I’ve started on my 4th painting tray and I hope I can balance it a bit better than the last one. I’ll quickly repeat the concept behind the tray – get a tray or box lid in the size you want, and load it with figures for your planned projects and paint them all. Keep focused and only stick to what is on the painting tray and you’ll find those projects will suddenly get finished! Well, that’s how I try to manage mine. I have had the odd substitution but otherwise I have been good at keeping to the tray. If your like me you can’t fit all the myriad of projects underway on the tray, so I try to limit myself. While I haven’t been great at that, I am trying to complete 1-2 projects per tray at least.

For the new tray I tried to balance it better and not load too much on there. The last tray took 7 months to finish and in a wargamers life, that is a lot of shiny new distractions, during that time. Even with the new tray I’ve started getting distracted!

So on to the new tray, I’ll break it down to figures and vehicles

Figures

• 100 FPW French line infantry
• 44 FPW French artillery crew
• 6 FPW Prussian cavalry
• 120 Scifi infantry
• 60ish Vikings
• 36 Dragon foot knights
• 25 Modern Iraqi artillery crew
• 40 WW2 French infantry

Vehicles and aircraft

• 18 Iraqi vehicles and 5 aircraft
• 40 WW2 British 1940 vehicles
• 16 Sci-fi vehicles and 2 Iliad studio mdf vehicles
• 4 FPW Prussian guns
• 6 Battle of Britain German Do-17 bombers
• 8 WW2 late war British tanks

Despite my earlier comments in this blog, the tray still has approximately 430 figures and 97 vehicles/planes, which is more vehicles and figures than last time. I not sure how I managed that as the plan was to make the tray smaller!

However a lot of the figures are much simpler than the last tray so it should be faster to paint them, and the vehicles too. The 2 Viking ships and the Epic models in the last tray were big and took a lot of time to complete.

I’m thinking about selling the Sci-fi halftracks which are nice model, but huge, so they may get removed for the tray.

The good news is that when I finish this tray, my Modern Iraqi project will be complete along with a DBA Viking army. Also this is the last of the early war British forces and the Dragon knights are also all done until I buy more figures to complete the army, and this will probably be enough WW2 French infantry.

So at least 3 projects completed and 3 that have all the figures in my collection completed or painted all that is needed.