Maya Ajaw and Ah'kin

First post of the year! The one downside of the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge is that I can't show my painted figures anywhere else until they've gone live on the Challenge blog. I've done quite a bit of painting already this year, but it's going to be spread across three Challenge blog posts (so far), so it takes some time for me to be able to share them here. 

One of my big goals for this year is to knock out my backlog of Maya figures so I can start gaming with them. So, while the first finished figures off my table were the Boomstick Cultists, I did start immediately in on the first of the Maya on the 21st, choosing some of the more richly dressed and ornamented figures from the Lucid Eye range; these five I'm treating as ajaw, members of the noble class in a Mayan city-state, fighting for personal glory and social status.

I misplaced the shields for this group; if I find them or buy more (or more likely, buy more and then find them), I'll get them painted and glued on. 

I also picked up some 28mm Maya figures from Gringo 40s to accompany my Lucid Eye figures and fill in some gaps. One such is this priest, or ah'kin; He wears a Chaac mask, putting on the persona of the god of rain, agriculture and (sometimes) warfare, with a plume of quetzal feathers. 

This is one of two copies of Gringo 40s' priest figure I bought, so you'll see another one in different colors later on in the challenge. 

While I'm going to work extra hard to paint more than I buy in 2026, I did pick up two figures at my LGS when I went in for paint the other day; this particular store, Casual Dragon Amherst, used to be under different ownership under the name Dragon Snack; when the owner of Dragon Snack took ill, his family shut down the shop, with all merchandise still inside, and the owners of Casual Dragon Lockport stepped and made Dragon Snack a satellite location of their own store. 

There is quite a bit of *old* merchandise still on the shelves that they don't quite know what to do with, including a couple of blisters of "Legend of the Five Rings" samurai fantasy figures dating back to when Reaper Miniatures briefly held the license around 20 years ago. These have been marked down dramatically (well below MSRP as it was two decades ago!) so I grabbed a few. I may go back and grab the rest; Casual Dragon has, unfortunately, jacked their paint prices through the roof in the last month so I can't afford to continue to buy my paints there. 

And, with a new year, we start the tracker afresh, and add some new categories:

Miniatures Purchased: 2

Miniatures Painted: 6

Terrain Purchased: 0

Terrain Painted: 0

Scatter Purchased: 0

Scatter Painted: 0