want to pick you guys. I am thankful for the thing that we're all watching right now, but I'm also thankful for all the other creators that it's brought to light, like AOS Coach, Doom and Darkness, Rerolling Ones. I'm going to miss some tabletop minions. Yeah, man. I'm just thankful for the show. And I've been playing Aegis Sigma recently, so I'm extra thankful for all the information and content. I'm 10 games in, boys. Nine wins. Nice. That's a heck of a winning streak with Stormcast, nonetheless. So take that stats. Yeah, yeah. Bucking the trend. You just don't go outside of your local meta. That's right. Yeah, exactly. Play people you can dominate regularly. The guys on the cover of the box are really good. I don't know. I'm surprised. I think the numbers are wrong, clearly. Check's out. For myself, Nico, friend of the show, put out another part in his Activation Wars blog series on AOS Short's site, until I want to promote that for us. It summarizes, not just because it links to our show, but it summarizes a lot of the activation wars and the hierarchy and some of the stuff that we talked about. It just walks through a lot of the, what can often be a very complicated mess of rules. It brings it all together in a pretty concise format and just updates from the prior blog. So I can't recommend it highly enough. All right. Cool. What about hobby time, Tom? What have you been working on? Fire Slayers. Always. Fire Slayers. How much more do you have to do? I'm doing a lot more detailing than I normally do on these guys because I'm an idiot. I have five more to do the gold on. Then once I do that, it's just down to actually highlights. But I'm going to do those five and then do the other models. I have to actually paint for ACON and then I'll do final step on final touch on all of them at the same time. Yeah. And then I got my gun hauler put together with a little bit of terrain base that Vince would be proud of. Yes. Oh, man. Take advantage of that negative space. That's great. And I got a little C4 underneath the arch. There's a lot of neat, fun things to explore on it. So I'm super excited about the story. I get to tell with some of this stuff. Damn. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah. So it'll be fun. And then I've been working with the kids this week. My daughter got her trim in together finally. So she's ready to go. Yeah. We had fun gluing all the little animals on. When she saw that they had extra animals on the sprue for these, she's like, I want all of them. Sure. That's because she hasn't gone through the experience of painting them where when I had all those extra animals, I was like, nope, zero of these are going on. Get rid of the stuff. I'm clipping stuff off of it. I'm always removing parts just so I could paint it faster. Yeah. I painted that creature caster, Dracon, who's a centaur. I'm like, I like this as a bust more. I'm not painting these four legs and base and body and done by subtraction. That's right. Nailed it. That's right. Indeed. Well, anyways, but I'm not painting those. She is. So I mean, I'm excited for her. It'll be your first armies on parade this year. And she's like, can I just go in like, like, do I have to play the game or can I just paint these things and like, you know, win awards for that? And I was like, oh, you can definitely do that. Nice. Yes, you can. Yeah. And so I was like, yeah, you don't have to play the game. It's okay. Sweetheart. And my son's like, do I have to paint this stuff if I want to win? And I'm like, yeah, well, yeah, probably actually, like, the two types of gamers personified in their extremes in your children. Yeah. In my twins, in fact, they are literally both ends of the player spectrum right there. They are. It's pretty hilarious. So yeah. So I've been doing some hobby with them this week as well. So it's been nice. Nice. Awesome. Hey, Sam, what have you been working on, man? I've been prepping for Golden Demon. Man, but everything is right on time. Just getting it all wrapped up. And in between there, I'm just trying to get pieces of my army painted, trying to paint, get something done before every game that I play. And it's going well. I almost have 2000 points painted. A functional 2000, I should say. I have 2000 painted, but that's not, that's not going to work. Right. You don't have to write 2000 painted. Yeah. Yeah. I painted griff chargers and castigators. If I could peel that paint off and put it onto a more functional unit, I wish. Yeah, if only. Yeah. I'm sorry, man. You painted castigators? Yeah. I'm just like, eh, it comes in the box. I'll paint it up. Look, what's the worst that could happen? It goes back on the shelf? Yeah. Yeah. I'll just, I'll use them as something else. Those are raptors now. That's sure. Absolutely. One, yes, they're still in threes. So perfect because that's how many you got in that box. They're just, they're just raptors with different guns done and dusted right there. Yeah. Nobody knows what any of these units look like in Stormcast anyway. So you're good because they all look the same. So it's fine. I mean, you're not wrong. Two, that's just planning for the future. Anytime you paint a unit that's like pretty bad right now, that just means you don't have to worry because next general's handbook or next time the points change comes around or whatever, next book and Stormcast will get a new book all the time. Yep. Let's be honest. They're going to get a new book this year. Castigators are going to come out and be amazing and you'll be like, boom, nailed it. Scoop up all the fills. That's right. You're ahead on the castigator meta. I don't know what that looks like though, but like, do they go down to 50 points for three? No, they get a reword. They get a war scroll rewrite because again, new Stormcast book this year, Tom, they get a range increase. Yeah, but like they traditionally haven't rewritten Stormcast scrolls, not significantly. I don't know what you're talking about. That's certainly they have what? What? Maybe they do D three damage. They're explosive. Yeah. I mean, there's all sorts of different like they have, what are you talking about? They have rewritten a ton of war scrolls. Like when you look at an army like iron jaws or cities or even over. I said Stormcast. I said it's for Stormcast. Yeah. Traditionally, maybe they didn't, but now they've shown they're more than ready to start rewriting some scrolls, buddy. And they know that Stormcast's getting that point because they've been on the same scrolls for like four years. So chances are they'll just treat it like a new book. We'll see. We'll see. For me, Hobby Time has been also Golden Demon Prep. I had the chance to be up here in Wisconsin and so and said, you know, asked Sam if wanted to get together, do a little paint jam, just hang out. So that's what we've been doing. Just working on projects, listening to listening to Argyle Park. Dude, we've been going through the weirdest music. Exactly. We listened to Limp Bizkit, ironically. Just one song. Yeah. Yeah. Back to Argyle Park. A bunch of Dungeons Synth. The guts theme on an hour loop, which we listened to in its entirety. Which is just the best thing to listen to. Like the Bizarre guts theme would recommend. Yeah. So it's just been a lot of crazy music. Yeah. Yeah. It's good. So I got my model back out to show it on camera and then left in the other room. It's fine. Whatever. I can man the controls here if you want to. That's all good. I finished up the third model of four in a unit. There you go. That's for my unit entry. And that's the last thing I have for Golden Demon. Before I do the all over double check everything. A word of advice for anyone painting for Golden Demon, which is after you're done and you think you're done, you got your submission done, stop, walk away from it for a few days as much time as you have. Maybe a week, maybe two weeks, whatever time you have. Come back to it. Look at it fresh with fresh eyes and really give it a good look. Stare at it. See it for a good 10 minutes. Be honest with yourself. Take it out in the natural light. Because you will miss stuff from staring at the same thing forever. It's true. So there you go. So yeah, that's what's there. And I got some stuff back at home on my desk as well. But I haven't seen that for a while. I'll get back. But this one's finished and one more to go. Nice. Okay. So shall we move to the actual topic this week, which is collecting and painting your army, getting it on the table? Yay. Yay. Yeah. So I thought this would be a fun show to do since Sam, you've been going through this recently. Also, shout out to Gubertown in the chat there. How are you doing, sir? Good to have you along. I see a lot of fun commentary going on there. Yep. I see Uncle Adam in there too. We want to play at Holy Havoc later this year. He needs to pay 1,000 points of a good guy army to ally with me. That's correct. I'm trying to talk, yeah, I'm trying to talk Sam and Adam into being a team at Holy Havoc in later in the year. It's worked. It's worked. Sam's on board. So now what we all have to do is pressure Uncle Adam to make sure he gets his 1,000 points painted. This is a public shame. Hold on. He asked about Night Haunt. The narrative, man, this thing writes itself. Like, sure. Yes, Adam, do 1,000 points of Night Haunt. And here's your narrative. It doesn't have to be a good guy. It's, you have a bunch of, what's the new chamber? Ruination Covenant? No, the one that just came out. Sacrissank? Sacrissank. There you go. They are redeemed Night Haunt. Yeah, absolutely. It's Casper. Yes. In the story, in one of the stories when the Sacrissank got released, they talked about how during the reforging the lightning geists, like the soul, will sometimes get out and just be a free floating spirit. I love all that stuff, yeah. So do Night Haunt, do it in like a blueish white ghost. So rather than doing the green, go blue. Mix in some lightning, maybe some purples, your golden. And boom. Perfect. You can still be death. You don't have to beat the good guys. You can be angry about being a lightning ghost who's been killed and reforged. Right. Adam says, I gotta be good guys. No, you don't. You can be the bad guys. You be a bad guy that acts like a good guy. Right. You're working with a storm cast because they've pressed you into service. You're just waiting for your chance to escape and stab them in the back. We're totally the good guys. Promise. No, you don't need to be a good guy. Don't listen to Uncle Adam. Just paint Night Haunt. Hey, I did Night Haunt with Vince's slanash last year. It was terrible for me. But regardless, I put up with Vince's filth. But you play, you do you, friend. That's right. That's right. Okay. So I thought this would be a good topic since you went through this recently of like, you've been building up your army, right? Yep. And so let's start at the beginning because I think we did a whole show on like, what's the best first armies? And hopefully people who watch that, I'll throw the link for the best first first armies, the most recent one we did, because we return to the topic every so often as things change and new armies come out. You went with storm cast. Yeah. What led you to storm cast? They came in the starter box. It's a good reason. I couldn't play. I wanted to do the KO, but you couldn't do drivebys at the time. Sure. I want to be Lord of the Skies. I want to set my perfect boots on the ground. I just want to blow everybody away, get all the treasure. But yeah, you couldn't do that at the time. So like, all right, the storm cast will allow me to paint a wizard, a dragon, cavalry and artillery and have that all in the same force. So that sounds like fun. Yeah. And a bunch of non-metal metal if you're into that. Yep. If you go that way. Exactly. So, okay. So you've got your force. You're like everybody else. They've picked their pony, right? Okay. How did you decide what you wanted to collect? Did you just start with a list? You had whatever you had in the starter box, but there's a lot more that you have to go beyond that. Right. Right. You have so many options. It's kind of the waves of storm cast and I decided to go with the sacrosanct wave with all the sequiturs and stuff. But I also liked the way Griff Chargers looked. I liked Neve Black Talons. I'm like, maybe I can have a little contingent of that in my army. Yeah, it's like a really curvy path like a family circus panel, if you will. Like, oh, that looks cool. That looks cool. And just trying to get games in here and there. We try to get an escalation league going. It kind of, it petered out, but now everyone's playing. Like, I'm just like, it served as you in six months. Yep. And we'll all be all of armies. Yeah. Yeah. Just trying to add little blocks to it. And it was really easy to when you have these high point value units, like a unit of evocators, 220 points. Bam. That wasn't 40 models. Perfect. I'm not painting hordes of orcs like I did previously. And yeah, it filled up really quick. Honestly, I was kind of surprised. I was like, oh man, I'm not going to have everything in here. Is T ready yet? What's that? Oh, is there still? T ready? I don't hear it. It's like getting higher pitch, like the farther we go. The more that I talk, yeah. I know, I know what it is. Hold on. I think I have, I think I have a way to fix it. If you fix it 50 minutes in, we've lost like half of our viewers. I mean, I don't know what to tell you. It is what it is. Okay. So let me see. Nope. I don't want to do the volume. Hold on. I'm just going to, I'm just playing over here while you're talking. Tom, while I'm doing this, talk about how you think about setting up your, like how do you, you've made many new forces. How do you go and decide what to collect? Like there's a lot of choices. Yeah, there are. I mean, for me, like it has to be a project that, like I've talked about this before, it has to be a project that has all the tools that I want. So like from a competitive standpoint that it's going to play like I want it to play. That's one half of it. The other half is that it has to have, like I have to have an angle or a take on it. And if I don't have like my angle or my take, it's like it's a non-starter for me. You know, I talked about this, you know, six months ago, back at the Night Haunt is that I really, like they really dragged on and I really struggled to get my Night Haunt done. I was probably born, this is probably nine months ago, until I got like my take, which was like wanting to do the dark elf, like themed ghosts. And when I, when I went towards that like dark elf angle, that's when I, that's when all of it clicked. And that's when I like locked in and painted, you know, 1500 points of ghosts. So for me, it's a combination of both, like wanting to have an original kind of artistic contribution, like having a concept that I want to realize. And then also it be having the competitive tools that I want. So for me, those are the things that, that I'm in, you know, kind of incentivized, incentivized me for that stuff. Also, there's a compatibility element. And I mean, this sounds really weird. But like, if I can, if I can grow my current army and then slowly branch into another force, that becomes something that's really interesting to me. Like I've never, like I haven't had a dispossessed army in a while, like, you know, like since the beginning of AOS. But given my fire slayers and my KO, like dispossessed was a natural kind of build out of my trajectory. And so then I've like, I have functionally like a city's army that I'm working on in addition to the rest of my dwarfs. All right. So I like that. Let me, did the whistle go away at all? If it would go away as I was playing with something. So I don't know if that worked or not. You have to use proper punctuation if you want to threaten me as well. Roasted. Zing. I wonder if from like my, my camera still looks like foggy, like fairly terrible. I wonder if it's the compression that you use, Vince. I'm not compressing anything. This is called what Hangouts does. But at any rate, yeah, I think that's all good thoughts. Here's the other thing I would say about sort of collecting your, okay, yes, it went when you dropped it down. Okay. So there's something it's picking up somewhere. All right. My house is haunted. So blame the night haunt. Oh yeah. There you go. Sometimes it went away fully. Cool. Don't know why, but it's, I've tried. Now it's gone. Okay. Cool. Good. At any rate, I think the thing I like, here's what I do. Here's my process. I start out and I go, I build a bunch of different lists. Just look at the points of sort of the army. Okay. Assuming it's not an army that I just don't care. Like that I'll say, I'll play anything. I'll paint everything. Like I want all these kits where every kid is just magical because it's a limited army, right? When, uh, when you look at something like iron jaws, there's like seven units in the whole thing. I went and got all of them because easy. Who cares, right? I know I'm going to have all of this and it will be viable at some point in time. Yeah, it's, it's on this end. There's something going on where something is picking up our voices and spitting it back into the signal. We know how feedback is created, you know, when you put a mic and a receiver in front of an amp. Do you have any other, just try muting everything else except for the one. Well, if I mute Tom, everything else is muted except that one. Sorry. Yeah. Don't mute Tom. We need him. Taking the whistle away. All right. Now talk. Me. It's a little better. I don't really hear it there. I think that that might have imagined problems because you're using streamlabs over the same problem. If I just go and mic everything or mute everything, even though I don't have that audio input connected, just mute it all. Everything is muted right now except for Tom. It's gone now. Right now it's gone, but if I continue to speak, maybe we'll come back. Let's hope the whistle will harmonize with me. Okay. Okay. All right. Thank you. Okay. Well, that only took an hour. So there you go. That's quick work in some, some people's books, man. We're making this up as we go. Again, I could never hear anything. So it's very hard to diagnose. Like it's hard to troubleshoot when I don't know what I have to just, I don't feel other people's pain. It's hard for me. Yes. You know what I say? I say all of this mess just makes us relatable. Sure. That's, that's what it is. Yes. All right. So here's the official start of the topic where the sound gets good. Let's do that. There we go. Anyway, I built a bunch of lists. You need to time stamp that in the comments. Sure. Whistle goes away. Okay. The, the, the basic thing I look at is I build out a bunch of lists and I say, what of this do I actually want to play? Right? Like, what of these is interesting to me of units that I'm going to find compelling enough? So it's not about like finding like, I don't generally look at like, what's a good tournament powerless or something like that? Just what of these things am I going to enjoy? They're like, this is the mix that's like, good enough, right? That I feel like I won't get my teeth kicked in. It has a bunch of units that I enjoy because like, I wanted to run some, so like with the city's army I'm putting together right now, I wanted to have an ironclad. Okay. Well, that's got to be in there. Right? Yeah. I wanted to have some gyrocopters. That has to be in there. And then some units I'll just be like, okay, that's kind of cool. I could do some of those. I've got a good idea. Like, well, I need a battle line. Pistol ears are cool. Great. Okay, I'll do that. It's like, you can make almost anything work. So if you're just building around that, like I wanted to have a wizard run the show. That was a motivator for me. And yeah, dipping into a theme, I was motivated by my milady doing my family tree. Turns out I'm super Celtic and all that. So I was like, I can lift from that for some inspiration and color choices. Because I don't prefer the studio stormcast scheme. But I see a lot of potential in those sculpts. It's just a really simple suit of armor. I can work with that. Yeah. So I think that's like my, I think what that boils down to is, in all three of our cases, we thought about it beforehand and played a strategy, right? Either you went, you kind of followed through for the units that you thought was cool and building the list words you want. Tom took a very like determined initial set, right? And I just experimented a bunch until I landed on something I wanted. Does that sound like three reasonable strategies? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Here's what we're really excited about. Because obviously, Sam, you're well known for being a pretty decent painter. You're good with the brush. Thank you. So how do you look at painting an army? Because it is, I assume you do treat it differently than an individual display piece or a competition piece. So how do you approach that? Well, yeah, I'm definitely thinking about where I'm going to pull my punches. Like, what am I going to paint really well? And what am I just going to drop a wash on? I've got a special recipe for my storm cast, where I base coat everything. I just color block it in, airbrush upwards with thin down black on the secretors. You know, I've got to paint the ivory cloaks in, make those look nice, make the crystals on their hips glow. So every guy has OSL on him. My fast is not most people's fast. Sure. Well, that's another good point. This is good to explore. But you're still not painting at your highest level. You have a different, oh yeah, like you know, you could take them farther. Yeah, I just want to have fun with it. Like, and also it was cool approaching painting an army. After painting armies for other people for so long, I appreciate the whole variations on a theme concept. Like if I'm painting on my fire slayers, and I want the characters to stand out, maybe I'll give them all white mohawks with a black stripe in it. You know, same way you saw my evocators where they've got like a darker green clothes versus the secretors. My leader is going to have all silver armor compared to all bronze armor. You see the same thing in space marine armies of chaplains and apothecaries having a specific color to kind of denote their their role on the battlefield or wherever they come from. Right. So variations on a theme and then seeing that whole footprint laid down. That's the coolest thing about painting an entire army is just like dominating the tabletop with your scenic bases and pieces of scenery in the negative space, you know, and everything. And as much as I talk about modeling, I I do want to win. So it's acknowledging the competitive side of things. And then all right, what falls, what's in the middle of that Venn diagram of cool and competitive. And that's where I'm going to end up. Nice. No, I like it. That's good stuff, because Tom, you also did like some variation on a theme within your fire slayers, where like the guys who had you've done this in a couple of different ways, but like the guys who have after saves who have like feel no pains for feel no pains, you added like this extra free hand to every one of them where it looks like their skin is sort of like has this hardened lava on it or whatever. Right. Like that kind of concept. Yeah, it bit me in the ass, of course, because the first one that I did that was my Volkites. And now they don't have an after save. Oh, thanks, GW. But yeah, yeah. And I've also now done it in both the Mohawks and in the basing. And so before I was differentiating it using the crack lava skin. But now I'm doing different Mohawks differently. Yep. And so that I'm doing like the the dual color black in orange for my vote or for my Hearth Guard, my Oryx, which will be like the shooters will have white in orange, like the whitish gray and orange for theirs. And then my and then my pure whatever they're called my pure Volkites just have the straight orange. And obviously, there's also a gradient and all their theirs going from like a deep red to like almost a yellow on the tips. And so I like as weirded it as it is like their hair actually like is distinguishable between the different units. And then I've also now done it with basing where before I have kind of like the flat cracked lava magma basing that was matching like the tattoos. Now, all my Volkites are on raised like rocks in the midst of pools of lava. And my Oryx have a different basing as well, which is like the cracked lava in the mixed of like hardened stuff. Yep. And then the others now and then my vote my original Volkites were all just lava fields like cracked lava fields. And so like visually when you look at the army, I can help, you know, like, so one of the big critiques Vince had was that we're all naked babies that look like naked bearded babies that look like, yeah, right. Like today we look at my army and be like, it all looks the same. And so what I wanted to do was distinguish in every way possible without actually changing the models. Gotcha. From basic care to all of all that stuff so that like visually they are distinct units and you can see that in every aspect of the elevated basing is a nice way to do that. Like, I'm putting the other star Drake, the base has to be at least like eight inches tall, right? I think to like, it's about the levels of power. And I also, I kind of have front rank and second rank models front rank, they're at the base level and the second rank models, I'll put a little a layer of corkboard underneath to boost them up a little bit, right? Just, you know, like, like a set of bleachers. Sure, sure. Get everyone's face in the shot. Yeah, that's right. Okay, yeah, I agree. Like this is I think the take home lesson here is when you're working on your army and you're trying to get it to the table, one of the things that can often trip people up is they feel like they get, it gets too repetitive, right? They feel like they have to execute the same steps like first I apply this color, then I apply this color, then I wash, then I highlight and whatever, whatever, you know, whatever technique they have to be using and that gets wearing to people's sort of mental endurance because just doing the same task repeatedly. Oh man, yeah. There were times when I'm painting an army on commission. I'm like, okay, I'm painting the color silver for the next two hours. Boy, I love painting, right? No, it's easier for me to take those heavy steps, get everything kind of blocked in and then I'll pull one to three off by themselves, get them finished, they become the cheerleaders, they egg me on. There's different ways to slice that to how to like maintain a motivation. Personally, I never want to paint a hundred of the same thing ever again, if I can help it. So breaking and maybe just painting something for fun or someone for somebody else working objectives, do scenery, there are a lot of ways to kind of chase the muse and break up the monotony. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Like, when you start varying the units, even within a unit, the bases, certain colors, different freehand elements, it's like any modification that you're doing there puts something interesting in your path and gives you a chance to not feel that creeping, crushing, psychological weight of like, back to the coal mines. So current Clean Brown asked in the chat, he said, this may be a silly question as I just jumped back from meeting, but is it okay to have a variation in color in both armor and skin colors, right? As long as they share a general theme. I think absolutely, yeah, 100%. Yeah, both and wrong with that. Yeah, a variety of skin tones. On the color theory level, I use a lot of warm skin tones because my storm cast generally have a cold theme. Got blue bases, snow, cold green, so a warm skin tone and then, of course, splatters of blood to add a little bit of warmth as well. But yeah, they're all going to vary. Yeah, I think when you vary armor, what you want to do is like have some element that's the same. So like if we were talking about let's just use storm cast because they're easy, like we use the sacrosanct guys, right? Like generally they define their sort of, not chapters, but their chambers by the color of their armor. So you could follow that and then vary the robes, right? Like one of the groups could have very like white robes. They're very plain. Some could have like bright color transition on them and be different. Like you could have that be a status of rank. Like the Secces, the baseline dudes are just sort of white. And then the evocators have like some colored robes. And then your characters all have like big sweeping color transitions where they go from like bright greens into like dark blues or something like that, right? Gigantic hats. Yeah, sure. Exactly. But the point is you could mix things up like that or you could invert that. If you're using your own chamber, if you're not using something out of a book or you just don't care or you're a successor chamber, like yeah, we're anvils ahead. We're anvils of the holding a hammer, not held in hammer, right? Hammer handle. Hammer handle, yes. Then yeah, vary the armor, but then just keep the cloth all the same. Or like the trim elements. So in like in Stormcats, one way that you could do it would be to have your primary metal the same, but then whatever your secondary metal is to vary it. So it's like, let's say you did like a hallowed night style, like dark steel, you could vary between like gold, brass, and bronze for your secondary metals. If you wanted to play around that way. You know, Curran had just said he's thinking about doing this for his various like stages of decay for Blight Kings. I think that's an excellent idea. Yeah, 100%. When I did my Blight Kings, one set has normal flesh tones, one set has greens, and one set has purples. Right. And the common element was actually the armor across all of them I painted the same. Yeah. And so what I end up doing is if I run like a big group, I'll just mix all the colors together. Otherwise I have like five, five and 10 painted differently. And so like even when the units are next to each other, I can tell what's in what unit. And so there's a lot of different ways that you can kind of play with that. I would totally encourage that. The way that I did it with my first set of this is estimated was that all of them had different beard colors. Sure. And so I have like whites and blondes and reds and all that mixed together. And I think that looks great as well, especially if you have very consistent elements like armor, like basin goes a long way. But if you can also have like armor or other like main color themes transition across, I think it's actually better to create diversity in that way. Yeah. I mean, I think people get a little too obsessed at an army level with like, well, I don't want to do that because then the thing wouldn't look the same. Like it wouldn't and that's just not how it works. When you're looking at an army on the table, you're three feet away from it, right? And as long as you have like some dominant elements being pretty similar, you can actually vary quite a lot and have it still look really cohesive, you know, just because that's the nature of when you zoom out from a thing, you're not looking at that level of detail. For me, that was actually the problem with the fire slayers, is that I like I initially I really did go uniform and the and Vince was right. Like if you looked at them at the table, like I literally had a unit of long beards, a 30 block of long beards, a 30 block of Volkites, and a 30 block at Arcannot Company, and he's like, I can't tell what's what. Like they had like one group was naked, one was heavily armored, and one had like blue jumpsuits, and he still couldn't tell because like the Mohawks were so dominating. Right. Because all you can see from a distance is a giant orange Mohawk and a giant orange beard. Right. Right. And then axes, everybody had axes, some had pickaxes. Right. And so like that's why I went with the differentiation in the Mohawk itself. And actually, I like I like the look that it's generated a lot more, which is going to make me go back to my foot heroes and figure out how I want to differentiate their hair as well. Yeah. So. All right. So next up, let's talk about time, the eternal question. Like sands through the hourglass, so go the days of our army painting. So all right, how long you've been working on your force? Maybe around mid end of summer last year. Okay. So probably like six months. Yeah, six, seven, eight months. Tom, how long you've been working on fireslayers related to chicanery? Two and a half years. Going on to going on three years in April. Sure. Next question. Did you paint other things in between working on the army? Yes. I am always painting. And that is because it's enjoyable. Everything I don't rush through everything you do is you can rush through something else. That's right. You got a deadline to finish something for a tournament, of course, but like, I'm trying to build to a functional 2000 point list. But I, I'm going to pick other things up along the way. I'm going to add to it later on. I'll stop and paint something that isn't for gaming at all. I just, yeah, I'm always just spending my painting time on what's going to make me happy. Yep. Yeah, I mean, the next, when people, when you find yourself rushing for a tournament, what's going to happen is then you'll rush for the next tournament and the next tournament and the next tournament. And you'll just keep getting yourself in this cycle. I'm not going to say never rush for a tournament. But what I'll say is try to avoid it, especially if it's one of your first armies, right? Because oftentimes there's just no need, like you could talk in most cases, you could talk to the TO and say, I'm a new player. This is my first tournament. My army's not quite ready yet. Is it okay if I come? I'd really like to still play. And most TOs who are generally really good people and want people to come to their tournaments will be like, yeah, you know, you're not going to do great on paints for, but I understand that's not why you're coming anyways. You're coming because you want to play the game and understand what the tournaments are like. So sure, come on in. Yeah, exactly. Just getting your little coin into the painting competition isn't exactly what it's all about. Right. So like, there's no need to rush yourself when realistically you could do exactly that thing. And then instead, you keep taking your time, you work on stuff. And the other point there, because Tom, you haven't only worked on fireslayers for the past two and a half years, you've done stuff all over the place in between as well. Yeah, like I've in the meantime, I've mixed in obviously in the last nine months, I did night haunt, did 1500 points at night haunt. The last year I took a pretty long hiatus and did my daughters of Cain army. So I did about 3,000 points of daughters of Cain. And then in the midst of the middle of that, I did almost a thousand points, 1500 points of stormcast. So like I've mixed in quite a bit of stuff. And like one thing that's helped me with the dwarf army is that it's not just fireslayers. Like it's murdered out as KO and then now I'm doing pure fireslayers and in the middle of this, I mixed in a bunch of dispossessed. And so I actually have like three very viable armies between KO fireslayers and cities of Sigbar that I can kind of mix and match amongst kind of my play. Yeah. And I think that's another good point. Again, it's all I think painting an army and getting your army up and on the table. It's an endurance thing, right? Even if you're being very simple, I'm not talking about like you're painting the whole army to competition level. I just mean like there's an endurance element to it. You've got to stick out of a singular project. It's a big project. That doesn't mean you have to do it all at once because again, there's really no reason. There's no pressure in the world that's worth being that kind of frustrated over. So if you get to a point where like, well, I was burying the units, but now I just, you know, it's just not what's catching me right now. I don't want to work on a unit. Cool. Put that unit to the side and I've talked about it before, have at least like two projects you're working on and just go do something else. Build a unit for something else, build something different. Like maybe you're thinking about a future army and so you want to try out a test paint scheme for that future army. Cool. You know, give that a shot or assemble some cool conversion or go into build mode on something and like if you've got a little shelf of shame, put some stuff together. Like any of that's fine. Assembly time, man. It's the best break from painting and spending time hobbying like, Vince and I were painting yesterday. I'm working on an entry. I'll pivot and then I'm working on my Star Drake a little bit while I was streaming and stuff. Yeah, man. Just a little bit of variety to keep things spicy. I love building. It's like so cathartic. But I just have to be careful because otherwise it's like, you know, you can obviously build way too much. Sure. Yeah. But yeah, you don't have to get wrapped up in this clean plate club thing. Like, oh, someone gave me a birthday cake. I need to eat the entire thing in one evening right now. Get this army done and I don't spend a second a time refining something I'm having a problem with. Yeah. Yeah. Like set realistic goals for yourself when you're when you're working through this stuff. There's no reason you have to be under somebody else's timeframe that you have to feel like you've got X months. If you're playing down at the local shop, no one is going to care that you have unpainted models. If every couple of weeks when you show up to play, another unit is painted or another couple models are painted. They're going to think that's wonderful. Like I've seen this happen so many times where players just like a little less gray is on the table every time. That's my approach. Yeah. There's nothing wrong with that. And you can psych a lot to be dominate somebody by slowly painting something while they aren't painting anything. It's just coming along. And you've got fully finished models next to the unfinished models. And then you come back and yeah, you're like, you see where this is going? This is the game outside of the game that that's what I'm most interested in. And that's talking trash and the psychological domination through artwork. Absolutely. Yes. You need to impress. You want to make them feel bad for still having their army unpainted. What are you doing, man? Look at how I'm crushing you. Look at this. My favorite part of going to events is having people stop and like have to take a double take. And they're like, wow, Tom, like you're a really good painter. Like I thought you were just competitive. Yeah, right. I thought you only won best sportsman, but turns out you're also a really good painter. You also won awards for Tom is the farthest away from best sportsman you could get playing Tom is a is an endurance match all its own. Not unlike painting an army. Hey, let me just say this. I don't think that there's ever event that I've been to that I haven't gotten at least one sports vote event. No, I often don't get best sports votes. So they can that whole that whole being on the internet, get you sports votes things. I don't believe it. Either that or I must be a really mean person. I don't think I'm mean. I don't think you're mean. I think it's everyone else. Sure. It's your own fault. Clearly it is everyone else that is wrong. Not me. I'm fine. What's wrong with you people? Yeah. Hey, I mean, hey, let me just say this that teams at ACON last year out of 150 teams, we placed third. There you go. Of course. Right. Now that was that was Rob Thymes carrying our entire team. Sure. Yes. Third. Sure. You had a you had an extremely gregarious partner. All right. So, okay. So you're you're moving along your painting. I want to there's there's a pitfall here. I want to I want to talk about because I know this is a common thing and I want to know how you gentlemen deal with it because you because because we talked about splitting up projects. Right. Like we said, yes, it's okay. You don't have to keep just working on the thing. That's fine, man. You do you follow your muse love, wander around. Okay. So now, how do we tackle the opposite side of that problem? How am I going to actually get are done? Right. You you've wandered too far. Right. When people keep the project, you know, yes. How do you get back? Just like building an army, you need to make a list. Okay. That's a good idea. I book events in the future. I do. I do. Like I'm like, okay, I'm going to I'm going to holy wars. That means that I have to have the competitive army I'm working on done in three months or six months or nine months or whatever. Like book something far away that you know is going to give you enough time. And then what it happens is I've painted enough to look at my army and go, okay, so from a project playing standpoint, that means that I need to have this done by this state, this vendor at the state, and then it, you know, I can track my progress and okay, I need to put in an extra day here of painting or whatever in order to play catch up. But for me, like up until this year and partially because just school workers dominated my schedule, like that events have actually dominated and dictated my painting schedule. Such like, so I haven't painted enough like full armies this year, like I normally would. But, but normally I would start an entire new army and paint basically 3000 points by the end of the year. Yeah. I mean, you just make a little step by step list for me, especially when I'm getting something done for a competition or either way, it's, I just need to check this off and I'm sitting down tonight and I'm not getting up until all the flesh is base coated because your brain is going to tell your body that you're tired before you you're out of energy because it's a survival mechanism. Fear is the mind killer. Exactly. I will face my fear. I will let it pass through me and when it's gone only I will remain I guarantee you have more reps in the tank. Keep on lifting. Keep going. And yeah, the brain is going to tell you that it's the most useful organ in the body, but that's the organ telling you that it's useful. Yeah, what is it now? See, the heart is what matters. There you go. There you go. But yeah, yeah. Anyways, make a checklist, get it done and put you have to put the time into it. People are like, oh, there's to be a magic word that makes you faster or something. And you know, I saw you, you answering this on a recent, it's probably like last week's episode, you're like, well, it's easy. I paint four hours a night and 16 hours on the weekends. It's like, I'm not actually faster. It's where I'm placing my time. You know, what's more important, drinking Tuesday through Sunday or maybe just painting Monday through Friday for a little while. So let me let me give you two psychological tricks and I'll see what you gentlemen think of them. All right, here's psychological trick number one. And you alluded to it, which is micro goals. What's intimidating is finishing the army or the unit or even the figure. All of those can seem like mountains too tall to climb. You mentioned like, I'm going to sit down and do the base coat on the skin, right? So instead of thinking of the project as I have to do the whole project, right, set a micro goal, I'm going to do this cloak. That's it. Yeah. Right. That's it. If I paint this cloak, I'm successful tonight. That's what I'm going to do. And there is more paint on my army after I'm done with that than there was before that. Any step forward is a good step forward. The more you start taking those small steps because you'll find sometimes you sit down and go, all right, I'm just going to paint the cloak, but you need to get a cloak done. I need to turn a cloak from primed to red. That's it. Right. And then you'll suddenly look up and realize you've also done the boots and the belt and some armor. And you're like, Oh, okay. I guess that guy's done. Sometimes that'll happen. Not every time. Sometimes your paint the cloak would be like, Okay, I did it. Done. Put it away. I think micro goals are hugely important. Like that's one of my tricks for competition pieces is I sit down and go, because that is a massive project in itself, right? I sit down and go, Okay, today I'm just going to work on hair, right? Or something like that. You can do the same thing with an army. I think something like a podcast or an audio book can help with the time management as well. So you're going to be more prone to searching for distractions. Yeah. And I sat down and painted for an hour. But what I really did was, you know, look at Instagram for 30 minutes. Like you, that's a good way to set your clock is just pull out a podcast, listen to Warhammer Weekly. I sit down and paint you the guys every Wednesday. It's awesome. Painting. It keeps me in the chair. Yeah. It's a good way to just stay on pace and manage your time. Related to that, I would say is also doing is having a painting community. Sure. Other people who are somebody did somebody to spot you, right? Like so regularly, like Vince and I walked and like open up a hangout and just like hang out and talk and paint together. I know there are numerous like Skype groups around where like just like if it's just you and them talking and hanging out and socializing as you paint. And that will often like help with like some of the sort of legitimate like extroverts, like raging extroverts. And so like sitting alone, painting quietly in the basement can be hard. And so one way that I fix that is I do like Skypes and other like hangouts like that where there's somebody with me to interact as I paint. Oh yeah. Yeah, like I want to shout out. I want to shout out to Helly in the comments here is that new to painting and I'm just painting this figure a little every day. Yesterday I base coated the metal parts of the of the armor. Today I'm cleaning it up and shading it. Yes, exactly. Perfect. That's amazing. One brick at a time. Yeah, exactly. Because then you're still you are making forward progress. And if you just keep doing that, you will suddenly have a whole army down and you won't even remember the thousands of little steps you took along the way. It'll just happen. Right. Here's my second trick. How much do you think of this one? I call this the piece of candy strategy. Okay, I like it already. The piece of candy strategy is, oh man, I'm so excited. I got this new fig, this new thing. I really want to paint. I really, really, really want to do this. Okay. But before I reward myself with that thing, I'm going to do the thing I'm not as excited about. You need the mini boss. Yeah, I've got a yes. That's right. You got to get through the mini boss before you get to the boss fight all the snakes before I can get to the temple of the lizard or whatever. Yes. Yes. You can't have any pudding if you don't eat your meat. You know, so you're saying paint the paint the rank and file first and then do your your big reward models later. Or whatever. Like if you've got something, how many times have you been in the middle of a project that you're working on and your head's actually been on a different project? You know what I mean? Like you're talking about something different. I thought you were talking about how you structure your project goals. Sure. I do all the worst stuff up front. Whatever I define is the worst. I do that first. Right. And then I save the most fun stuff, the easiest stuff for the end. The big splashy models that you just want to like just lavish attention on. Yeah. The six characters you've made sure to include in every 2000 point list. Right. Because that's how it's done. Yes. Yeah. Exactly. It's the same. It's the same theory. Right. It's the same theory, Tom, because in both cases, I've got a thing that I'm really excited about and jazzed about. Like this is what I want to go do. Right. And before I can do that, I'm going to get this other stuff out of the way. Right. And that's just a good strategy, I think, to employ because you'll just push through that stuff and get it done. And that will then get you to the stuff you're really excited about. And if you're not an army painter, here's a tip. Hot take. If you're not an army painter, stop painting high model count armies. Stop it. Yeah. Yeah. It's a great piece. Like if it's not your bag, stop doing Gloom's bike. Right. Yeah. Don't get tempted by like a rules thing or a list you really like if you know that's not actually your personality. Like you mentioned never painting 100 VIGs or whatever. No, like Horde again. Exactly. I see a Horde army outside. The only the only thing I've done in any high number recently that I've enjoyed was Daemonettes because I love their like little supple life forms. They have very expressive faces and I'm obsessed with them. Yeah, that's what you like to do. And you're using your favorite color. I just want to throw that on top of this. Also true. Also true. But like somebody said, for example, when I was kind of working on my slaves darkness force, somebody was like, oh, you should you should do marauders because marauders are really good. And take 90 of those. Nope. That's not happening. It's just not happening. Like because even if even if one, the sculpts are done, but that's fine. As we mentioned, spire tyrants are awesome. There's plenty of replacement scopes. You could use blood rivers. You could use whatever, which is by the way, another trick. If you don't like a particular sculpt and you're not going to be excited to paint it, find a replacement sculpt. You are excited to paint. But anyways, even in that case, I'm just not jazzed for that. Nothing about playing marauders interests me. So I'm just not going to play that. That's not my thing. That's not what I'm doing. That's not what I'm painting. I'm trying to escape reality, not just paint what I am in real life. A man with giant muscles and a bondage harness. I mean, that's just looking in the mirror. I'm looking to create something that's unreal and sure a good guy. I'm trying to paint a good guy. That's why you only paint good guys. Yeah, I get it. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that'll checks out. So yeah, I think there's a there is a value in knowing yourself, right? Like if you're somebody who spends a lot of time, who is a slower painter, then look at ogres or storm cast or iron jaws or, you know, there's plenty of good elite armies and out in the in the field right now, just play one of those. Right. Like there's got to be something in there you like. And if you don't like any of those, I'm sure we'll get the Giants release soon. I was just gonna say that there's just six regiments right there. Six bases, six Giants. That's my army. Done. I mean, I mean, for me, like, it's funny. I was sitting here and I'm like, okay, I have, I have these 40 dispossessed left. And then I have another 30 Volk Heights with dual axes, 10 more oryx with shooters, and I probably need to do another probably 20 Arcanauts, you know, thinking through what I need to get done for my army. And like, I've just rattled off like 150 models. Yeah. And like, I'm like, okay, yeah, checks out. But that's, that's my personality. Like, yeah, you actually enjoy painting these big hordes to a degree. Like you're, it's actually something you're pretty good at. You sit down with a 30, you grind them, then you grind another 30 of something else. Right. Right. And like, I don't mind doing that at all. Like, I have 80, 80 ghost boys that sitting over there. I'm just, I'm chomping on the bit to assemble. Like I like big horses. Horses don't chomp. They chomp. I don't care. I'm just correcting you because it's fine. Thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah, it's chomping at the bit. I'm chomping though, because I'm a human, not a horse. Yeah, clean plate club. But you got to know what you like. That's like, that's the balance here. And for me, like, I know I'm going to paint an individual model to a lower quality than like Benz or Sam. Like I'm, I just am because that's who I am. That's, they're like, that's, that's what I enjoy. And so if I could, if I do like horde armies, then what ends up happening is that like, it feels better. It balances out too. Yeah, absolutely. Because yeah. Yeah. People like mass quantity has its own quality. That sucks. Yeah, that footprint that you throw down. Yeah. And really, I just want to bring the model to life. And that is kind of a relative term for everybody. You know, if Tom is satisfied with his work, I'm happy painted miniature is always better than, you know, you've brought it to life well enough. If you feel good about it. And so I do horde armies because that's what I like. That's in general what I like. And also from a play style, it's what I prefer. Like I don't want to lose on bodies. Like that's just all fast. But yeah, so just you need to figure out what you like. That's the key here. Yep. And you know, just sort of a note on something that was said in the comments with a bunch of people talking about like using contrast and stuff like that. Don't ever let anybody hobby shame you into a particular way to paint. That's a bunch of crap. I remember when air brushes were new. Yeah, people sitting around. Oh, that's cheating. Oh, I would never use an airbrush. And now look at you hanging out like airbrushes. Now I think I fancy me an airbrush. Yeah. And the same people are contrast when something gives rejected anything. I mean, I'm going to be honest. The leo metal color with an airbrush is literally the best thing ever. Sure. And if you're playing a heavy metal like just do that. Yeah, get like, yes, I could get a storm cast army painted in an afternoon if I wanted to be fast with just like metal color and that kind of stuff. Yeah, check out the anti zenithal video I did with tabletop minions. I know anti zenithal is not a real word and no lidial light. I learned that I didn't go to art school. I did work instead and you paid $1,000 for a degree to learn the word no lidial. Congratulations. But a rose by other name would just as be just as instructive. So check out the video and color block your models. Use the airbrush. Use the three dimensional aspects of the failure to control the angles. You get your gold and silver on your dwarves airbrushed upwards with a kind of a browned out black, maybe a wash. And yeah, everything's just shaded in at once. Yep. Oh, it's true. Yeah, there's absolutely zero wrong with those kind of techniques. Use what you need to use because any painted model is better than an unpainted model, assuming you don't just literally like dip it in house paint. Like, you know what I mean, people. Okay, you know what I mean. Like, yes, we all know the joke of like the old those those the pictures that get shared around of like the horrible space marine that's just got like a half inch of paint on him. Oh, good. Yeah. But that's not what people are actually painting, right? That's not actually what happens. Any painted model that you're that you're reasonably controlling your paint on even mildly is better. Period. Right. Right. Right. And like, here's the deal, folks. My two nine year olds can put contrast on models. And it actually looks pretty good. Yeah. Like, I'm excited to show you all some of what my my daughter is doing. And like, if you can do that, y'all can do that. Yeah. Right. And here's another tip. Here's a hot take. Find our if you don't like painting, and like, what is the biggest like obstacle for you is painting and you don't really care as much about like the theme or, or, or whatever for your army, find armies that paint easily. Right. Okay. So like, if you want to limit that, go grab Sylvaneth and some contrast and have a heyday, because that the Wildwood contrast paint on those trees looks fantastic. And it'll paint literally in an afternoon. The same thing with the metal color airbrushing and storm cast, it'll literally like, it'll paint itself or heavy like or heavy, you know, an airbrush and heavy and like a KO ship based army, where you're just like painting huge panels, knock it out, get it done. Yep. Absolutely. No, it's a good point. Like a certain armies paint a lot easier than others, right? Sylvaneth, nice, easy, relaxing paint job, because it's all high texture, natural colors, woods takes well to washes, ink stuff like that. Storm cast or ogres or anybody big like that, where you can just kind of like do a lot of work with just your airbrush and make that be most of the work. Those kind of things. Stay away from, you know, say like doing something with complicated zinch with 72 different colors and beads and bejangles and bejewels everywhere. Zangor. Yeah, the nightmares. Yep. Fire slayers are actually pretty bad detail wise. The new elves are going to be nightmares as well. I mean, like it's just it's it's what those are, but things like ogres will be quick, storm cast, Sylvaneth, even, even with contrast, iron jaws paints up really quick. Sure. My son's doing those right now. Yeah. Not everything has to be a different color as well and some of these more detailed models. I've got four colors mainly, right, working up to a progression up to a highlight, but when I was painting my infinity army, there's a lot of smaller, I see that word. There's a lot of smaller pieces on the models and you're tempted to just pick every little individual box of equipment in different tone. Just paint it all red. Just paint all the same thing. Right. Gloves, belts, boots, eyes, base, like those, those elves, you know, that they're really detailed. You can take them far, but what if every bit of armor work was just like a creamy white, like, like if it's an Eldar made of Wraith bone, right? Right. This can be completely monochromatic if I want it to be. Yep. That's, that's actually, Sam, it's so easy. That's where I find myself with my fire slayers, because I made this mistake of having both my silver and golds. And so like, so like, I actually have like bracelets that are like, that are like three layer bracelets where you can actually tell they're like an outer like ring. And so like this would be silver and then I have to do my golds around it. And like all of that could just be one metal color. Like if I wasn't insane. In the event you ask what's taking me so long, that's what's taking me so long. Sure. It's mixing in those like two tone metal colors and stuff like that, because that's what I, that's what I want out of the unit. But the reality is, is that you don't have to do that. Yeah. All right. Good stuff. So, and then I'd say follow that. And something we've said here has will hopefully get you out of your jam and get you towards your painted army on the table. I think fine content producers, you know, and you guys alluded to this fine content producers that you can fill the airways with other people who are excited about the hobby and will inspire you to do more of that. Right. There are tons of content producers out there. Find them and listen to them. Sam obviously does work. We have some paint along with Sam every Tuesday and Thursday from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. Central Time Tuesday through Thursday. There you go. Samson Arts on Twitch. You didn't stream today because you were nice enough to sit here with the show for us. But normally it's Tuesday through Thursday. Like just having something like that regularly where you get together and do that, where this is the time I paint, the time when I'm watching Sam and you're painting along with him. Boom. Good way to go. Yep. I've been painting two battle reports on Rerolling Ones and Girl of Manager Games. Yeah. Hours of that stuff out there. It just helps to fill the room with chatter that's related to the task at hand. Right. Yep. That's good. Oh. Thomas says, Sam, what's your take on the new big elf guy on Techless? We actually mentioned it earlier, but go ahead. Oh, man. Yeah. I'm trying to find the silver lining and just say things that I like about it. So I've got kind of similar gripes to everybody else. Things I like about it though are I like that the monster has a humanoid face. I think that harkens back to very like 16th century woodcuts of demons. It's a man with like a monkey's hands and like a cow's udder. It's a demon. It's like this living Sphinx and Techless floating around like a Castlevania boss. Yes. I'm okay with that. I like the high fantasy. I want to see it just cranked up to 11 these days. I don't like that. Yeah. It's obviously the Torilon. Just flipped. What do you point you guys pointing that out? And I was like, ah, god. But there's, I don't know. A lot of the time when you see the model in your hands, it changes your opinion on it. For me, the Star Drake, I didn't like it. Then I got it in my paws and now I do like it. Yeah. It can take on a different feel when it's in person. You have to wonder how much of that is that they oftentimes take these pictures of these big models from like the worst angle we were talking about. They have, yeah, they want to level it with the base. You can replace Techless or Tesla. It depends on what side of the equator you're on, I guess. Replace him with another model if you don't like him. Use the invisible man. You get a whole like invisible man thing going on with that one character or, god, yeah, there's things you can do. So yeah, there's my take on the model. Use a different one. What started this. The take home point is, yes, the light of El Tharian is a very good model. Yeah. There you go. That's the general thought on Techless. I'm just trying to enjoy the ride, man. Anytime this cool model's coming out as a painter, I'm generally enthused. It's always something within that release I'm going to like. I'm not going to play that army. I wanted to. I was like excited, but yeah. Too much just Elvis. We got to wait for the next thing. Also Giants. Really? I'm the Giants. I'm waiting. I'm in holding pattern. We'll see. Tom will end up collecting his army. Hanging under. Yep. Your expectations are under the basket. I like, wait till it's piled up, man. That's what I did with the last two editions of 40k and I still haven't gone back. I'm giving this a year. I still don't like it, but hey, I'm playing AOS. All right. And we're glad you are, Sam. Vince, you said that about Ideneth and I still haven't come around on them. That's fine. I didn't realize just how fishy they would be. You're going to get these Tom. They're just high elves again. These will be in your wheelhouse. I know where this is going. I have foreseen it. Maybe. We'll see. We'll see what the rest of the range looks like and we'll see what the rules look like. Sure. All right, folks. With that, we're going to shut it down. Thank you very much, everybody. Today, sorry for the audio issues at the beginning. I don't know why the default setting was like it was and was making a little whistle. I'll go back and listen. Hopefully it's not too terrible. I will link in the description when the whistling stops later tonight. All right. But at any rate, thank you all very much for watching. Thank you, Sam. Yeah. It was great to hang out with you guys. Met you. It's cool to chat with Tom because I watch the show every week. And I understand the references now. Do you guys refer to like Caribbean ogres? I think you talk about things that happened like a year ago. I was like, I was there. I remember. So yeah, thanks to you guys, man. It's cool to be part of it. That's how we create participation with our audience and buy in. Just running jokes. Oh yeah, man. There you go. All right, folks. With that, we'll say thank you very much for watching. Don't forget hit the like button. That helps a lot of other people find the show. The more people hit like, the more other people get the more this gets recommended. So thank you very much. Please hit like, subscribe, do all that fun YouTube related stuff. It is really, really, really appreciated when you do so. More than you know. Four more years of Warhammer Weekly. At least. At least we'll be there at any rate. Thank you all very much. We appreciate it. We'll see you next time.