Why Do We Paint?

When you come to think about it, painting miniatures could very well be the oddest part of this entire hobby, particularly in this day and age of pre-painted miniatures and professional painting services. Why spend countless eye-straining hours laboring over tiny figures long into the night? Even if you are lucky enough to get in multiple games a week, it's likely that you'll never spend as much time playing as you do painting. And then there's all the additional cost (both time and money) involved in gaining proficiency in painting itself!

And yet most of us persevere. Why?

My answer: self-expression.

We want to feel like our miniatures reflect a bit of our own creative vision. In fantasy wargaming (and the more obscure historical genres), this includes things like choosing uniform colors and other details of the figures' appearance, but even in your more rigidly-proscribed historical genres like Napoleonics or WWII, there's often room for more than a bit of creative flourish amongst the uniform plates and camo swatches.

And then there's your own personal style. Everyone has one, even if it's subtle. To my mind, there is no point in painting miniatures yourself if the result isn't obviously your own "brand" of painting, as it were. Yes, most of us watch tutorials and try to emulate a particular favored style. But if the end goal is to look just like a Kev Dallimore or Duncan Rhodes piece, I have to question why you would bother painting your own minis at all. Just find a professional painter who can ape your favored style and spend the money you would have otherwise on paints and painting supplies on commissions instead.

So that's all my subjective opinion, and YMMV and all that. Where I start to get a bit tetchy, as the Brits say, is when emulation of a particular style gets confused with being a "good" painter. It's all a bit Académie des Beaux-Arts, if you will.

A personal anecdote to illustrate my point:

I've been painting miniatures for literally 30 years at this point. I am happy with my level of painting proficiency, though I'm always pushing myself to try new techniques or up my skill level in this way or that. But, ultimately, I would call myself a "good" painter.

To that end, I have periodically engaged in painting miniatures for commission. I have never had an unhappy client, and have frequently had to turn down work because my queue got too full.

A few years ago, I was looking into taking my commission work to a more regular gig and so was looking to put my name out there. One of the bigger GW-adjacent wargaming YouTube channels at the time ran a painting service (they may still, for all I know) and had an offer for commission painters where, if you did some painting for them, they would advertise your services on their channel. I submitted a portfolio.

The response I got was one of the most condescending rejections I've ever received; it more or less said, "Hey, great effort buddy! Keep practicing and in a few years you might actually get good!"

At first, this really threw me for a loop, I have to say. But as I thought it over, I realized where they were coming from: I don't paint to GW standards. And in their world, painting to the GW standard is the sole marker for what constitutes "good" painting. How clean are those edge highlights? Tighten them up, or you'll never be a "good" painter! That kind of nonsense. After that insight, I had a good laugh and moved on.

But that insight has stuck with me ever since as illustrative of a much more pervasive attitude. And it's frankly bullshit. It's an attitude that turns the art of miniatures painting into a craft of paint-by-numbers.

Do your figures look badass on the table? Are you happy with them? Then you're a "good" painter. End of story.

Timely insights courtesy of @sonicsledge.

Yes, there are certain minimum technical bars we all should be clearing. There is, I believe, an objective definition of what constitutes a "bad" paint job. Beyond that, anything is fair game. Paint for yourself and your own enjoyment and satisfaction; nobody else's.

(Okay, you can also paint for the enjoyment of your gaming buddies who appreciate your efforts and ogle your figures when you put them on the table, but that's it!)

282 Days

 Last November, in the Before Times, I posted about starting up an Instagram account and getting a #hobbystreak thing going.

This past Saturday, for the first time in 282 days, I did not do anything miniatures related. I broke my streak.

Two hundred and eighty-two days. That's pretty impressive, I have to say. I've never done anything approaching that in my miniatures gaming hobby, and I've been at it for nearly 30 years!

Unsurprisingly, I got a lot done. I still have unpainted minis on my shelves, but their numbers are massively reduced. Once I finish my current project of WWII Eritrean Colonial Infantry for my East Africa 1940 project, I still have:

• Sisters of Battle
• Genestealer Cult
• Death Guard
• 28mm Gempei Samurai
• Some Warlords of Erehwon warbands

And that's about it! Each of the 40K projects are small, about 30-40 models a piece, and the Warlords warbands are even smaller (with the possible exception of the Goblins).

This is a massive shift from when I started back in November. In that time I've painted up three forces for Sharp Practice (two AWI, one Napoleonic), two 6mm Sengoku samurai armies, a WWII German platoon plus support, jump-off points for  Chain of Command, several classic Grenadier fantasy models for Warlords of Erehwon, and an assorted miscellany of other figures, plus taken on a handful of painting commissions.

Honestly, without those commissions I'd probably be done with the above list, or very close to it. My original intention was to break my streak in late July anyway, since I thought I'd be going to Gen Con, and my initial schedule had me getting everything except the Erehwon figures completed by then. But it's all good; I'm always happy to help other folks get painted figures on the table, and the cash helps pay for more minis (not that I'm buying too many of those these days), paint, and other supplies.

I'm optimistic I can get the rest of the above-named projects done by the end of the year. After that, I want to get back into experimenting with 2mm Napoleonics, as well as a special "black & white" WWII project and working on lots of terrain. I'll probably continue with my painting commissions as well.

But on the main, I'm anticipating 2021 will be my year for terrain projects the same way this has been my year for figure painting. Hopefully by then I can start hosting games in my house again...

Anyway, I'm really proud of the streak I hit and the progress I made, and after taking a few days off I'm itching to start up another streak. Let's see how long I can keep this one going, eh?

I'll leave off with photos of some of the projects I completed during my 282-day streak:

Hobby Streak!

The last couple months have seen me painting more frequently than I have in years. Possibly decades.

This was partly due to taking on a couple commissions in addition to my regular personal painting. In fact, I was painting so much, I started to develop carpal tunnel pain in my painting hand! As my day job requires me to do a lot of typing, this was seriously worrisome.

So I'm hanging up my commission painting cap for a while (though I will probably still eBay painted figs from time to time) so I can take it easy and go at a slow-but-steady pace that isn't going to mess up my precious hands.

Because...

I'm gonna flippin' do it, man. I'm tired of staring at the unpainted figures on my shelves. I figured out that if I complete around 30 figures a week, I'll get nearly everything finished by the time Gen Con rolls around next year. Why Gen Con as my goal? Simply because it's sort of the beginning of a new "fiscal year" for me, both professionally and in terms my hobby. So it seems like a reasonable goal, and the math worked out pretty well.

I recently discovered Dana Howl's excellent painting tutorial channel on YouTube, and through that I found out she's been posting a #HobbyStreak photo on her Instagram every day for nearly a year. Talk about inspiration!

It's so inspiring, in fact, that I've started up an Instagram account linked to this very blog. I'm one week into my own personal #HobbyStreak and feeling good. The carpal tunnel has gone away (thankfully!) and it's already been really gratifying to see new painted figures appearing on my shelves again. Woohoo!

Hoping by around the first week of December to have two AWI forces painted up for Sharp Practice, at which point I will ideally get a game in soon after. I'll then move on to some 28mm Napoleonics (inspired by one of my recent commissions)—also for Sharp Practice—as well as 28mm Genpei War-era samurai for Ronin. That should close out the year, at which point I'm turning my attention to my patchwork of unpainted WWII platoons...

In sadder news, I was supposed to play Malifaux this week for the first time in a very long time, but it was cancelled at the last minute due to my opponent coming down with a cold. We've rescheduled for two weeks from now. I took pictures of the table so I can set it up again, but figured I'd share one here as a teaser...

The Decline and Fall of 2mm Napoleonics

A couple months back, I posted about my burgeoning interest in 2mm Napoleonic wargaming using 3-D printed figure blocks from Forward March Studios, and (brimming with confidence) promised more details soon to come...

Well, I can definitely say I gave it the old college try.

I ordered the figures and buildings from a couple different professional 3-D printing services and got out an old sheet of acrylic plastic I'd bought for wargaming, determined to paint it up to look like the rather clever sheets featured on the Forward March blog. I got my copy of the Et Sans Resultat rules and read through the rulebook. I assembled a list of units and devised a basing scheme.

Forgive the poor late-night lighting...

That single base is as far as I ever got.

In retrospect, the whole process was a lot more hassle than I'd anticipated, from printing problems to the whole acrylic sheet thing not really working out to the assembly of bases and labels to overall dissatisfaction with the scale. This latter point was really brought home to me when I recently completed a painting commission on some 28mm Napoleonic cavalry. Damn but those figures look fine, and I can see the appeal of the scale (even if I'd want a good-sized table to play at that size, even for something on the level of General de Brigade).

Not saying I want to get into 28mm. Not saying that at all. But returning to my 2mm last night, I just...couldn't. They're way too abstract. I realize minis wargaming is, essentially, just using three-dimensional counters at the end of the day, but these are a little too close to the "wargames counter" experience for me to get really excited about it from a minis wargaming perspective.

Besides, I recently discovered the Pub Battles line. That's basically the experience I envisioned when I first started thinking about this whole crazy 2mm project, and looks like something definitely worth checking out—might as well just go "full wargame" at this point, eh? (And hey, maybe I can figure out a way to integrate my 2mm blocks into the Pub Battles system?)

Regardless, it'll be a while before I find out—those Pub Battles games are expensive and a bit too bespoke for a casual purchase. I'm not that much of a hardcore wargamer! Something for next year, perhaps.

In the meantime, I found that, between my own projects, commissioned projects, and my day job as a writer and editor, I was straining my hands and experiencing some incipient carpal tunnel pain! That's a big uh-oh in my line of work, and obviously something has to give. I just finished one commission and will be finishing up the second over the next couple weeks. After that, I won't be doing any more commission work for the remainder of the year; I'll check back in with my hands next year and see if I want to pick that back up.

(Not that commission work is a big income stream for me or anything. Just a nice way to earn some supplemental hobby cash, and it can certainly lie dormant for a while.)

Even with my own projects, I'll be taking things (even more) slowly. I have an interesting DBA project I've been working on in fits and starts, and I'll be returning to that shortly, as it's pretty easy on the ol' paint hand. Pics to follow once I'm done (sometime around Christmas at the rate I've been going...).

Some Sunday Skorne

I've decided to set Paint Table Saturday aside - not that I don't enjoy seeing other folks' PTS posts, but old habits die hard, and I'm finding that I prefer to share photos of my finished minis in preference to WIP shots.

And hey, whaddya know? I've got some finished minis to share!

Since the beginning of the year, I've been slowly but surely putting together a collection of Skorne for Warmachine/Hordes. I've got a decent-sized force collected now, and the first models are rolling out of the old painting factory and (hopefully) onto nearby battlefields.

(Or rather, they will be once I finish up just a couple more models...)

In the meantime, here's what I've got finished so far:

From left to right, that's Dominar Rasheth, a Titan Gladiator, a unit of Paingivers, and a Paingiver Taskmaster.

In case it wasn't blindingly obvious from that description, the Skorne are all about inflicting pain as a means to power. These guys are wickedly, cartoonishly villainous, which is my kind of evil. Let's take a look at the individual units, then...

So this is the original Lord Humongous, a regular Hedonismbot if you will. It was this model that inspired me to go with the Skorne over a couple other factions I was considering. He's so wonderfully decadent. Plus, he stands in stark opposition to all the other Skorne leaders, who are nauseatingly physically fit. I feel that Dominar Rasheth is an icon that I, as an American, can fully get behind.

Plus the model is just all kinds of awesome, with tons of fun little details. I'm really pleased with how the Agonizers bearing his litter turned out. They look completely fed up.

Sadly, my decision to paint up my Skorne as albinos resulted in Dominar's abundant flesh getting a bit washed out. I'll have to fiddle with my camera settings for future photoshoots.

The Titan Gladiator was the other model that really attracted me to the Skorne. This model was a joy to paint, and I probably spent way more time on it than I should have. As you can see, on both the Titan and Dominar, I went with a non-standard color palette for the armor. My Legio Metalica titans are red and gold, and I wanted something a little different on my shelves. I decided to go with a lacquered armor with a purple cast.

I haven't decided yet if I'm going to just stick with the monochrome banner or put a design on it. We'll see how the other banners in my force shake out.

Finally, we've got my unit of Paingivers. For these, I went with a more standard Skorne color palette, although in my faction this palette is more like the guild colors for the Paingivers and not the sort of more general "Skorne uniform," if you will.

So that's that. As I mentioned, I've got a couple Cyclops Savages to finish up and then I should have a gamable force. With more to come after that!