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Does anyone have any tips for forcing yourself to work on painting miniatures?

Other than Amphetamines, Xanax, or other drugs......

I seem to be having these periods were I go to paint, and I manage to get through one color, but then it' slide I forget to do what I am supposed to do next?

I don't think I am so old that my brain is forgetting?

Maybe some music?

What would be good for painting miniatures?

You know... As much as Bakshi's Lord of the Rings sucked.... The soundtrack was pretty good.

MB

If its a tedious chore (Like yet another GW unit) then I tend to paint whilst watching an Anime or film.
Its the same when modelling individual tank track links. The distraction takes the frustration away.

It will vary from person to person, but here are a few tips:

Sound helps. Some like soundtracks, some like familliar albums that don't require too much attention, and some will put on TV. Personally, I either just have my iPod on shuffle or stick old sitcoms on; I don't need to actually watch the likes of Dad's Army or Red Dwarf to be entertained.

Make sure your setup and seat is cofmortable. If you're going to spend hours at a time there, you don't want something painful to sit on. Try to have some painted stuff on display around you, so you can see the end result of what you're working on and the progress you've made.

If it's something you're looking forward to painting, then that should be a motivation in and of itself, but if it's something fairly monotonous (say, a few dozen Guardsmen or Orcs) then I think you just have to grit your teeth and tell yourself to just do it. Better to sit down and get through a few minis a day than just let your unpainted pile build up. Reward yourself by painting up more interesting stuff, command units or characters and such.

Something that I keep thinking might help (but for which I am loath to spend the money on in case it doesn't) is to buy a chair, and desk exactly like the ones I had when I was younger.

In the early 1990's, the last time I regularly painted minis, or did ANY kind of artwork! I would just sit for a couple of days straight painting.

My "zen" seems to have deserted me.

And the last time I painted in '00-'04/'06 (pretty sure it was in '02 and '05) I was on a LOT of Ritalin.... Tended to help focus.

I just need to find something to get that sort of "zen' back that I used to have painting miniatures. A lot of it is that I don't seem to FEEL the paint like I used to.... Very frustrating, much complaints! So impediment!

MB


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 master of ordinance wrote:
If its a tedious chore (Like yet another GW unit) then I tend to paint whilst watching an Anime or film.
Its the same when modelling individual tank track links. The distraction takes the frustration away.

The Anime sounds good, but I would have to watch re-runs, or only be able to paint Thursday, Saturday, and Tuesday (the days that the regular anime I watch air).

Of course, I could watch GITS or Kyōsōgiga forever.

MB

Probably an odd question, but are you painting at the moment for the sake of painting, or is it to get an army ready for gaming? Either way, it might be worth swapping and seeing if that helps. If you are painting to your highest standard and it's not working out, then find or buy some cheap grunts, give them simpler scheme and just knock out a unit or two for your game of choice. You can always go back later and fix them up to a higher standard, you might just find that a visibile amount of progress once you rank them up might be just the motivation you need.

Conversely, if that's what you're already doing, find a mini that you never intend to set on a gaming table, paint it purely for a display piece, and do the best job you can on it.

Might not work for you, but personally, I find that a going from a few minis per hour (troops) to a few hours per mini (characters) is enough of a change to keep me going.

I tend to have some mini's and paints ready on a lap tray, and will just grab them to work on for half an hour here and there when watching TV. Managed about an hour a night for a week before an event and got almost all of it finished, which was quite a boost.

I have a love/hate relationship with painting.

I am not a huge fan of it, but I am also not willing to slap a simple/sloppy paint job on most models. So my painting takes a lot of time to get the results I want.

My main problem right now is that I have young kids and my wife and I are between houses. So I don't have access to a workshop. I can't really clean miniatures because my wife doesn't like the idea of metal filings around the kids, and I can't clean resin models in the house either.

As far as painting goes, painting requires a lot of setup time and cleanup time. It is also something that is easily messed up by little inquisitive fingers. This makes painting something that isn't easy to do around small kids.

At the end of the day though, that's a bunch of excuses. Painting is frustrating.

My advice is to find a level of quality and a method that you can handle reliably. This might be basecoat/dip, it might involve an airbrush. It might be that you paint in greyscale and tint in your colors. It might be a base/wash/highlight 1/highlight 2 method. It might be base/dry brush/wash. Whatever the method is, you should be pleased with the results and confident that when you sit down to paint it is something that you can manage.

From there you can experiment a bit and push the envelope when the mood strikes you, but when there is a method that I am comfortable with, I find it easier to sit down and just paint something. For example, I never paint eyes. I never even try. I decided it wasn't in my wheelhouse at this point, so I don't worry about it. I also try to keep my highlights restricted to out-of-the-bottle combinations that I know work well or else successively lighter tints of the same color.

Keeping a good record of your recipes is also a good idea. That way you don't forget how you made this red or that blue, or that you highlighted this with X,Y,Z.

As for painting in greyscale and tinting in colors, I have found that to be a decent method given my circumstances that produces decent results. The idea is to paint the entire model in the same grey base/highlights. Once that is done, you layer on colors with a series of very thin glazes so that the neutral gradient you painted underneath looks like tints and shades of the color you glazed on top. I like this method because I can start painting very quickly and I can stop quickly without worrying about forgetting what I was doing since the colors are always the same.

If the kids need something I can stop what I am doing and rinse out my brush real quick. If half of a model's pants are painted, that's okay. I know exactly what color I need to finish it. If I am traveling, I can pack up a brush, a couple of paint bottles, and a few miniatures and do some painting in my hotel room.

I am too much of a snob to use a dip method.

And I am fighting and competing against myself.

I was a professional in the miniatures painting world before such terms were thrown around like Mardi Gras beads.

I had miniatures on display at the Dalling Road GW store for all of the 1980's and 90's (although I understand someone took some of them when the Olsen's stopped managing the store and moved to the USA), and painted miniatures for convention displays for Ral Partha, Heritage/Genesis, Steve Jackson Games (where they are also used for the OGRE miniatures box art)....

And I used to be a judge at the Origins and Gencon miniature painting events in the late-80s (won a few of them in the early-80's).

So... I am competing against a talent that was once considerable, but has been so neglected that it is viscerally painful to fumble about with something that used to only occupy a few seconds of brush time.

But I know that in order to recover the talent, I need to be putting my brush to miniature surfaces, and failing when necessary in order to re-built the talent (artistic talent is only a small percent innate talent, and vastly more a matter of persistence and practice).

It would certainly be easier if I could leave the miniatures out to be able to paint the second the whim strikes, even if only for a few minutes.

But discipline I suppose is something else that is built by persistence, and I need to develop a discipline for working on painting as well.......

MB


Automatically Appended Next Post:

weeble1000 wrote:
I have a love/hate relationship with painting.

As for painting in greyscale and tinting in colors, I have found that to be a decent method given my circumstances that produces decent results. The idea is to paint the entire model in the same grey base/highlights. Once that is done, you layer on colors with a series of very thin glazes so that the neutral gradient you painted underneath looks like tints and shades of the color you glazed on top. I like this method because I can start painting very quickly and I can stop quickly without worrying about forgetting what I was doing since the colors are always the same.

.

I have used this method before on Sci-Fi figures.

This is actually the method that many of the Renaissance greats used for many of their paintings (Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceilings use a technique much like this, and Raphael used this method primarily).

I have a friend who uses the method for 15mm figures.

He primes in grey, and then adds a black wash, and then dry-brushes white over the entire figure.

And then comes back and paints a single layer of color over each area.

It does seem to be quick.

But my past experience with fantasy figures, and the style of painting I had (have) is too distinctive for me to use the method on most figures.

But I have found that with figures like Imperial Guard for 40K, or Robots...I can get the technique to work quite well.

Something about the inorganic lines that seem to support the method.

MB

Well, if you are fighting against a once great talent, that's rough, and I can't give you much advice for how to deal with that, unless, perhaps, it is to concentrate on what your entertainment goals are. Are you painting for playing? If so, then the helpful maxim of a good friend of mine is quite applicable: "Good 'nuf"

I sometimes have difficulty adhering to that, but Chip, if you are reading this, I do repeat that to myself on many occasions. There are many times when "good 'nuf" really is exactly that: good enough for what you are doing.

Usually when I paint greyscale, I use a base + 2 higlights method rather than drybrushing. I have found that it gives a cleaner look to the finished miniature, makes me feel like I am really painting, and also provides practice with selecting proper highlight areas and brush control.

For some miniatures that just need some colors on them I'll use the method that you described, and I daresay that if I were painting 15mm miniatures, I wouldn't do much more than that.

I find it very hard to enjoy the process of painting for very long. At the same time, I only play with painted figs and I wanted more than just base colors. I needed to find a balance that gave me results I was content with in a limited amount of time.

My cure was dipping. Tabletop quality figs in a short amount of time. Fits much better into my schedule and gives me much more time for the Terrain building that is my favorite part of the hobby. The results are not going to win any awards or please everyone, but it's a balance that works for me.

You can see my process in the Brush-dipping tutorial in my sig. Best of luck finding a process that works for you.

I am friends with the guy who invented Dipping (Duke Seigfried) for miniatures.

I think he would be shamed if he knew I had resorted to dipping.

I suppose the "good enough" will have to do for the most part.

Some of my work, and some colors and shades are much better than others (I am having a terrific difficulty with darker skin tones).

They don't look completely hideous, just not what I would really like to see.

MB