Holy Shit! I Managed to Paint a Thing Finally…
It has been an insane amount of time since I painted a model. I haven’t finished painting a single model since I released the Iron Warriors Centurion for Kera.
Not going to beat around the bush here: I wedged myself into on fucking epic hobby rut. I shit you not, I didn’t enter my hobby room for two months, which sucks, cause we pay a lot of extra rent for the second bedroom that was going to waste. I didn’t even want to sit at my desktop in there, and instead used the chromebook or laptop in the living room or at the dining table. It was rough.
Not only did I not miss the miniature painting hobby, but, it fuckin stressed me out.
A few months back, I started putting some minor effort into breaking out of the rut. I had a paint night with Ryan and I did literally nothing, didn’t enjoy it and abandoned the idea for a while: The time and space I needed away from the hobby had not been adequately accumulated. Dungeons and Dragons has filled that space in my crazy-obsessive brainpan.
But I am about seven months out from dumping the hobby like a cheating whore and decided to give it a second chance. Long ago had I decided that it would no longer be the primary consumer of my free time. Both Reading and Dungeons and Dragons had come together to usurp the miniature hobby rulership, and I was a better person for it.
With the official announcement of 11th edition Warhammer 40k, I decided that it was time for me to put a little effort back into the hobby. I mean, I have several thousand points of Dark Angels still unpainted, as well as a whole Death Korps of Krieg army that had largely come into my possession thanks to Ian and and helping him with his Steel Legion tank project. So, what they hell? Why not give it a try.
But, how to get myself back in?…
Blue Man Group
Seemed to me, that the easiest way to get back into things was two-fold: a small project and preferably already started.
If I could find something already partially complete, than there would be less work necessary to get that little dopamine rush for completing a project. The likelyhood of that was fairly high, and that’s me being sarcastic, since I can’t look around without partially completed and abandoned projects offending the eye. The other key was small, not a fuckin tank in eight sub-assemblies, or a 10 man squad that was just primed: I needed quick and easy.
Within the pile of cast away model projects, I found three Saturnine terminators. I got six from Connor in a trade, as he wasn’t super keen on the sculpts, and I took him up on it because the Saturnine box we bought had gone to Kera. They were not only built and primed, but airbrushed several blues to have a lively blue color that I had come to love and white areas blocked in.
I got to work on the metallics. I found that the Leadbelcher party had already begun before I left the project to rot, so finishing it up was an easy task. The gold took much longer, and almost sent me back on a fuck-this-hobby spree, but, I held my shit together, taking my time and only working in single-hour intervals. That seemed to work, since the next thing I know I was working on details.
This is far from my best work. But I decided that it should be shared because in the end, a painted model is far better than an unpainted model or a mini perpetually stuck in the partially-painted bin next to my hobby table.
We had purchased the Frostheart contrast paint for all the eyes and plasma for the Iron Warriors project Kera and I were still hypothetically working on, as we wanted to make life easier on the wifey. Plus, it looks plenty good enough on the table. I decided that I could afford to lower my expectations of myself this time and give into the ease of contrast: I needed the win, and so here we are. I have three more painted marines than I had before.
The dopamine squirt felt good. Now I just need to decide what I want to work on next: some preexisting project already in the works or something unborn still in a package. I guess you can check back here later and see just what it is I chose to work on, if anything.
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Tyson
Obsessive and neurotic collector of little plastic men, novels about the same little plastic men and paints to make the little plastic men pretty. Married to Kera, who puts up with him and pretends that she doesn’t hear him speaking to the little plastic men in between making pew pew noises in the hobby room. Requires adult supervision. A menace to himself but rarely to others. More beard than man
