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Hi guys,

As the title says, i feel like a terrible player. I started a deamon army more then a year ago and i have switched armies to necron and now out of the blue i started a small force of tyranids. I have accumulated so many unpainted stuff now and suddenly im liking orks now too. I am looking for some advice to stay motivated on one army and not end up with a small army of everything and nothing decent to play with. The thing i enjoy about having all these different types of models though is that im learning how to paint all different types of things (armors, muscles, weapons, carapeces etc) but it does not work very well for accumulating a large enough army to play with :(.

Its all down to practice my man.


Keep motivated by reading up tutorials online, they really helped me immeasurably. Stealing other peoples ideas is all part of the hobby! lol


I mean this was my painting three years ago,





This is where I'm at now. Its just a matter of practice, mate.

I think pretty much every gamer/painter has, at one time or another, a backlog of models to finish and suffers from lack of motivation to get them done. The difference of course is the size of the backlog. I long ago learned to live with the fact that time constraints, motivation, frustration with painting skill and the size of my unpainted pile means I have decades worth of painting ahead of me before I am anywhere near finished. Try not to beat yourself up about it and take the long term view, that would be my advice.

i dont game personally, so im lucky that i can buy whatever models i like the look of. which i do! haha. its difficult because you seem like me, you are easily distracted by stuff that looks cool. my advice would be to try and keep a small warband if you want to play the game, work on it to a tabletop standard, then budget yourself to treats of cool looking models to make into conversions or cool dioramas. that way you'll be able to justify getting them. stay motivated by coming on here. look online at peoples conversions and projects..i find that i look at others work and think wow im not that imaginative, yet i'm sure if they look at mine they'd be thinking similar.

From my own experience over this past year, and from advice I've seen, a clean desk can be key.

Keep your painting area neat.

Work through units in batches.

If you have a colour for a certain feature, then do that feature in a production line. A shade or base, do that on your batch.

Build up the same stuff over and over on the batch and you can have those units done in a few hours here and there, instead of one slow slog at the lot.

Keep it to a manageable size, 5-10, or a squad. Certain Armies sculpts lend well to this, others are a nightmare.

I don't always follow this advice myself, as there's so much to do. Table top quality is fine to start with. Some units you may never get back to. But as you go you learn.


Worst of all, the better you get you may find you left mould lines behind, or made some other mistake, that leave your paint scheme nowhere near where you want it. This isn't the end of the world. Other players may be in your boat and may never get around to their armies.

Work up to your expectation of table top.

As you learn you'll get closer to tournament/ showcase standards.

I can relate to this, Evariuda.
I have more unpainted than I do painted at this time because a month or so ago my motivation just wasn't there. What helped me drag myself out of it was to paint in stages. I lined up all the paints I'd need and just painted every model with one paint before moving onto the next colour and what this does is allow you to see every model in a squad with paint on them which make the overall job seem less daunting. a common and simple way of going about it I'm sure but it really does help keep the motivation up.

Whenever I want to try ideas or color schemes out I practice on terrain. This is also how I taught myself how to use my airbrush.

I also have a back log of several armies hah. So far this has been my year of building. Almost 2000 points of chaos and 3000 of nids, lots of terrain and Infinity too. I have Orks on the build que as well.

Try to get some games in. Even small 500 point games, or 200 point kill teams if you can manage.

I find a good motivator to getting stuff done is to picture how it works on the table. Think of all the cool tricks and stunts you can accomplish with the new unit.

Interspersing cool, fun, minis with boring troops helps plow through them. Give yourself little rewards by painting that HQ one you bang out another troop pick.

If you have too many projects, boxing some up out of sight, out of mind, might help alleviate the decision paralysis of what to work on next. One project on the bench at a time.

Start a blog. Rely on peer pressure to keep you on task. I find the shame of posting a “no real progress” post keeps me on the ball. I try to update mine at least once a week.

Pretty much what's always been said. Pick up some cheap metal minis and some nitromors if you don't want to paint your guys for your army. Practice on these, strip after each paint job and keep going until you're happy. worked for me.

Be realistic. Realize that the first models you paint won't look as good, but paint them anyway.

Pick small, specific areas to concentrate on, and really work at them, so that you notice the improvement. This can be as simple as brush control, or picking out details when you start, to things like colour theory, blending and freehand, as you improve.

There's always somewhere to improve. Treat it like a journey, not a destination.

As with absolutely anything in this world, it's a lot easier to stay motivated when you love what you're doing. Take a little break and find out what you really want to do, look at all the different armies ant potential paint schemes you could put on them and find the one that's going to keep you motivated.

If you are bored of painting, try painting a mini that is completely different from what you would normally do e.g. a necron (if you normally do marines) or sodapop mini or malifaux.

Sometimes just picking up a different style of miniature will mix things up a bit.

Everyone hits that wall.

And god knows i keep piling more things against my better judgment.

I find that it helped putting my hobbies as FAR away from the computer and TV and stuff started getting done.

Radio is fine.

I think you've hit on one way to stay motivated without realizing it. It can be daunting (and boring) to paint a large army. The painting gets repetitious and it seems like you will never be done. By having several armies you can change to another when painting one gets boring. This is what I do, I have a Grey Knights army, an Inquisition Army, a small Black Templars force and I paint my sons Necron army. I have also built quite a bit of terrain. So when one thing gets boring, like I just finished a unit of ten and can't motivate to paint another unit I just move to something else. I can concentrate on a character model, or if it's detail painting that has me down I can just throw some paint on some scenery. For me being able to keep what I'm doing fresh helps a lot.

As for painting skill, nothing has helped me more than YouTube. Seems like no matter what I have to paint there in a video to show me tips and techniques to help me make my models look great, or at least pretty good!

thank you all for the tips and tricks. Yes i suffer from the ow look shiny new models special rule sadly and im easily distracted but atleast knowing that other people share that same thing makes me feel a bit better about and and makes me want to do something about it. I watch allot of painting tutorials on youtube which makes me want to paint all sorts of models because of the damned related or have you watched this section. I go from watching a tyranid video to watching chaos marines to orks etc etc :p

This has been a problem plaguing most grinding/skill games in history, but for Warhammer 40k I found the solution. So my answer comes with a story. I play Chaos and I really don't like painting because I'm still learning and my minis don't look so good. I eventually could only paint about 1 mini every so while. Then I started playing Dawn of War SoulStorm. That kinda helped, but not much. What you have to do is download the Ultimate Apocalypse Mod. After playing this mod I saw how epic my Chaos army cutting up the puny guard. Remember in the game you have to make something close to your army in the table top. Also, while painting/playing listen to miniwargaming batreps. This helps because of how fun it sounds/looks because you can't look at it too much focus on painting/playing while listening because their miniatures look amazing, but the guys in DOW SS look bad because of graphical limitations, but they do amazing things. With the combination and watching the apocalypticon 1 time just because it shows you the average mans miniatures they don't look as good (not saying they look bad) and also the amazing grand scale you should want to paint just remember that you have to keep on listening to miniwargaming batreps with your race mostly to keep you going. This is my solution... I'm not lying to you I suck at painting you can actually see my mini's in another post I just posted. I did it though because of all I had experienced so much 40k amazing things. Just try it one time it works very well. (DISCLAIMER: I'm not trolling this actually works)