Another productive day (two Sundays in a row, I'm threatening to make a habit of this

). I've managed to prime almost all of Smaug and cleaned and assembled these models which will be part of another project I'm working on;

I've also finally gotten round to sorting out all my paints. I had to box up a lot of my hobby stuff and take a break of several months after the ceiling in my brother's room collapsed and all his stuff had to be moved into my room while it was sorted so I needed to re-assess what paints I already had and which were now now so thick they were pretty much no longer usable. To this end I spent a couple hours creating a spreadsheet to help me keep track of them all in future and checking each pot. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the paints I can no longer use are either from the very, very old flat-topped pots, or from the newer base range. All the paints from in-between are still perfectly usable, as are the newer layers and most of the bases. I even found some of the old inks GW used to do!
As if all that wasn't enough, I even managed to find time to make a start on this old Davros miniature, my first actual painting attempt in months;



I haven't made a start on the jacket yet but, as there's an awful lot of black on the model, my intention is to go for something like a Karak Stone/black mix for highlights on the jacket to tie in with the brownish skin. For the metal lower body I've tried to go for a pure black basecoat with pure white highlights to show an almost unnaturally dark, shiny material to contrast the humanoid upper body with the Dalek lower body but I don't think I've managed to pull it off so perhaps a rethink is needed there (and definitely a tidy-up if nothing else as the lines aren't straight).
Now to dig out my DVDs and try and decide exactly what shades of red and brown I want to use on Smaug.