Picking up Spent Glory’s introductory hobby series, today we are going to talk about one of the ways to help get through a project and actually ‘finish a warband’. There’s no right way to hobby, and anybody who tells you otherwise is probably selling something, but if you’re struggling to complete a project or get things tabletop ready today we will look at a few ways you can help make that process easier and increase the odds you’ll have something to be proud of at the end.

I’ll run through some strategies and tips and all that jazz, and end with the thing that made the biggest difference in my painting hobby. I went from somebody who got maybe 10 models done in a year to somebody who routinely exceeds 100, all with one relatively small change.

Articles in this series:
The Benefits of The Hobby
Building Underworlds Models
Painting Supplies
Primer, and Why to Use It
Contrast/Speed Paint
Acrylic Paint
Miniature Basing
Lore, Novels, Art, and Fan Fiction
Making It Manageable

Set Your Expectations

One of the things that will help you get a project under control and start making progress towards completion is figuring out just how much you’re actually trying to do. Without a specific goal in mind, it’s easy to become a little overwhelmed with ‘man I have to paint all of this’ and letting the amount of effort and time spiral out into your imagination. Decide ahead of time what it is that you’re comfortable with. Tricolor standard? Base colors and a wash? Contrast paint with a few highlights? Full ‘Eavy Metal box art? Whatever your goal is, knowing it ahead of time allows you to break it into concrete steps and can also help you decide when you’re “done”. This also helps you gauge your progress and feel like you’re working toward something with each session, building momentum and getting the project to completion.

I also want to point out that you do NOT need to be an airbrush pro or have 10,000 Instagram followers to paint something that looks good, nor do you need to spend 700s hour and use 75 paint colors to have something awesome. The ‘worst painted’ warband you’ve ever seen is still a painted warband, and has more going for it than your bare plastic from an aesthetic standpoint. The guy who runs a 2-hour mile is slow, but he also is faster than the guy sitting on his couch. Let go of the visions of ‘perfect’ and step forward into the future where you have painted models.

Establish Goals and Routine Check-Ins

Once you’ve figured out that you’re aiming for a certain standard of quality and detail, you can get to the next part of your plan: how long you’ll take to get it done by. If you don’t set a time-based goal, it’s incredibly easy to let the project drag on to infinity and never be completed. I’ll get to it later, you might say. ‘I’m nowhere near finished and thus have little inspiration’ or conversely ‘it’s almost done and will only take me a few more hours so there’s no rush’.

As you go about establishing your painting project plan, you’ll want an end date for what you’re working on, possibly even in the grand scope of your hobby overall. Say you want to have a warband painted per quarter, a model per week, everything done before the next thing is released, whatever works for you. Once you have a goal that you think is reasonably achievable but also would satisfy you, then you can get to figuring out how much work you need to do to finish it, and how fast/how often that work needs to be done. If you want to do a warband every month, set a reminder for yourself two weeks in to make sure you’re either done with half the models, or done with half the ‘stuff’ on each model.

Carve Out Dedicated Time

Knowing a given project is going to take you some amount of time, maybe 15 hours, you’ll have a lot more success if you actually schedule that time and protect it. The concept of protected time is a cool one (and not just for labor laws and making sure you get a sick day). If you dedicate protected time for your hobby – this is that “me time” and stuff that you hear wellness people talk about – then make sure nothing gets in its way, you’ll actually use it. It’s easy to say to yourself ‘oh yeah I’ll get to it on the weekend or something I guess’, you’re pretty likely to find yourself at the end of the weekend having done nothing on your project because other stuff has come up and gotten in the way. If you instead say “I’m going to take the two hours after I get home from church and do all the skin and hair on this warband”, guess who might actually have painted skin and hair by the end of the weekend?

Other people have the opposite problem; instead of having their painting time overrun by other priorities and obligations, they just can’t seem to find the energy to pull the trigger. Scheduling time can also help with that one. You told yourself you’d paint sometime this weekend, but you either don’t think to do it, or you do remember but brush it off and let Netflix autoplay the next episode. If you set a calendar time with an alarm and all that, when 7PM rolls around and screams at you to get off your butt and paint, you might really do it.

Or maybe just watch another episode while you scroll your phone, I’m not here to judge you. It’s not like I haven’t done the same thing.

A Little Goes a Long Way

OK, so you’re like me and do the laziness thing. Surprised you made it this deep into the article, but good on you. Here’s the single most impactful thing I have found to help me go from zero to hobby hero. Or at least a guy who actually hobbies. We’re all on this journey and there’s no finish line. You’re all heroes.

What I mean to say is you don’t have to carve out a ton of ‘real work’ and set aside a whole day or what have you. I used to think I needed to set aside a four-hour block of time to really ‘get anything done’. Since finding four hours of continuous hobby time was difficult both logistically and psychologically, I would go months between hobby sessions. I would rarely make any real progress on a project, and I never really developed skills because I went so long between practicing. Effectively I was making the problem too large.

I remembered a concept from the Independent Characters Podcast called One Hour a Night, which is pretty simple. “Anybody can find one hour a night to hobby” – maybe after you put the kids to bed, you do an hour before going to sleep yourself. Maybe get rid of the wasted hour watching the nightly news and hobby instead, or hobby while the news is on, whatever. They have a Facebook Group if you’re interested so you can get some inspiration and share paintjob progress and all that.

The thing is that still was probably too much for me. I have a variable schedule working in a hospital, so my ‘night’ might end at 8 PM or might end at 4 AM. I can work any day of the week and have random days off and random time blocks on the job. Establishing a nightly schedule wasn’t in the cards for me, and I didn’t always feel like I had an hour (despite it being much more manageable than 4). So, here’s what I ended up doing that’s been the real game changer: ten minutes, one thing. That’s all.

I have a few paints in my locker at work with an old shoddy paintbrush and a plastic cup for water. On my lunch break, after I finish eating, I’ll spend 5-15 minutes just doing one coat of one color on a few models. In the morning, I might get up 5-15 minutes early and put a wash on some models. When my daughter tells me she’s bored, we might spend 5-15 minutes getting Elmer’s Glue and putting some base flocking on a warband’s bases together. Weather is nice and I just finished mowing the lawn? Grab a spray primer can and hit a warband before I go back inside.

Some days (most days really) I don’t do anything hobby-wise. A lot of days I do. Sometimes that ten minutes is just ten minutes, but it’s more than I was going to get. Every so often that 10 minutes turns into 30 or more, and I might find by the end of the week I have done 4 hours of work without having to block off a 4-hour chunk I never did before. I feel more motivated because I see more progress. Doing it fuels me to do it more. I have gotten more skilled in the past few years because I have been painting, and I have done it almost exclusively in 15-minute chunks instead of scrolling my phone.

I’ll take it back to the beginning of this article and repeat that the guy who runs a 2-hour mile is slow, but he also is faster than the guy sitting on his couch. You don’t need to finish the whole warband today. Just paint their shoes with one layer of brown and move on. You’ll get through it. I believe in you!

P.S. How do you think I write all these articles anyway? Just a paragraph at a time here and there. #Professional