Pile of projects!

Welcome again to the Armoury!

Today, I'm coming out to you all. I am most definitely a 'hobby butterfly'. 

I always have a ton of projects that I work on somewhat, but never really get to finish. While that does not really bother me as such, it does take away that fantastic feeling of looking at a finished model, or army, or bit of terrain that is completely finished. In my case, it also means I have models lying around everywhere, which can be annoying if you need to look for something specific. Fair to say, the missus isn't always as amused by that particular part either...

There's a few ways to mitigate the butterfly-syndrome however, which we'll get to after the break.

As an avid Warhammer player for about 15 years, I've amassed a lot of plastic fighting men over the years. I get exited for new releases and pick up the occasional box of stuff. I get inspired by bits of background material, and start working on projects. Other people starting armies get me to scour the game fluff looking for suitable opponents. Over the years, this has led me to collect:

Warhammer 40k;

• Salamander space marines
• Grey Knights
• Chaos marines
• Chaos daemons
• Deathwing Dark angels
• Space Wolves
• Lamenters
• Crimson Fists
• Orks
• Imperial Guard/Astra militarum
• Tyranids
• Imperial Knights
• Adeptus Mechanicus

Age of Sigmar

• Ogres
• Stormcast Eternals/Free Peoples
• Chaos Daemons

Other game systems:

• Dystopian Wars
• Warmachine
• Hordes

As you can imagine, that's a lot of stuff to work on, and to keep track of. As it stands today, I think I have 1/3 of this all painted, drifting between models and armies as whim takes me. I have found however that some things can pump up my 'hobby focus', and help me finish up stuff, rather than keep drifting.

This month, these moustache-toting,

griffon-riding aristocrats join my

Tale of Warlords army on the tabletop.

1. Tournament/league deadlines
   I'm not a very competitive player, so I don't often attend tournaments. I did however try to always participate in the events organised by my local gaming club. Most, if not all, tournaments reward or even demand having a fully painted army. Despite this always ending up with painting all of friday night for an event on saturday, it has led me to bring my Astra Militarum models up to a very basic scheme, and finish my Grey Knights.
   Gaming leagues have a similar effect for me. I'm currently engaged in a Tale of 4 Warlords league at the Ghent Games Workshop store. We all started an army from a 'Start Collecting' box or variant there-of and get a month to assemble and paint those models. Each month, we play a game with the models we acquired and afterwards agree on a new point level for the month after. Over the course of about 6 months, each of us will have gathered, built and painted an army of roughly 2000 to 2500 points.
2. Friendly Competetion
   
   In my previous post, I made mention of my routine gaming buddy Thor. In an effort to boost both our painting outputs, we've started a spreadsheet. Yep. Nothing says 'nerd' than keeping spreadsheets of you efforts of painting toy soldiers. That being said, it has been a phenomenal boost for the two of us!
    First time around, roughly 3 years ago, we set out to see if we could paint 1 hour each day of the year. We did drop that down to 300 hours a year, as we both have had issues painting in summer (festivals, vacations, bbq's,.. getting in the way of painting). We both didn't get there, that year though, but bravely, decided to have another go for year 2. This time round, we lowered the needed score to 200, which is a fairly big difference, and which we both managed to achieve. I had managed to get some extra painting in even. Our morale bolstered by this achievement, we started a 3rd year on November 1st.
   
   Then Kwintijn, a mutual friend and fellow gamer, took over management of the nearest GW store. We started passing by there on free days to get some painting in. We've been doing that weekly now. The result is thus: By October 31st, Thor & I need to have painted 200 hours. Today, March 11th, Thor has painted 210 hours!  
3. The List
   This is something I actually stole from Thor, because of how great it works for him. What he does is keeping a chronological list of his purchases, and works his way through that for painting. He has a slight advantage over me for doing so however, as 1) he's keeps a list of what he bought at what time 2) he plays fewer armies than I do.
   
   That being said, I did give The List a go. I picked one of my smaller armies, my Deathwing Dark Angels, and listed up the different units that make up this army. I threw in the models I needed to finish for our Warlords campaign to provide a change of pace inbetween the painting of large groups of bone-armoured Terminators, and it worked! (Somewhat, for about 3 weeks..)
   
   Forgetting to bring to list to where I'm painting is one of the things I shouldn't do. Getting super exited about Malign Portents, and picking up my Khorne Daemons and working on those is another.
   Despite this, making a list had me focused enough to finish 30 terminators models that had been languishing on the shelf for over a year, so I'm propably going to give it another go. 

So, there's 3 things that help me get my focus on. I hope it's of any use to anyone out there, and feel free to point out your own tricks to keep focused in the comment section!

Aam