May Update

I hadn't realised how many months had passed since I last painted. I hit a bit of a mental block in February after stocking up on all the re-released models - I was determined to stick to my plan of painting more than I bought, but that meant I needed to clear out another 40 models, and my Morannon force was all about slower detailed painting which meant that it was (seemingly) going to take forever.

So I had a cunning plan - put aside my current project and paint up a batch of Uruk-Hai as they're quick and easy... Unfortunately it turned out that holding myself to arbitrary rules and painting random models to achieve them utterly killed my motivation and left me in a slump where I didn't actually finish anything in February (although I do now have a lot of half-painted Uruks!).

I took a detour from painting in March when I read 'The life changing magic of tidying' by Marie Kondo and asked myself if my LOTR collection 'sparked joy' for me. The answer was fortunately yes, but not as a pile of boxes shoved into an overflowing storage unit. To fix this I embarked on a major project to document every model I have, organise them into game-legal armies, and then build the miniatures.

The end result is that I have now built every single model I own and they are now sitting proudly in a couple of display bookcases where I can (just about) see all of them. I feel so much better about my collection now that I can see it on display, instead of feeling vaguely guilty about the sheer number of models I had amassed and never done anything with.

Another bonus was that by selling my surplus models I made exactly the right amount of money to reinvest in GW's April 'made to order' run and now have 30 more previously out of print models coming my way...

I've also come up with a cunning new plan - paint what I want, when I want, and buy what I want, when I want (within reason!). In particular, I plan to plug the gaps in my newly written army lists, which should keep my wallet busy for some time.

Oh, and I painted something this month - one Morannon Orc Captain (foot & mounted)

And purely because I like statistics:

Month	Bought	Painted
January	42	2
February	0	0
March	0	0
April	30	0
May	0	2
Total	72	4

January Update

It was a slow start to the year, marred with illness and a dodgy neck which kept me away from the painting table.

On the plus side, we did make it a little further through the introductory games in the Pelennor Fields boxset and determined that the Witch King on Fellbeast is excellent at killing Horsies....

I'm working on the Morannon Orc heroes at present and the only ones I'm claiming as finished this month are the Banner Bearer and the Drummer. I've done a fair amount on the others so hopefully I'll have some early finishes in February to get me back on track!

A lot of the previously OOP models made it back into the webstore in January and as a result I totally blew my plan to buy less than I painted. I'm totally okay with that though as I've been waiting years to get my hands on some of these and it's brilliant to finally have them in my collection.

Painted: 2 Models: Morannon Orc Banner Bearer and Orc Drummer

Bought - 42 Models: Forlong, Angbor, Duinhir, Dalaymar, Corsair Captain, Corsair Bosun, 6 Corsair Alabasters, 24 Corsairs, 6 Numemor Bowmen