2023 – Quarter 1, Weeks 7 & 8

Two Weeks of Progress

I have struggled with hobby motivation the last several weeks, using my free time to play through God of War: Ragnarok, instead. This has put me officially behind schedule by a single week – a hole that will only get bigger if I keep up the current pace. Let’s take a look at what I did accomplish…

The Three Amigos

With the arrival of these reinforcements, I now have 4 Van Saar members fully painted. The close-ups show just how shaky many of the edge highlights have turned out. In some ways, I think my unhappiness with the them has contributed to a loss of motivation. This is natural, I think – especially when you see the beautiful work put out by so many painters on social media. When this frustration sets in, I must remind myself that not only do those painters have thousands of hours of experience overall, but that (in many cases) they’re putting tens of hours into a single mini. In order to get to those levels, we must struggle, learn, and grow.

While I was struggling, I realized that the brush I had been using had deformed pretty badly. There was no way that I could get a thin enough line with those bristles. So, I switched to a brand new brush with a much much sharper tip. And, even though this brush had a larger body, I saw immediate improvement. While there is still tons of room for improvement, it felt great to see that some cleaner highlights were achievable. Spending more time on each mini and cleaning up the highlight layers is also something that I need to do. Unfortunately, because I have slacked so much the last weeks I didn’t have a chance to spend longer on error fixing. I still need to get the whole box done by the end of the quarter, so right now, done is better than perfect. I have plenty more gang members to practice on.

…A Door?

This will seem random. And that’s because it is. While I was getting irritated with the gang members, I grabbed a door that was already primed as a mini palette cleanser. Really, I just wanted to play with the Tamiya painters tape! Who doesn’t love hazard stripes?

I’ve been starting to think about what I want to accomplish next quarter. The clear frontrunner right now is some terrain. When this Van Saar box is complete, I’ll have three base gangs ready to go – Van Saar, Delaque, and Escher. But! I have no board to play on. Well, I have some terrain – it’s the backdrop in every photo. I would really like to have at least a 2×2 board ready for gang warfare though.

Scorecard(s)

A quick glance at the above reveals a lot of red. We are now 8 weeks into the 13 week quarter, and have only hit the 10 hour goal twice. 25% success rate is not so impressive. I knew when this began that I would need to push myself to hit 10 hours each week, and it’s clear that I just haven’t dedicated myself to the task. Honestly, even 5 hours was a struggle these last few weeks.

You will also notice that I had some expenses this week, for the first time all quarter. Sadly, it was a rather large expense, so let’s talk about it briefly.

The Big Purchase

Going into this year long hobby challenge, I knew that I wanted to try and minimize the hobby spending. As I discussed in the intro post, I have plenty of miniatures to build and paint. However, I also knew that I would likely make two significant purchases. We have just hit the first – I bought an airbrush.

As I’ve started thinking about next quarter’s potential projects, I realized that the terrain in particular would be a nightmare with only a brush. I have played around with some of the terrain sets enough to know that they are significant undertakings. Even just priming, basing, and dry brushing the zone mortalis tiles takes more time than I expected. Then picking out details, experimenting with oils and weathering pigments is going to make them even more time intensive. Thus, I made the decision to get an airbrush.

It is a pretty common tool in the hobby these days, and I have exactly 0 experience with one. It’s also quite expensive when starting without any of the equipment. Guess I’ll have to use it regularly to make sure I get my money’s worth!

Keep painting.