At first I was afraid...

If you follow my Facebook feed or G+ presence you'll know I've not been idle the last 5 weeks. Far from it in fact - though I did need to take a few days off after a misunderstanding between my painting hand and a hob plate. All is fine now, and I've been pretty busy working in several different directions at once. I'm not convinced that this is the best, or most productive way of working, but it's a method that I'm going to have to get used to if I want to ever paint any of my own toys in the near future. I currently have a "promise" list of people waiting for me to decorate their toys, which is great - it's always good to be busy - but I have got to temper and balance it with wanting to do things for me.
With increased demand for my services I also came to a pragmatic decision that most of my grey pile wasn't going to get painted any time soon, so just about everything Games Workshop related that I owned was shipped off via Ebay and private sales. That provided a bit of a distraction from productivity, but also encouraged me to rearrange the man cave and put lots of stuff away, which I always finds helps my productive brain to function.
Another factor for the clear out was the eventual arrival of the huge black monolith that is Kingdom Death: Monster. I was at first just overwhelmed by the sheer number of toys in the boxes. Panic set in. How was I ever going to even make a start on them all!? It didn't help that I had made a start on a diorama involving 3 Kingdom Death models either, so I was slightly apprehensive of the job there. So when faced with 3 models, the prospect of painting more like 70 odd just made me freeze!

Time to put thoughts and plans in order. First get properly started on the diorama. So lets get to pictures...
The diorama involves the Thief sculpt, the Fighter sculpt and the Ammo Slave sculpt. The construction brief is that they are a band of adventurers on a trail beside a bog/marsh towards some upcoming peril. I thought that the recurring themes in Kingdom Death of faces, hands and lanterns needed to be represented. Lanterns are easy enough. The faces I needed to sprinkle around the ground and stones, again not too difficult. There are several grasping hands reaching out of the ground in the Thief's sculpt, so I spread them around and added one or two to the edge of the bog. To add to the trail feel, and create a bit of interest, I decided to build a rope bridge. Never done it before, but it has actually been quite a fun challenge.
This is the base so far...

I've added some corpse and skeleton debris and there's still plenty to add, like soil texture, scrubby grass and some water effect puddles, but it's taking shape.

For the models, the Ammo Slave is almost complete. I shall add pigments when she is on the base, and probably a couple of blood effects here and there...

I have just started on the Fighter sculpt...

The hair will be a totally different colour in the end, I just blocked in some tones to work over the top of.

I haven't begun work on the Thief yet, other than assembly and priming.

The priming part brings me to what else I've got up to, and that is to make a start on the pile of minis associated with Monster and figuring out how to paint them fast and not too dirty! I emptied out the first sprue of plastic, containing the 4 starting survivors, White Lion and Butcher models.
These were assembled, cleaned, filled and primed, ready for paint...

In the priming process, I then added some atmospheric preshading (you can see some parts from the diorama here too, and the Thief with her umbrella).

After that I worked on my favourite of the survivor sculpts, Allister. I wanted to paint him fast, but get a detail in that I find important to the mythos of Kingdom Death, which is the inky eyes that the people have when they "awaken" in the world. It probably made the painting slightly easier that I didn't have to paint in tiny eyes too. Anyway this is the result of about 4 hours of painting...

He needs a base, but I've batch primed a whole load of bases for the models, so he'll likely get it when they're all done, or I'll change my mind and do a load of them just because! lol

I'll try not to take 5 weeks before my next update... Sorry! ^_^