The "How to Maintain Painting Motivation" Thread

Please link your painting and modelling projects here for feedback and to show off your work
Post Reply
User avatar
The Other Dave
Destroyer of Worlds
Posts: 5096
Joined: Tue May 18, 2010 3:46 am
Location: Nagoya
Contact:

The "How to Maintain Painting Motivation" Thread

Post by The Other Dave » Wed Sep 01, 2021 10:52 pm

[insert gif of Shia LeBouf shouting "just do it," hit Submit, done!]

What with the Backlog-burning thread Primarch just started and some general posts related to the topic about motivation and what-not, I thought I'd start a thread where we can share ideas about how to get and stay motivated painting! It can be hard! Everyone has their own methods for staying on the painting wagon, and some will work for some people and not for other people, but maybe we can get some tips and what-not.

So here's my general thoughts and process!

1. Use some kind of organization software to keep track of what you have and what your progress is.
This is probably more useful if you have a very big backlog, or are forgetful (*raises hand*), but I've been using Trello to organize my painting queue for the past 3 years or so and it's helped a lot. My dashboard (which is one of the tabs that opens automatically when I load my browser) looks like this:
Image
And you can sort of see how I've done a bit of triage. At the far left is "back burner," which is basically models that I own, but have given myself permission not to worry about painting (the colored labels show what system they're for, and the 4-point checklist each has is "buy, build, prime, paint"). The back burner models live in a closet or box somewhere - Trello reminds me they exist if I want to get to them some time (like most of us, I've discovered miniatures in cupboards I'd literally forgotten I had, and like to avoid that), but I don't have to look at them or feel guilty. (This also helps me identify and get rid of things that are just taking up storage space.) Next is "In the Queue," which is things I'm currently working on, or want to get working on as soon as I get my hands on them (*shakes fist at Australian post and international shipping*). They live on a shelf next to my painting area. Things can and do move between these columns as interest in a particular project wanes! Then I have columns for each month of stuff I've finished, with fancy little pictures I can look at and feel chuffed. Which brings me to point 2:

2. Find a way to give yourself a little reward for finishing a project.
Whenever I finish painting a little batch of minis, I take a picture, update Trello and move the card to the "finished" column, post the finished picture to Twitter, and post here in the "what did you do today" thread and update my sig. It's a little string of affirmative actions that give me a tiny dopamine bump saying "you finished some stuff, good job!" Sometimes people even say nice things about them, but chasing likes on social media seems like a bad idea in general so I try not to worry too much about it.

Related to this is:
2a. Figure out the best-for-you number of miniatures you can consider a "project" and break your workflow into chunks of that size.
You'll notice most of my completed projects are 3-6 individual miniatures. Often that's because Underworlds, but even for 40K I've been painting my plague marines mostly in batches of 3 or 4. That's because I've discovered it's really hard for me to keep motivation to batch paint larger numbers of minis than that. (I did 10 squig hoppers in a batch in July, and that worked OK mostly because of Contrasts.) It might be a lot easier to set yourself to paint 6 batches of 5 Ork Boyz than one batch of 30. I can paint 10 plague marines in 3 batches of 3-4 models a lot quicker than I could paint a single batch of 10 models, just because the latter would burn me out and demotivate me.

And for actual putting-paint-on-miniatures motivation, often the hardest thing:

3. Promise yourself you'll sit in your painting chair, and pick up a brush, at least once per day.
Importantly, you don't have to stay there, or even put paint on the brush! Lots of times I don't, I'm just too tired or distracted or whatever. (Heck, sometimes I even miss the basic promise of sitting in the chair, but I know I should, and it's intentionally not a very big ask.) But lots of times I do, and even getting in a 5- or 10-minute painting session each day adds up (just this morning I took 5 minutes to put the base colors on one leg of a space marine). Sometimes I'll paint for half an hour, or longer, and often I'll grab 3 or 4 short sessions a day. (One thing I have found, since my daughter was born - she's 10 now but the habit was established when she was a baby - is that there's a lot of value in very short painting sessions you grab when you have a minute. I can't do hour-long painting sessions any more, both because I can't really find that long a chunk of time until everyone else is a-bed, and because I don't think my nearly-50-year-old back could take it, but four 15-minute sessions in a day is very doable.) It helps that my painting station is 3 feet to the left of my computer desk, so I can look over and be tempted any time I find myself bored-clicking through YouTube or what have you.

Finally,
4. The perfect is the enemy of the good. And the finished.
Some people like to spend 3 weeks on a single model and make a work of art, and if you do, that's fine! Some people just want a finished army and don't care how it looks from anywhere closer than 3 feet away, and that's fine too. The important thing is to understand what your goals are and how they fit in with gaming (if you're painting for gaming, and I think most of us here are), and don't compare your painting to anything other than the previous thing you painted. It's also good to know, for a given project, where it's going to lie on the effort-vs-time chart. I put a bit more time into my plague marines than my underworlds output, partly because I started them that way (although they've actually gotten a bit more complex over time as I figure out how to do rust and so on), and partly because they're just a higher-effort project and I like putting the time in. My blitz bowl teams are universally bash-them-out-in-a-day contrast jobs. But having an idea of what "finished" will be for a given project, and knowing that not all projects need to be done to the same level, can help with the stress thing a lot IME.

And that's my effortpost on painting motivation! What do you all do?
Last edited by The Other Dave on Thu Sep 02, 2021 3:06 am, edited 1 time in total.
Feel free to call me Dave!
-----
Miniatures painted in 2023: 252
Miniatures painted in 2024:
Epic scale: 9 vehicles, 56 stands of infantry, a whole buncha terrain
32mm-ish: 3 infantry

User avatar
Primarch
Evil Overlord
Posts: 11392
Joined: Fri May 14, 2010 9:33 am
Location: Nagoya
Contact:

Re: The "How to Maintain Painting Motivation" Thread

Post by Primarch » Wed Sep 01, 2021 11:39 pm

@ToD - Nice idea for a thread.

While I don't use Trello, or any other form of organizational tool to keep track of my progress (I'd spend years just getting it set up), I do agree with what ToD said about finding painting time where you can, and giving yourself small, positive rewards when you do get stuff done.

In recent years, I have done the majority of my painting over the winter. This has been due to the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge. I find that having set painting targets (in terms of general volume rather than specific minis), themed entry rounds and the vague sense of competition with anonymous strangers really helps me stay focused on getting a brush in my hand and minis moving on my workbench. The AHPC encourages entrants to comment on other people's work too. A fair number of the other competitors do post very actively on the minis and it honestly feels good when people say nice things about your work.

My other motivation to paint is a simple "No unpainted minis on the table" rule. Tabletop wargaming should have a stunning visual aspect to it. Whether it's a kill team of hardened elites skirmishing across a carnage filled warzone or hundreds of conscripts marching in formation across the battlefields of the 19th century, the game should look great. If I want to see bare plastic being pushed over a wooden table surface, I'll switch to boardgames.

And finally, I'd say that the best thing to motivate you is to see the work of others. Even if I can't hope to duplicate it, or I don't even have the same minis, seeing what other people have done really makes me want to paint more myself. I'll add the caveat that it is very important to find your own groove in terms of painting. I don't have the patience or skill to be an award winning painter, in the same way that ToD doesn't batch paint 60 minis in one go. Being happy with your own work is essential to getting minis done.
Painted Minis in 2014: 510, in 2015: 300, in 2016 :369, in 2019: 417, in 2020: 450

Jye Nicolson
Legend
Posts: 1852
Joined: Thu Aug 08, 2019 11:04 pm

Re: The "How to Maintain Painting Motivation" Thread

Post by Jye Nicolson » Thu Sep 02, 2021 12:39 am

So my goals are different to most folks here I think (I am in the "only care how it looks from a metre away camp" Dave mentioned), but my throughput has been good this year so there must be *something* going right in my process.

1. No unpainted minis on the table. Just like Primarch. Actually very literally Primarch because I adopted this rule for Nagoyahammer 2020 (shakes fist in the direction of Covid). This is effectively a rule in 9th ed 40k due to the painting score; nobody in the club would actually enforce that but enforcing it on *yourself* helps.

2. Pay attention to the meta. This seems like silly advice because we don't actually play competitively around the club, for games like 40k we usually don't even play at the sizes tournaments are run at and thus we have a different local meta. But I'm not talking about winning games, so much as using any desire your brain has to win games to trick it into painting minis. The meta *changes*, very frequently for 40k in particular, and units come in and out of fashion essentially randomly. Trying to keep up with that is expensive at retail prices, but when something in your existing "pile of potential" becomes the new hotness your motivation to get it painted and play a game or two with it before it goes cold again is pretty strong. And if you keep this cycle up your painted library will grow and you'll often find you have the unit of the moment ready on the shelf.

3. Remote meetings. If you happen to be a remote worker, a population much bigger during the pandemic, you know one of the biggest curses of Zoom (et al) meetings is that people can just alt-tab out. It's frustrating when you try to get people to participate and find they're not paying attention, it's embarassing when you hear your name being called and realise you've forgotten you were even in a meeting because you alt tabbed to answer a question in Slack and then did some code reviews etc etc. My solution is to paint through the meetings - it keeps my eyes and hands busy while my ears and brain are on the meeting. It genuinely improves my contribution to the meeting and gets a lot of painting done.

4. Podcasts. This is actually the same as point 3 only the podcaster doesn't care if your attention wanders during the show. But I find painting, like meetings, is a perfect activity if I want to use my brain and ears for (say) history and need to keep my eyes and hands busy. There's also a lot of Japanese teaching on YouTube etc that I promise I will get back to just as soon as I finish The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.

5. Be married to a baseball fan. It's 18+ hours a week where the TV is not available for PlayStation use or anything else. While I've become a Yomiuri Giants fan via Stockholm syndrome, I can't take three+ hours baseball level stress so I just podcast and paint through, looking up when there's a home run or whatever.

6. Post your minis in What Did You Do Today when they're done. Even if they're not good, it's fulfilling to show people you did the thing, and getting to make the post is great motivation to push through and finish.


TLDR: my method is having game-based motivations to paint, and always combining painting with something else to do (voluntarily or otherwise). Also low, low standards.

User avatar
me_in_japan
Moderator of Swoosh!
Posts: 7382
Joined: Fri May 14, 2010 2:46 pm
Location: Tsu, Mie, Japan

Re: The "How to Maintain Painting Motivation" Thread

Post by me_in_japan » Thu Sep 02, 2021 12:55 am

Good idea, Dave.

I realise I am probably the worst person to be giving painting motivation advice, but my extended periods of not-painting have given me some insight into things, I’d like to think.

I think it’s fair to say that we all enjoy our hobby. We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t. However, I think it’s also fair to say that it can become a burden at times. Taking myself as an example, I haven’t painted much in a few years now (occasional spurts of creativity notwithstanding) and because of that I feel, well, guilty is probably an appropriate word. I feel like I’ve done something wrong by not painting. I daresay the root cause of that stems from knowing how much money I’ve spent on the unpainted minis sitting around my room, but I suspect some of it also comes from my self-identification as a miniature painter/gamer nerd (ie if I’m not painting then I’m wasting my time).

The upshot of this is that if I’m not painting I feel bad. If I do paint, those feelings go away, at least a bit, and I feel that I’ve done something constructive. However, I know I can do better work. I’ve done better in the past. This is also a source of frustration, as again I feel like I’m wasting my time. So, I get discouraged and don’t feel inspired to paint. Rinse and repeat. It’s gotten so that when I do paint I’m not painting for fun - I paint to stave off the feelings of guilt from not painting.

This, I am sure, is not how things should be.

The one thing that snaps me out of this nonsense is when I’m painting with a purpose. There’s only been a couple of occasions this past year or so when I’ve painted anything much, and those were for the rare occasions I got a game in. But, on both occasions I was able to get a dozen or so minis painted up for the game, I felt satisfied with them, and enjoyed using them to play with. The one exception was when I painted my Cobra for the gauntlet. I’ve had that model for over a decade, and the gauntlet gave me a deadline and a reason to meet it. So, as my motivational point for this post, I’d say

“Paint with a purpose in mind”

is a good mindset to have. Personally I find painting simply to clear the backlog to be soul destroying, although in my defence I do have a stupid huge backlog which I know in my heart will never be cleared. I sometimes consider selling it just so I don’t have it any more. I know id regret it, but maybe the sense of freedom would allow me to enjoy buying a new box of something and painting it? I dunno - it’s just something I toy with when I’m feeling defeated by it all. It does make me wonder, though, would I be happier if I just packed it all in and played pc games instead?

It’s funny - in the past, I had never really consider gaming to be a primary motivation for my painting. I had always put myself much more in the painty side of yet hobby, rather than the gamey side. The pandemic has helped me see that I need a social purpose to my creative endeavors. The same is true of my magic cards, btw - not being able to actually play with them has made deck building and planning really lose its shine. Even online play doesn’t quite scratch the itch. (I also realize that most if not all of you are up in Nagoya and thus have access to other gamers. Down here in the boonies it’s a different story entirely. It’s very isolated.)

Anyway. This whole post was a very long way of saying:

if you’re not painting, think about why you’re not painting.

Does your painting spark joy? If it does, then great - you’re doing this right. If it doesn’t, can you identify why not, and what, if anything, can be done about it? For me, the lack of purpose and social contact has been a huge demotivator. I’m hopeful that once the ‘rona has passed (yeah, I know…) my mojo will come back and I’ll be happy painting again. Until then, I guess I shouldn’t feel too bad about playing computer games? 🤷🏻‍♂️

One final point is: I recently got a magnifying visor/headlamp thing. Holy hell it has made a huge difference. I get a health check/eye check every year as part of my job requirements, and it always comes back ticketty-boo, but I’d suspected my eyes were getting a bit weaker. Things I used to be able to do effortlessly when painting were getting difficult to the point of impossibility. When I eventually bought the visor and tried swapping out some lenses, I could suddenly paint like I used to! Eyes once again got pupils in the right places! Gems got light pings in the right quadrant! Huzzah! I hadn’t realized how frustrated I’d been getting about not being able to do things that I’d once done easily.

So, a secondary piece of motivation advice:

if you don’t have a magifying visor, consider getting one.

There’s a whole bunch of em on Amazon, and they cost about 2000en. Mine is a generic Chinese clone, and came with 5 or 6 lenses. It’s great. Having a built in light is also extremely important. You won’t regret getting one, I promise .
current (2019) hobby interests
eh, y'know. Stuff, and things

Wow. And then Corona happened. Just....crickets, all the way through to 2023...

User avatar
The Other Dave
Destroyer of Worlds
Posts: 5096
Joined: Tue May 18, 2010 3:46 am
Location: Nagoya
Contact:

Re: The "How to Maintain Painting Motivation" Thread

Post by The Other Dave » Thu Sep 02, 2021 2:53 am

me_in_japan wrote:
Thu Sep 02, 2021 12:55 am
Personally I find painting simply to clear the backlog to be soul destroying,
Touching on this, sort of counterintuitively, stopping worrying about my backlog and just painting for fun was what enabled me to annihilate my backlog. When I stopped thinking "I have to paint up these Orcs for Underworlds because I have an obligation to paint them" and started thinking "hey, it'd be fun to do some Orcs with weird skin colors*" I suddenly had a huge desire to paint them, and finished them up in like four days. I try to remember that I paint minis because I like painting minis, tautological as that may be.

*I only learned too late that purple orcs are apparently A Whole Meme, and if I'd known I'd have picked a different color. :lol: The price of being contrarian.

(Related to that, being reflexively contrarian about color schemes has been very freeing to me for some reason. The worst painting block I ever had was when I was staring at 20-odd WWII Germans in feldgrau, and the free-est I've ever felt was deciding to do some red orcs, or pale blue witch elves, or dwarves the color of the inside of a 1990's Taco Bell. I heard a story once from a GW staff member somewhere who said he'd always tell especially younger kids coming in for a paint demo "nobody has actually ever seen a space marine, so you can paint them whatever color you want," and how sometimes their eyes would just light up. I try to take that to heart, although it does lead to me having to bite my tongue when some wag on Twitter sees my red orcs, say, and says "Ahh I see you've painted some Fel Orcs from Outland, ho ho!")
Feel free to call me Dave!
-----
Miniatures painted in 2023: 252
Miniatures painted in 2024:
Epic scale: 9 vehicles, 56 stands of infantry, a whole buncha terrain
32mm-ish: 3 infantry

User avatar
Primarch
Evil Overlord
Posts: 11392
Joined: Fri May 14, 2010 9:33 am
Location: Nagoya
Contact:

Re: The "How to Maintain Painting Motivation" Thread

Post by Primarch » Thu Sep 02, 2021 3:22 am

Personally, (and probably quite predictably given my interest in historicals) I'm in the opposite mindset regarding colour schemes. I find that knowing roughly what colours a figure should be really helps me blitz through them. For me, painting 5 models in different colours is way more challenging than doing 25 models in the same uniform.
Painted Minis in 2014: 510, in 2015: 300, in 2016 :369, in 2019: 417, in 2020: 450

Post Reply

Return to “Painting and Modelling - ペイント”