I just wrapped up a project that took the better part of 2 months to complete, and I’m looking down the barrel of another challenge I gave myself.

But before I hit that slog I wanted to take a break and stretch some muscles that haven’t been getting used.

I have an unpainted box of Mansions of Madness minis laying around and thought this would be a great opportunity to really go out there and try some things I’ve never done before. Above, I wanted to emulate a piece I saw on CMON that uses only OSL to provide light and color on the model. I really don’t have a lot of experience with this technique as it’s a pretty good way to screw up an otherwise serviceable paint job, so a small model that lives in a box seemed like a good way to practice.

Instead of giving the model static form and shape by painting the flesh tones and her dress, I wanted to try to tell a story by just using a few colors. By using only yellows oranges and reds, I tried to give the feeling that she was lost in a truly dark place with only a small candle to provide any light. Which seemed appropriate given the she comes from a game about exploring a mansion haunted by H.P. Lovecrafts various eldar gods. Unfortunately, this effect comes off a bit exaggerated here, more like she’s in the middle of a raging inferno, but it was a fun learning exercise anyway.

Where the OSL piece was pretty much just for the fun and experience of the process. Sketching and black lining the models in preparation for a project is a skill that needs to be developed and worked on over time, and it’s one that I don’t use enough. The creases on this shaman’s dress and the lines of her dreads gave a pretty straight forward guide of where to highlight and line with black.

I’ve never really done something like this before, but the general Idea is to prime the model black, then apply white to the raised surfaces where we want light to reflect the most, once our highlights are dry, all the dark recesses where we want our shadows get lined carefully with an unthinned flat black. When we are finished we should be looking at a nice blueprint of where to begin adding out highlights and shadows.

Once the colors are added, following the guideline in the sketch you can see the highlights much more effectively.

I can’t stress how much this skill improves, if not the quality of the finished work, at least my confidence in the process. It’s something that I’ll have to work to practice more and more, but in the end it can only help to improve.

A new year, another new painting blog to throw in the bookmarks bar. I’m not going to waste a lot of time laying out some grand mission statement about what it is I plan to accomplish here, mostly because I honestly have no idea.

I’ve tried maintaining some sort of “hobby journal” for a few years but I’ve never been able to stay motivated enough to keep up with it. My best attempt came about after a burst of activity over the course of 3 weeks. I found this template, made a few minor changes, planned out a release schedule and made sure to pose every night before I went to bed.

If you scroll down you’ll see…nothing. there’s nothing there. I killed it all.

See, I learned something today. If you are working off pure motivation you are guaranteed to fail. Wait..what? How can being motivated be a bad thing? How can someone truly motivated fail at something? Well, what I’ve found is like the President’s life force, motivation is a finite resource. Yes, when I am in the groove and feeling good about things, the work can just flow. It’s very easy to get through and I feel more inclined to try things that may be intimidating or new.  But, like adrenaline, that feeling fades. The quality seems to drop off and things no longer come as easy as they did before. That leads to shortcuts, which leads to just all out quitting.

Miniac’s year-end video brings this up and offers a solution. A solution so simple and obvious that I feel silly for not realizing it before. I offer, that rather than relying on our motivation (and trying to force ourselves to stay motivated), we instead focus on routine. A routine is just something you do, it doesn’t matter if you aren’t feeling like brushing your teeth in the morning. You just stumble over to the sink, slap your arm around the counter until your hand finds the tube and the brush, and you just finish the rest without every really thinking about it.

I believe expanding my routine to encompass the work I do here with painting and website upkeep is the only way to be sure that things are maintained, and more importantly that commissions are completed on time. By having a set block of time every day to complete these tasks, when the motivation is gone, it shouldn’t matter. I update the website every other Tuesday, the end. From 21:30 – 23:30 every night I work on an existing commission. 

Setting reasonable expectations and goals is the true key to success. Updating a website of all my progress every day is untenable in the long term. Sure if I’m feeling like it I could write an entire post about spending 4 hours glazing a shoulder pad, but what if I’m not? If I don’t have a routine to fall back on, it just doesn’t get done and I will be the first one to tell you that doing nothing is amazing. I love doing nothing, me and Pooh got that down. The drawback to doing nothing is obviously that nothing gets done. So, if it’s Tuesday afternoon, I update the website. regardless of how I’m feeling. I should have 2 weeks of content to draw from and it’s an easy task to check off, which in itself can do a lot to actually add motivation, so you can take advantage of those times where it feels like you’re powered up.