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For myself, I find it VERY hard to keep my hobby projects on track. Normally that's not so big a deal, but sometimes it can be discouraging. I suppose it has a lot to do with where you are in your life. I happen to work full-time Mon.-Fri. and free time is hard to come by, for whatever reason. My lady and I are engaged, we have a couple of pets, she's in grad school at the moment, but none of the massive real-life commitments that could eat free-time, like KIDS, or particularly grueling hours, or anything like that. Still, I find it extremely hard to devote time to the hobby.

And sometimes, when I do find the time, I get so little done! A good example: Once a month my girl is away from home for two solid weekdays doing grad school studies. I always target those days for working on my hobby projects since she's not around, needing quality time and all. After those two days are gone and she's back, I look back and realize, wow, I've painted like, 3 guys! Maybe I'm just incredibly slow at it....

So what about it? How much time would you say you actually devote to the hobby in say, a week? A month? Particularly those of you 30+er's out there that find yourself dealing with more and more boring grown-up stuff. How do you find a way to balance time on the hobby with say time with your significant other?

These days I run gaming at school on Wednesdays, go to the local club Thursday nights, and school and work eats up most of the rest (Time is fleeting... madness... takes it's toll) That's the gaming time. As for hobby, I'm having to wait for school holidays to get anything substantial done. They've just started, and I've got 41 guardsmen, a commissar, a sentinel and a land raider to paint . So I want to put more into the hobby than I do, but don't get the time.

I'm only 26 and have been married for five years with no kids (adopting). I have plenty of time for my hobby though. Every Tuesday is gaming at the local store, and I can usually devote one other day to the hobby. The rest of the time goes between fishing and remodeling my house. My wife is very understanding, I usually can get one weekend day every other month to do hobby stuff too.

I generally try to spend an hour or so working on some model every night. That's been thrown off a bit lately due to my fiancee rebuying basically all of our furniture, so the obvious storage area for everything mid-relocation is piled around my work desk.

I used to only paint on weekends, due to my old painting style being mostly batch painting. Since I figured out batch painting was actively discouraging me from finishing anything, I moved to painting models individually and painting every day. Really helps with the motivation.

-Loki- wrote:I generally try to spend an hour or so working on some model every night. That's been thrown off a bit lately due to my fiancee rebuying basically all of our furniture, so the obvious storage area for everything mid-relocation is piled around my work desk.

I used to only paint on weekends, due to my old painting style being mostly batch painting. Since I figured out batch painting was actively discouraging me from finishing anything, I moved to painting models individually and painting every day. Really helps with the motivation.

Hmm, that's interesting - I generally batch paint too. I never realized that habit could be crimping my motivation. It IS generally easier to approach a single model rather than a batch of 10 now that I think on it. That explains why my 10 assault marines have been taking ages to be finished off I suppose.

I paint at least an hour a night, but i'm a really slow painter. It can take weeks to months to finish one unit. Doesn't help i have 3 40k and 2 WM armies to paint, and my ork army is huge and mostly unpainted.. :(

I play when i can, but it varies. Maybe 12 hours a month (9 of which are at a monthly local tourney) on average.

I'm busy assembling my wife's Cygnar (fething Thunderhead!! it's a pain to get together, and then it'll be used on me ) and my Rhulic Mercs and Menoth.

I have scenery projects on the go...

Basically any time not take up by Work, Kids, Wife, Food (prep/eat - i like to cook) , Pathfinder, The suit of leather armour i'm making for a friend, or Sleep (the smallest timeslot there) I'm spending on Wargaming, one way or another..

mustardParty wrote:For myself, I find it VERY hard to keep my hobby projects on track. Normally that's not so big a deal, but sometimes it can be discouraging. I suppose it has a lot to do with where you are in your life. I happen to work full-time Mon.-Fri. and free time is hard to come by, for whatever reason. My lady and I are engaged, we have a couple of pets, she's in grad school at the moment, but none of the massive real-life commitments that could eat free-time, like KIDS, or particularly grueling hours, or anything like that. Still, I find it extremely hard to devote time to the hobby.

And sometimes, when I do find the time, I get so little done! A good example: Once a month my girl is away from home for two solid weekdays doing grad school studies. I always target those days for working on my hobby projects since she's not around, needing quality time and all. After those two days are gone and she's back, I look back and realize, wow, I've painted like, 3 guys! Maybe I'm just incredibly slow at it....

So what about it? How much time would you say you actually devote to the hobby in say, a week? A month? Particularly those of you 30+er's out there that find yourself dealing with more and more boring grown-up stuff. How do you find a way to balance time on the hobby with say time with your significant other?

it depends. if those 3 you finished are draw droping by the average gamers standards then you're doing fine. great even.

if they are kind of meh table top quality then yes, you are pretty slow.

mustardParty wrote:

-Loki- wrote:I generally try to spend an hour or so working on some model every night. That's been thrown off a bit lately due to my fiancee rebuying basically all of our furniture, so the obvious storage area for everything mid-relocation is piled around my work desk.

I used to only paint on weekends, due to my old painting style being mostly batch painting. Since I figured out batch painting was actively discouraging me from finishing anything, I moved to painting models individually and painting every day. Really helps with the motivation.

Hmm, that's interesting - I generally batch paint too. I never realized that habit could be crimping my motivation. It IS generally easier to approach a single model rather than a batch of 10 now that I think on it. That explains why my 10 assault marines have been taking ages to be finished off I suppose.

The problem with batch painting is you need the time - and motivation - to sit there and go through whatever your batch is. For my Tyranids, I simply cannot do it. There's enough manual highlighting and re-layering red after a wash to make me go nuts with a batch of models. It need, say, 2-3 hours to sit there and do the red on a whole batch of Termagants. However, when I changed to simply painting for an hour or so at a time, I found I went through models much faster. I got nearly my entire Termagant unit done in 2 weeks rather than 2 months, due to having more small 1 hour blocks than 2-3 hour blocks of time to paint. My models also came out better looking.

However, I still do batch paint my Skeletons, because my method for painting them lends itself well to painting them 5 at a time (and if I painted 100 Skeletons 1 at a time I'd go insane). Prime black, base Vermin Brown, base Jack Bone, drybrush white, block in metallics and cloth colours. Devlan mud. Done. The batches break themselves up because I change the colour of the clothes and wood every batch to get a random look to my Skeletons.

Playing games: 3-4 hours a week.

Painting and all that garbage: 15 minutes a week (Note my army is fully painted, save for my LC Terminators that I am working on)

Too much.

I try my best to have 1-3 hours of painting a night. Once a week l get a good 4-6 hour day but those are very rare.

As for gaming. Once or twice a month. Tops sadly.

I play 40k for about 12 hours every 2 weeks or so.

I paint and put together models every day after a Multiplayer match/Beating a level/reaching the next town for about 5 minutes. Except the Friday before I go out to the FLGS. Then I turn on the Radio, flip between an 80's station, a Classic Rock station, and a Hard Rock station(I hate Commercials) and paint/ read wargaming articles online until I go to bed

In terms of actuall games, about 3 hours every Thursday at my local gaming club and the occasonal tournament.
And about 4-6 hours of painting each week, when I can be bothered (usually weekends)
In short, this is an ok amount of hobby time for me but more time (especially games) would be preferred.

Not much, to be honest.

I used to do a lot more, making foamcore buildings, shopping every couple of weeks for new stuff, chatting up a storm with other hobbyists on the Internet, and gaming every weekend and some weekdays. Then, a few weeks after the new Sisters of Battle codex came out, I pretty much stopped.

I liked the Codex and everything, it's just that I was on Dakka very much at the time. As you might recall, there was a lot of... dissatisfaction, with the Codex and the lack of new models. It really started to rub off on me, and pretty much ruined my enjoyment of the hobby.

Ah-heh, posting this has reminded me why I hadn't been back to Dakka in a while... It's kinda an unfortunate situation. I get in the mood to socialize with chatter about WH40k stuff, try to resist going to Dakka, eventually fail to resist, go to Dakka, am reminded of why I tried to avoid Dakka.

Also unfortunately, with my enjoyment of the hobby having been reduced significantly, I've found my main source of entertainment being a single videogame, which has become somewhat unenjoyable as of late.

I am at school now on our break painting and reading/postn on dakka dakka. The teacher tells us we need to paint these models to get better with paint brushes. Somthing tells me that new statue that just arived is going to be next for us lol.

I game almost every Thursday from about 7-11, and if I finish before then I'm still hanging out and talking 40k with my group. I paint and model probably half my days after work, and i'm usually painting while I'm on the phone every night. When I'm not with my girlfriend for the weekend it's not unusual for me to spend the whole weekend painting though. Then I need to remember how much time I spend on various 40k forums during work hours and it gets to be kind of insane.

In short, I spend a lot of time with this game.

Every sunday afternoon

I usually spam paint before tournaments so I can play at them with a painted army, besides tournaments I dont really get alot done.

Every waking moment. At my end of year exams last year, I finished my maths test early. I should've reviewed it. I sat around wondering if my Finecast Draigo arrived in the post that day.

My most was about 30 hours a week. That was when I was painting, playing, writing battle reports (and then animating them in flash), and running a 40k online magazine. Needless to say, that was a little hectic, especially while working another job (a real one).

When I game, I spend probably 3 or 4 hours at the store once a week, and then I spend anywhere from 3-12 hours a week putting together and painting stuff, depending on what else is going on, and how into my current project I am.

About an hour each day, and maybe a game every weekend, but I don't know many players in my area, and going into stores to play just irritates me because during the weekends its full of kids...