Keeping up motivation for painting

In the first six to seven months since [our daughter](http://www.nirya.be/gn/archives/000031.html "GN Archives") was born, I managed to paint only one miniature.

Obviously, part of the reason for this appalingly low output were of course the demands that having a small, needy human being thrust into your care place on your free time. This blog entry is not about that, however -- the real reason behind this low output is due to a lack of motivation on my part. I did have (and still have) free time available, it's just that I used it for other things than painting little tin men.

Recently, I seem to have recovered however, having painted for at least an hour every day over the last week. I think I figured out what motivates me to paint miniatures, and modified my painting behaviour accordingly. The result is the mentioned increase in output.

So, what are my main motivational pushes that set me painting? There's two: playing games and seeing good games played, and actually finishing figures. Of the two, this last is probably the most important, and changing a painting habit that affects this directly has produced the desired effect.

Let's look at these two factors individually.

__Playing games__

Each year after [Crisis](http://users.skynet.be/tinsoldiers/html/crisis04_titelblad.htm "Crisis 2004" ), [Tin Soldiers of Antwerp](http://www.tsoa.be "TSA Website" )'s convention, my painting output rises dramatically (only to drop off again slowly but inexorably). The same effect is produced, although on a smaller scale, by playing games, the best of which in this regard are the [Schild en Vriend](http://www.nirya.be/snv/ "SnV Website" ) revival games.

So, in order to stimulate this effect, I've put some life into the SnV Revival project again, announcing game number three, _Exploring the Congo_, for sometime in September. Organising and playing this game should get me painting again.

__Finishing figures__

This is the big one. I realised only recently that my biggest _oomph_ in painting motivation is simply finishing a figure. When I admire the latest (more or less) beautifully painted miniature, I feel an urge to grab my brushes and paint another miniature, immediately.

With that in mind, I looked over my painting habits, which turned out to be completely antagonistic to promoting this effect. The last couple of years, in an effort to -- paradoxically enough -- get more miniatures painted so I could have a couple of decent armies, I had switched to an assembly line painting style. I would take a number of figures intended for the same unit, e.g. 8 Arthurian spearmen, and paint them at the same time, going in stages: prime, basecoat, faces, ... The classic assembly line painting, in other words, and the one method that is mentioned in every army painting guide out there on the net as the way to get your army painted in anything resembling a decent amount of time.

Unfortunately, the also widely stated disadvantage of this method is that it is a tad, well ... boring. My typical painting session these days is about an hour long. In an hour, you do not paint a lot of things if you're painting 8 figures at the same time. If you're lucky, you can get all the base colours blocked in, or all the tunics finished, or something like that. That means that, on average, you need around 6 to 8 sessions to finish a figure, or 8 figures, in this case. Unfortunately, the fact that you have finished 8 figures at the same time, does not compensate for the fact that it takes that many painting sessions to actually finish a figure. I find that as often as not, my motivation lags halfway through the painting when using this method.

I have now switched back to a different _modus operandi_. Instead of 8 figures in assembly line, I now work on maximum three figures at the same time. Those three figures are of different types (e.g. now I have a musketeer (of three of them fame), a Darkest Africa askari and an Early Medieval British archer on my painting table), and are in different stages of finishing (the musketeer has all base colours blocked in, as has the askari, and the archer has some colours finished). This way, I am reasonably certain to finish a figure every other painting session or so, with the result of keeping up my motivation for painting.

So far, it works a charm -- I have finished four figures in 7 painting sessions of not more than an hour each. Let's hope I can keep this up for a while.

Single basing vs multiple basing of figures

One of the things that pops up regularly on various wargame related mailing lists is the issue of basing. More specifically, in this case, the basing of 25mm Ancients for Warhammer Ancient Battles. There are two basic camps: base everything singly (i.e., one soldier to one base) versus base troops on multiple bases. In the multiple base camp, the most popular sizes for the bases are those that stick to the DBx standard, basing figures on single DBx bases or on bases whose sizes are multiples of a DBx base.

Both ways of basing have their advantages and disadvantages. Some of these are mutually exclusive, some are present in both basings.

Let's start with the advantages of single bases:

• Figures are based singly. Well, obviously. This is an advantage because this means that the figures can be used for any ruleset with any basing system, using simple sabot bases. It also means that the figures can be used individually for skirmish games. As my main interest in this period and scale is Sub Roman Britain (or Early Medieval Britain), a period characterised by low inensity skirmish type fighting, this is a definite advantage.


• Looks. This might be a bit of a surprise - it certainly was for me - but singly based figures actually look good. You don't have the diorama effect you can create with multiple bases, but the single bases have their own esthetics, especially if you remain consistent in how you finish the bases.

As to disadvantages of single bases, there's just one, but it's a biggy:

• Transportation, both in game and outside of the game. In a game, it's obvious that moving 36 figures that are based individually is more work than moving 36 that are based six to a base. You can work around this to a certain degree with movement bases, but you have to be careful with how you finish your movement bases to avoid killing the visual appeal of the bases. Transporting figures safely to games is also more difficult for single based figures, as the tradition way of using magnetic sheeting under the bases is less effective with the smaller surface area of the magnets, and if you use slottabases, it's a devil to get the sheets to stick. However, for those with lots of money, rare earth magnets can help in that regard.

On to multiple bases. Advantages:

• Ease of movement and transportation. This is the big one. Whichever way you look at it, it is easier to move 6 figures glued on a stand than to move the same 6 figures based individually. The same goes for transportation - bigger bases means bigger footprint, which means greater stability or greater adhesion when using magnets.


• Looks. Using bigger bases, you can stuff more scenery on the base, effectively making the stand a mini diorama. It is easy to overdo this, however - if every stand in your army has a pool of stagnant water, two ducks and three tree stumps on it, along with enough greenery to hide an army of frogs, you are probably taking this a bit too far.


• Fixed position of figures. This is actually two advantages in one: on a multiple figure base, you can to a certain degree 'protect' certain fragile figures by putting them towards the middle of the base, thus preventing handling damage, and you can position figures in such a way that they fit nicely together &emdash try lining up a pike phalanx in single figures to see what I mean.
  

The disadvantages:

• Lack of flexibility. The bigger you make your bases and the more figures you put on them, the less the number of different rules systems you can use them for. If your are the kind of gamer who plays one ruleset and one ruleset only, this is actually an advantage, of course, but if you are like me, you want to use your figures for as many different rulesets as you can get your hands on (all in search of the Perfect Ruleset, of course). There is no beating the flexibility of singly based figures.

On the face of it, multiple basing seems to come up on top when looking at these advantages and disadvantages. Nevertheless, I am currently rebasing most of my 25mm Ancients to single figure bases, and more specifically slotted bases from Hetzerdog. Why? Because I found that the look of ranks upon ranks of single based figures does appeal to me, and that using single bases makes it easier to stay consistent in basing, as opposed to the multiple bases where one set were finished with static grass and painted Polyfilla, the other with two colors of flocking, and yet a third with painted parrot cage sand. With the single slotted bases, the only viable way of covering the slot is by using Polyfila, so every base will be Pollyfilla and static grass (with the odd bit of extra embellishment).

Special figures will still get their own base (e.g. Bartholomeus Sinister Grassus is based on a custom size base with a duck, his mascot), but the majority of my rank and file are being rebased to single bases.

Currently, a unit of Sub Roman Briton veterans (Late Roman Auxilia), a Sub Roman comitatus (BSG's comitatus) and a unit of pedes are on my modelling desk, on single bases awaiting the Polyfilla treatment. At the least, it keeps me busy :)