This week I'm starting on a second Dreadfleet set for a client. I can already tell that I'm going to be able to avoid some of the pitfalls that I ran into with the first set and I'm planning out this project accordingly.

First off, bases. I tried to do as much assembly as humanly possible on the last set before I started painting. This meant that in most cases I had affixed the ships to the bases at the outset. Most of the time this was fine, but it did sometimes cause some issues and slow down the painting process. Where possible I really should be focused on painting like items together in order to save time. So this time around the bases will not be permanently attached until the end. I will be temporarily attaching them before priming in order to let the ships themselves act as masking for the parts of the bases that will require glue later on. It seems like a good idea here at the front end of the project. We'll see if it ends up helping like I hope.

Speaking of assembly... I'm still trying to assemble as much as makes sense but I'm not going to assemble anything that created any sort of problems last time. This was mostly an issue with the Bloody Reaver last time, but I'll be scrutinizing the other ships to make sure that I'm not making more work for myself by prematurely assembling things.

I'm also thinking about painting all of the sails (or at least their base coats) in one sitting. I used the airbrush last time around, which I plan to do again - but I think that I can save time by doing all of my airbrush work at once. That way I don't have to do setup and tear down for the airbrush for each set of sails.

One other thing that I may do is paint some of the little bits first. I found the cogs to be rather tedious to paint at the end of a long project. The ships were all pretty fun to paint - as were the islands and wrecks. Better to save the fun stuff until last to help keep my enthusiasm and creativity at a higher level. This should help with productivity overall.

I'm not sure how many videos I'm going to do of this project. I may do a few progress reports and then some tutorials if I can squeeze them in. I don't want to duplicate things that I did last time around.