Focused work: Noh Empire Assembled!

Beautiful!

Now that I'm picking up the hobby again, one strategy I've decided to follow is Focus.  Us gamers love to try the latest board game (Star Wars Rebellion or Star Wars Destiny?) or follow the latest Kickstarter (Relic Knights 2.0?), and why not?  It's a hobby!  Just do whatever is interesting!  However, with my collection of unpainted Relic Knights, Super Dungeon Explore, Infinity, Malifaux, not to mention 3d-printed proxies for Star Wars X-wing and Armada I'm working on, I didn't have enough focus to get any one thing done. 

Hence, I decided to put away everything else except the one thing I was working on so as to have no distractions.  Actually, since I just moved, this means everything is still in boxes and I only unpacked the Relic Knights collection.  I decided to focus on the Noh Empire and only this faction, partly because I already planned what bases to use(cork).   Towards the last few model, I was thinking I should assemble another faction.  But instead I doubled-down on focus, and pushed through to the last model (Kasaro-To on Chinese lion mech), which gave me a sense of accomplishment seeing the entire faction assembled.

Originally, I was thinking about making/painting the bases separately from the models, then pinning/gluing together at the end.  However, simplicity is another strategy I'm following now.  By basing first then painting both base and figure at the same time, I'm cutting out a waiting step which can bog me down.  Sure, the bases won't be as detailed this way, but the reality is that the figure is the focus of the model, not the base. So even if the bases has less detail (than if I painted it separately) it doesn't matter. 

The next step is to decide if I'm going to paint the entire Noh Empire faction or should I start assembling another faction so I can demo the game with my friends?  My gut feel says I should paint, because I'm still pumped after assembling them that the momentum would keep me going painting them. Because of their larger features and monstrous aspects, the Noh faction turned out great in the plastic material of the first Kickstarter, and I really like how these models turned out.