It’s the very end of a perfect Sunday. The weather was quite warm but not too hot. Lorri was away with two of her good buddies. I was left at home with very doable list of chores and my two good buddies Ringo and Owen, our American Shepherd puppies. Done with anything important by 1:30 or so, there was nothing better to do than paint figures and watch the Mariners game.

The Mariners won 2-0 to salvage one game from the Tigers series (grrrrr.) The painting was much better. I’ve been working on the last bunch of figures for an Anglo Danish SAGA army. They were 75% finished, but because there were 19 figures to wrap up, the remaining 25% wasn’t exactly nothing. I hoped I might be able to put my nose to the grindstone and get them done.

But wait. I always like to have my next bunch o’ stuff ready to go before I wrap up what I’m working on. More SAGA? Well, no. I do have a SAGA army ready to paint, the Skraelings using Footsore figures. But honestly I need a break. Finished the Picts last week. Wrapping up the AD’s. I want a SAGA siesta. So it’s on to my little pile of Camerone figures. I’m guessing I have a bout 100 figures to paint, plus the terrain, so it’s time to get started.

I primed up nine French Legionnaires and while waiting for them to dry (which doesn’t take long with the warm, dry air) and got back to work on the Last of the Anglo Danish.

I had sixteen plastic warriors to finish. They are Gripping Beast figures. I like their looks though I am not especially good at assembling them. While painting, I noticed I didn’t do a terrific job of getting arms and shoulders aligned. But they have nice detail and the cast on spears are so much better than the GB metal cast spears. However, in the ultimate sign of trying to do too much too quickly I did actually manage to glue a torso on backwards with the feet pointing in the wrong direction. Sigh.

However, today the focus was wrapping these guys up. Shield patterns were done. There were hands to paint, some flesh washing to do and some brass bits to finish up. In addition to those sixteen guys I had Harold Godwinson and his brothers to finish. Their painting was a bit more fiddly. I fancied up their tunics and Harold had a kite shield to do. By the end of the Mariners game they were finished and it was time to bring the Camerone guys in from the garage.

I managed to get a good start on them, and hope to wrap them up in the next day or so. I decided, after reading through James Ryan’s excellent account of Camerone, to ditch the madder red kepis and trousers and go over to white for both. I used Vallejo White-Grey, which has become a real go to color for me. Most of my already-painted Legionnaires have the red, so a bit of a mix is good.

Yep, Sunday was a most excellent painting day. It wasn’t an all-day paint fest as I mixed my chores and playing with the puppies in with the brush work, but from abotu 1:30 to 8:00, with a few intermissions for other things, it simply wasn’t better. Of course, I’m one of those guys who needs to paint to feel normal.