At the start of January, I was trying to make myself work on some Space Marines, but I got distracted by the models laying at the bottom of the jar of isopropyl I keep on my painting desk for brush cleaning. They were naturally submerged there for paint stripping, They’d been out for scrubbing at least once before, but they were – to be blunt – forgotten about in the murky fluid. So I noticed them for reasons I will discuss in another post and fished them out, gave them another scrub, and then decided to smash my way through painting them. After all, these were the last ones to get done from all of my Reisgard, and there’s always that satisfaction that we glean from finishing the last of something, right?

The negative to this, though – was the fact that the shields on the six of seven models in this batch would actually be the last of my old-school heater shields. The way I see it is that things like shields, decals and bases are resoources for completing figures. We want to get the figures done, but we don’t want to run out of shields or bases of a certain type or size. With bases and (most) decals it’s not such a problem. We can always buy more bases, we can usually buy more decals (or print them ourselves in many cases). But shields. Especially specific shields. They can be a lot harder to come by. Still. Getting the last Reiksgard done was a worthwhile use of them! And once again,  these models go toward my tally for Dave Stone’s Paint What You Got Challenge.

A week or so ago, I finally got off my arse and went outside to photograph almost all of the models I’d painted so far in January. I also thought that since I’d finally completed the last Reiksgard, a group shot would be in order. Turns out I only had 21 of them, and for unit purposes in KoW I’d like to get at least 24 in total, including a standard bearer, so I guessed I’d have to try and find another three (or more). Ideally two with greatswords to get around the shield issue, and one more to convert into a standard bearer.

And then about 2 days ago, while poking around in a tub next to one of my toolboxes looking for hex keys, I found this….

Well, I won’t need to find three more models, nor a standard bearer. On the other hand, I now need to find six more of those shields…