Impending Painting Burnout

Miniature Painting Burnout.   I can already feel it coming on but there’s nothing I can do about it.   The same thing happened last year leading up to DieCon so I shouldn’t be surprised but I was holding out hope that this year would be different.

The army I want to play for Hardcore still needs a fair bit of work, either touching up old models or finishing new ones.   Right now I think I’m happy with about half the pieces for the army but time’s quickly running out.   And if I really want the army I envisioned in the beginning that means one more big project in the last month before DieCon 09.   I really want to try it but I look at how much time I’m going to have and wonder if it’s really possible.   I know, I know… that’s not very detailed.   I’m really trying to get the whole project done as a relative surprise so I can reveal it with full-army pictures here after the Con.   You’ll just have to bear with me in the meantime. 🙂

On top of that I still have the miniatures that will be given away as part of the Privateer Press Weekend that I need to complete.   I ran into a similar problem last time I did commission work – after a while it just gets harder and harder to stay motivated to paint something I’m not going to be keeping while my own unpainted models start piling up.   I made a commitment though and I’m not backing down, but it means pushing through the burnout.

I guess this is my biggest hurdle with miniature painting.   Typically I enjoy it very much because it’s a casual hobby – I paint whatever I want at my own pace.   If burnout strikes on my own models I can just set them aside and take a breather.   Then when I get interested again I can come back to the piece in question and work on it some more.

But commitments come with deadlines and deadlines mean not stopping just because I’m tired of working on something.   If time gets short (like it is now) painting on a schedule can start to feel less like a hobby and more like work and that’s why I do it.

Still though like I said I made commitments to people and I intend to keep them.   I’m going to keep pushing through to DieCon and finish off everything I can between now and then.   It won’t be the most fun I’ve had painting but I’m determined to complete the commission to my usual standards.

After that I’ll probably put the brushes away for a while to recharge.   Maybe I’ll take that time to catch up on my online miniature gallery.   Either way it will be disappointing because I already have a backlog of miniatures I want to get painted for my own armies (in addition to some figures I just want to paint for fun) but they’re for my own collection and they’re not going anywhere.   It will be far more satisfying to wait until I can enjoy the painting process again.

In the meantime… time to buckle down and get to work!