A new approach to painting.

As a painter, I've tended to be one of those people who works in big batches. In my case it has made for periods of great progress followed by long fallow patches. Having just come out of a fallow patch that, for various reasons, lasted about five years, I've been wondering if it's time to change my approach.

Back in May I took stock of the leadpile and thought about what I was going to do with all these figures I had yet to paint. Was I going to give up further progress as a bad job and start selling things off or was I going to get back on the metaphorical horse? I wondered if I could set myself a goal of painting two figures a day until the end of the year. If I could do that, I thought, it would give me a) more figures to game with and b) a potential way to move forward with the rest of the unpainted collection.

As per usual, my default was to go into big-batch mode. I got about 80 foot painted, and then started on a large cavalry lot, which I have just finished. All of this of course requires decision-making at scale, time spent prepping in large numbers, and then painting one or two steps a session (64 spears in brown, 32 tunic base colours in light grey, 32 in a variety of others, etc...) until the batch is finished.

What this means in practice is my hobby space is completely taken up with prepped figures, paints, bits and pieces, and the sense that you are on a big job. You can't, for example, set up an evening game if you feel like it, because to do so would require you to pack everything away to clear space, play the game, and then put everything back out again.

So I decided to try a new approach. For the moment, I'm calling it 'four for now'. Four to a base is how my infantry figures are organised for painting, so why not just do four figures to (almost) completion in a session? You see immediate progress, you shorten the time frame for playable numbers, and you can do it all in a much a smaller space footprint. I can store prepped figures elsewhere, so when I want to play a game, I can. 

I suppose the idea is to make painting less of an all-or-nothing thing, so that I can work on getting through the figures I have but without making it all-consuming, and by making painting something I am always doing in little bits. 

My first 'four for now'. Washes, base painting and shield patterns to come when I'm up to bigger numbers.

We'll see how long I last!