How our plans go astray when the gaming gods intervene! The Jewel of July was supposed to motivate me on a personal level to finish a bunch of small heroes and villains from various games, some large monsters and also get some of those Space Marine Heroes for my armies done.

While I somewhat achieved the first of those objectives, my group’s beginning to meet again regularly after a couple of months’ hiatus – and the focus in our gaming sessions primarily being Star Wars Imperial Assault switched my previous painting of IA models from being somewhere to get some easy wins, mixed in with my other models (as with Shadows of Brimstone) into much more of a proper gaming focus for the month and into August.

It’s not been a terrible month by any means, though it kind of morphed into a bit of a neglected model month of sorts (as so many tend to do) as I finally completed things like a sextuplet of Zombicide models representing both the living and (un)dead states of three Survivors that were started at least 2 years ago when we used to play Zombicide frequently.

Similarly, I got a bunch of LotR models finished that I’d done very little on in the past – in fact, all seven of those models had been started to a lesser or greater extent in the past, though most had little done to them before July motivated me to get them done and out of the way. The big nasty spider had been assembled, sprayed and initially drybrushed a dark grey in the distant past, though I went over the top of that with the browns and also created the base. The Big Brimstone Guardian of Targa was started in June, as was the Royal Guard Champion, alongside his brethren. The rest of the Imperial Assault stuff was actually painted start-to-finish during July, as was the Valkyrie. So 23 models completed for the Jewel of July, including 1 for Temple of Morikan

Since the only difference between my challenge models and my overall models this month was a few pieces of terrain, I’m combining both posts into the one, here.

Aside from the Jewel of July models, the 10 ruined columns from Mythic Battles: Panthenon, the 2 bridges from Massive Darkness and the 4 doors from Star Saga provide me with a bunch of improved elements when I get to the appropriate boardgames, as well as an additional 16 pieces of scatter terrain for various wargames as needed.

16 pieces of scatter also works nicely towards my monthly goal of a minimum of one model of some sort for each day of that month – these smaller, but more frequent and constantly reset monthly goals are working a lot better for me overall than the broader “365 for a year.” My total for this month being the 23 for Jewel plus 16 non-challenge scatter terrain brings me to 39 models for this month.

From Jan to June, I completed 343 models, so with the addition of July’s 39, I’m up to 382. More on that later, though!