The "How to Maintain Painting Motivation" Thread
Posted: 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:
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?
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:
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?