Painting for a Living – Part Two

Come here for Part One

This has been rather a long time coming, writing wise. I think mostly because I was trying to do too much with too little. I wanted to write advice for potential fellow travellers on this wonderful road of painting. But truth be told. My business didn't really work (I am back "in business" but only for raising investment for other schemes and a bit of pocket money, it can't support me). I am not really qualified to advise anyone! Instead I thought I would offer my thoughts on one of the reasons PVP never really got off the ground as a full time venture and something that others need to consider. Pricing.

Editor's Note: This article might seem like a whine, it isn't, I've loved my work. Consider it more of a cautionary tale than a complaint. Read to the end and you'll see what I mean. Also, others will have had different experiences. I'd urge them to share them. It's a cool job, be nice to find the formula that works :)

Pricing for painting services is really One Of Those Things. You are trying to sit in the sweet spot of a curve between what people are prepared to pay and what you are worth. I'm afraid to say, with few exceptions, it will have to trend toward the prepared end. There is a good reason for this. The market is kinda split into two halves. The premium end where Golden Demon winners and the like live and the budget end where the basecoat-drybrush-wash brigade dwell. I was trying to operate in a medium ground between these halves. Better quality than the budget but cheaper than the premium. The problem comes when you start doing armies and the costs mount up. Even the boldest customer will baulk when you say you want £400 for 20 models and I suspect, rightly so. Lets consider a case study:

Why Badrukk? Well, one, I love how this model turned out. Two, he's a good example of the character work I do. Three, he was done on a mates-rates basis for a friend so I can talk conceptually about the pricing without making anyone feel uncomfortable (definately not my intention). I used to have characters as £30 a model. That was three times the cost of the model in the first place. It seems like a lot. It's actually nothing at all. Let's work through it. This model took the best part of two days to paint. Lets say 12 man hours. That might be under-selling it but it'll work for the purposes of this exercise. Now lets consider an appropriate hourly wage. Well, lets set aside the concept that it has taken 25 years for me to get to this level of painting. Most jobs with 25 years experience are paying a hell of a lot more than painting (consider a music teacher, something I see as comparable in terms of the creative-with-a-lot-of-time-becoming-expert stakes and check out how much they charge an hour). Instead, let's just take the living wage which in the UK is £7.85 an hour giving you about £15,400 a year. Hardly mega-bucks but better than minimum wage. Feels right. Now multiply that £7.85 by 12.

I'll help you out Mulder: It's £94.20.

£94.20

That's nuts. I wouldn't pay it. Not for one model. Never mind that it would probably round to an even hundred once postage and materials (the cheap bit of this weirdly) are included. It can get even worse when you do a unit:

That unit took me the best part of four days to finish. They're a pain to do, even the shields alone took a huge amount of time. Four days, that's £251.20 for a unit of 30. £8 per model. Now that seems more fair but when you add it up and it becomes £250 odd... well, that makes people baulk a little. By contrast I can do 50 Night Goblins in about a day and a half. More like £1.88 a goblin and the same £94.20 as Badrukk alone cost. It makes it impossible to offer a consistent part rate so you have to negotiate every commission individually which can make people suspicious that you are trying to rip them off. Worse, sometimes what should have been easy - those Longbeards above - can suddenly turn out to be a horrorshow of ultra detail and finicky brushwork. You quoted the client a price that would pay you for a days work and it took you four. You just quartered your income. 

Don't forget that you are competing for these commissions, almost exclusively online. Out there there is the budget end. People offering flat rates of £4-5 per model (what I started with in order to compete). That is what you are competing with. There's no way you can earn any fair pay painting to a high - but not super-high, Golden Demon prestige-bringing designer-label-pricing-justification  - standard for £5 a model. So you end up in a weird hinterland where you end up with a few customer who like you because of the results they get and a lot of drive by clients that you can't bring in because of pricing. For interest, this blog tracks unique visitors as well as crude page-views. In the time PVP has been open I have received getting on for 35,000 unique visitors (and I love you all) generating an eye-watering 275,000 hits. From this I have generated just three clients who I didn't know before. Granted, they are enthusiastic clients. But I am not overflowing with work. 

So what to do? Honestly my advice would be pick one end of the market and target it. If you have serious Golden Demon/Crystal Brush/Euro Militaire winning cojones then go straight for the Premium end. Estimate carefully with wriggle room for time and just straight up charge what you are worth. If you don't, my advice is to do what I could not. Swallow the pride and pitch for the budget end. If I found spraying a basecoat, doing one drybrushed highlight and a wash satisfying then I could easily make a comfortable part time living. I don't. I can't. That's why PVP doesn't really work. But you could! The only thing I would charge and abdure you with is the following:

Do not, DO NOT bait and switch. I see it all the time. The painting service page is all beautifully painted examples of their premium level work (of course, you want the page to look nice) with just one picture of a unit painted in the basic scheme (and frankly a little more work) on the payments page. I have seen examples of work from some of these services and am really not impressed. I could teach people how to paint to that standard in one hour. Did so, for years (ex-GW staffer). Don't do that. Be up front. Be honest, you are trading people time. You are for the people who can't be bothered to paint and aren't fussed about the quality too much. Don't make people think they're getting one thing and deliver another.

There. Lecture over. No more didactic commands from me ;)

I'll leave you with a few final thoughts, some cross pollinate with blogging:

• If you are considering painting for a living, consider whether you can afford it. It will be a year or more before clients really notice you. Even when they do you'll be only earning part time salery. Don't do it if you're looking to support family and home on this alone.
• The first year is networking. Go everywhere. Register for every blogroll, find every directory, drive eyeballs to your site. Offer tutorials, offer advice with a link back to something useful (DON'T spam just the link). Site traffic does come. It just starts slow until eventually something goes what I call "Wargamer viral" as one of the big sites links to you. From this traffic comes your customers.
• Have your own hobby. It'll generate interesting content for the page but...
• Do not waste money on things you are not interested in just to show you paint them. I did Flames of War models, Warmachine models, all sorts. Number of commissions generated? Zero.
• Do not try to predict what the internet will like. I have failed hopelessly. Projects that I thought were winners didn't register, some things I thought were routine went through the roof. Throw everything against the wall without ego or expectation and see what sticks.

 When you do get clients:

• CONFIRM what they want, how they want it on which models. Take photos of the models as they arrive, tag 'em with numbers and confirm with the client which models need what job. It sounds daft but there is a lot of misunderstanding possible with email. There is nothing more embarrassing for a "pro-painter" than to spend days working on something only to mix up which were supposed to be blue and which brown (real world example).
• Consider taking daily progress shots and either sending them to the client or posting them on facebook or whathaveyou. It makes the clients feel involved with the process, generates excitement, content and keeps you aware of your rate of progress.
• Make suggestions. The client is hiring a professional, if you think the colour scheme will clash, mention it and offer an alternative. Make it clear that it is entirely their choice but they may not have realised that there was a more attractive option.
• Don't do volume discounts, it's tempting because people are used to buying things that way but your costs are your time, you can't make them lower by clever bulk ordering.
• Enjoy it. This isn't 9-5 in an office.

That having been said:

• Do not paint from dawn to midnight. You WILL get an RSI. I did. 

Who knows, maybe this will help someone. Otherwise it'll give you a view in to what it is to run one of these things. I'll say again, my business didn't work, there are reasons for it! If you can avoid them then you might well do better. In the mean time

Happy Painting and

TTFN

Painting for a Living – Part One

I’ve pondered a few times about how to write this article. All sorts of different formats, but the one I’ve settled on goes something like:

Part One: What painting for a living is like.

Part Two: Advice for those considering the career.

Part Three: Advice for those considering hiring a painter.

And given that this week’s models are proving impossible to photograph (lots of subtle black tones) I thought I would start part one… now! Most of you know that we are coming in to this story at the end of the process. Pirate Viking Painting the business is closing and the blog will be converted to my own personal stuff and will likely change a bit. A quick disclaimer, I have had no problems with any of my clients and to my knowledge they have had no problems with me. Anything below that sounds like a complaint is at worst a mild niggle and is what makes professional painting a job rather than a hobby.

Getting started:

There I was, end of May 2010, semi-voluntarily out of work and moving to Cardiff with my dear lady wife. What to do to earn a crust? The economy was in an even deeper hole than it is now and we'd just acquired Tories (for readers across the pond, think Republicans without the religious obsession) in charge again so I wasn't expecting any real help from my government. To get a bit of beer money I had agreed to paint a chaos army belonging to one of the chaps who frequented the Swindon Games Workshop (my previous job). It was during the planning phase of this that I thought "Hey, something I can do, have (at the time) 22 years experience at and might actually earn some crusts". So with that amount of planning and a call to HMRC a business was born.

I do not recommend doing it this way and it won't be a central feature of part 2 ;)

But there I was with some models to paint, a blog to promote my existence through and time on my hands, let battle commence! What happened next was a year of relative doldrums where I was trying to get exposure (actual good advice on this in part 2) and a lot of painting a variety of things to have content on the blog. Things didn't really take off until year 2 when I started to get much more regular work and was pretty much busy enough to be working full time hours.

So what is it like to be a full-time painter then?:

Well for the most part it is a lot of fun, you are doing something that you like in exchange for money and on your own terms - to an extent - there is not a lot to complain about! The key things that being a professional painter (and I wish we would go back to using pro painter as meaning paid for it, not "expert", I've seen pro painted stuff that is so basic I used to teach it in an hour back at GW and I've seen "amateurs" - i.e. every hobbyist ever - produce stuff of such quality that it has made me want to bite through my paintbrush in envy) kinda go like this:

1) It will make your painting better, a lot better.

There is a lot to be said for constant practice. My bog standard work these days eclipses some of my best work of only four years ago. I have learned a massive amount and have improved immeasurably. The other advantage is that you are constantly solving problems that you never knew existed as you would not have chosen that look; or colour; or pattern or whathaveyou. I'd had some experience with this army building for GW but it took on a whole new reality with this. In order to gain work you will agree to do stuff that in your mind you are saying "I think I know how to do that" and then you just do it. Sometimes frustrating, mostly rewarding. Having said that:

2) You will paint stuff that you just can't stand.

Sadly, you are doing this for money, what the client wants the client gets. I have been lucky with most of my clients, they've all been very happy to give me vague briefs and let me find the "my way" amongst their requirements. There have been some models though that the brief lead to me painting things that I thought were just "ugly". In reality it just means "not to my taste". The clients were delighted and technically the work was fine but you will never be truly satisfied with the end result as it doesn't look "right" to you. Other times you will be working on models that you just can't stand the sculpts of and would never have bought yourself. But the thing is, the client is paying their hard earned hobby money for you to do this. You have to get over it and just do it! Those days are the ones that drag, the ones that leave you feeling like a hack because you can't make it work. But the next day may have something unexpectedly delightful rock up and it'll all be sunshine and rainbows again.

3) Sharing is fun

 

One of the most enjoyable aspects for me has been maintaining this blog, we're almost at enough posts to keep you going for a whole year if you read one a day. My hobby had always been a private affair for me - with a slight local exposure in the shops - and opening it up to a large and growing audience was actually slightly thrilling. I long ago gave up on predicting what the internet will find enjoyable and now just throw stuff out there and see what sticks. The unexpected leaps in hits when you stumble on something that tickles the online Zeitgeist is very rewarding.

4) I'm not a natural businessman

Yep, I've admitted it, always had a slightly guilty relationship with money. Preparing invoices always made me feel a bit apologetic: "sorry, I kinda need to charge you for doing this fun stuff as we need to eat/fix the car/move house for the third time". I constantly undercharged for the work I was doing (seriously, I've seen some of the equivalent priced work from others now, I was undercharging) and didn't say "no" often enough when I knew that a project was wildly out of my wheelhouse. The bottom line is that I like people to have groovy things, the fact that this has had me on part time minimum wage for three years of 40+ hour weeks is very much my fault.

5) Freelancing is both awesome and terrifying

Freelancing is awesome! If you need to pop into town or it's just a lovely day then you can shift your work hours into the evening and chill during the day. You play by your rules and so long as you can get over the guilt of sitting still while there is work to be done then you can do so at your own pace too.

Freelancing is terrifying! If you are ill, you watch the productive seconds fly away, you are earning nothing in this time, if you take a holiday or circumstances force you away from the painting table then you are mentally counting the impact that it is having on your schedules. Plus, you never know where the next project/client will come from. Nerve wracking doesn't cover it.

On balance, freelancing is great, if uncertain.

So what changed?

Truthfully, not a lot, the situation - business wise - was actually improving, great exposure, regular work and long term clients. But a few things happened that made keeping PVP as the not-exactly-a-going concern that it was impossible:

1) My health:

Those that are long term readers will know that I damn near destroyed my wrist. Who knew that trying to do 11 hour days of repetitive activity would result in a Repetitive Stress Injury huh? Not this muppet that's who and I have a Biomedical Sciences degree and everything. Knowledge does not equal wisdom. Important learning point that. I got over the RSI and went back to work on shorter days only for it to happen again. Sadly, once you've harmed the tendons they are unwilling to let you just go back to normal. I'm down to about 6 hours a day maximum these days. That just isn't enough productive hours to allow me to clear commissions in order to get the next paying customer on the workbench. Turnover is everything in this business. 

2) Pricing:

If I am honest, I don't think I would have made much more cash by pricing more harshly. People have a limited supply of moolah for hobby purposes and I would have been competing with cheaper painters and with the more premium rate painters. I don't have Golden Demon awards or anything so I won't be seeing £100 a figure any time soon nor should I expect to. So I couldn't grow output and I couldn't realistically grow unit price...

3) Economy

Even with those things I might have seen the business as worth continuing had it not been for the way the economy has been handled. We've seen four straight years of inflation outstripping increases in earnings, we've seen leaps in the cost of energy (not included in most inflation calculations) and a host of other ways in which life has become more expensive. Sadly we have reached the point where my Wife Support is struggling to keep us going. I need to do the predictable paycheck gainful employment dance.

And so we find ourselves at the end of this particular journey. Parts 2 and 3 will possibly be more useful but I thought a general overview first would be useful. Until next time:

TTFN

A quick musing

Hi folks, bit of a break from the norm today. So today, there I was, minding my own business painting Corsair Hornets when this happened:

Hooo doggy, you better believe that the toys got thrown all of the way out of the pram. See, these models have been absolutely refusing to paint. Once I'd calmed down I got to thinking: How come some models seem to paint themselves, the colours flowing on, every highlight clearly where it should be? And then some seem to actively fight you putting paint on in the first place. Here it was a tiny section where the mold release agent seems chemically bonded to the damned resin (I'll probably have to sand the section and redo) but there have been others:

there seems to be an eldar theme to my tribulations, probably a coincidence

The Harlequins - you may remember - were the very devil to paint. I still can't explain why. They just fought every damn brushstroke. With the Hornets it was even the hexes - which had gone on fine on the Warp Hunters - that were cramping my wrist something fierce! They just don't want to be painted. But I will break their spirit, oh yes I will. [sounding a little crazy there Jeff, dial it back]

So, I ask you this, which models have fought you? Which are you delighted to have finished, to have in your army, but were the very devil to paint. Who resisted every step. Answers in the comments please! It'll be interesting to see if there are any commonalities and patterns or whether all of us Ahabs have our personal whales!

TTFN

Blood for the blood god

Hi folks, I don't do this often but today I'm going to use my pulpit here to talk about something important for a change!

I just came from donating one of the three pints of blood I can give each year and got chatting with one of the staff. Out of curiosity I asked what proportion of the population give blood these days. Go on, play along, take a guess. I was mentally prepared for a fifth to a third of the population, somewhere in that region. Her answer literally floored me...

6%

No joke, only between 4-6% of adults in this country give blood. I could not believe it. Just to give you the scale of the issue, the Welsh Blood Service needs 400+ donations per day just to keep things ticking over. Blood stocks do not last and during certain times (winter, sports events etc) they plummet. There is clearly a massive problem with recruitment of donors. All I can do is my tiny part. I therefore beg you all. Whatever country you are in. Give blood. Go to the National Blood Service (or welsh/scottish) and register. If you stub your toe today you will experiance ten times more pain than you will ever experiance at a donation. You can only donate 3-4 times a year. At roughly an hour for donation that is just 0.0003% of your entire year. You CAN be bothered with that. Drop the excuses, shelve the fears and donate. Please, for me.

Now, Mrs PVP has an unexpected long weekend from work and I have decided to join her in joyous relaxation (well, sorting the house really) so regular updates will be back next week. Have a pleasant weekend and 

TTFN

Voices of Authority (and why they aren't healthy)

Hi folks, this is going to be a rare departure for me as I am not going to be talking about painting little men but rather about this grand ol' hobby of ours in the round. You see, I spend a lot of my time these days in hobby cyberspace as you can imagine and I've noticed some trends that are starting to bother me. For a long while I just ignored them but recently they've annoyed me more and though I am but a minnow in this sea of hobby I thought I'd toss my two pence worth into the debate.

Many of you know that I spent a considerable proportion of the last decade working in games workshop stores up and down the country. While doing this I had the opportunity to watch gamer psychological dynamics at close quarters and how cliques and opinions form. See if you recognise this scenario from your younger days in the hobby:

You are talking excitedly about your latest doodad or project idea. Some kid who has been doing the hobby longer (usually about a couple of months longer, oh the experience) comes over and tells you in dense, jargon-heavy language why what you are doing is wrong. There will be declarations about how this unit and that are "pointless" and you've wasted your money. There will be references to rules pulled - usually - not from the book open in front of them but from their living brain (gasp). Clearly this person is a hobby god. Your opinions are meaningless; your shiny doodad is a waste; maybe you should just do what he says and be a better gamer.

Now that was a very sarcastic paragraph but I think we can all remember those times and maybe for a while we were "that kid" until someone open our eyes to how ridiculous it all was. Some of you might be saying "so?" right now but the internet is rapidly becoming "that kid" - what am I talking about, its always been "that kid". This I genuinely believe is creating a damaging environment on line for our hobby and especially every new hobbyist entering cyberspace. Why? I'm glad you asked, let me expand:

1) Credentials established by confusion.
This is a jargon rich hobby, all of them are really, it's kinda the shibboleth by which we recognise a kindred spirit. There are thousands of named weapons and rules, weird terminology and dense passages of rules. You should see a parent's face in a game shop if you forget yourself and use even a term like 40k. Blind, panicked, confusion. So in the face of all this jargon, why the hells do we feel the need to complicate it further? Abbreviations, named army builds, oblique nicknames for units? We all do it to a greater or lesser extent. When it is just between you and your gaming buddies it doesn't matter. It becomes a shared cant that binds you rather than divides. The problem is when these same linguistic tics are used with strangers. Not being able to understand the local jargon puts you instantly on the back foot and allows someone with no more experience or understanding of the hobby in general than you to sound authoritative. I've been doing this hobby for twenty three years. If I can't understand you then you are using a smidgen too much jargon.

Example: these are CSM termies with MoN, 2 PF, CF, PW and PLC. Ranged: 2SB, Combi-melta and a RAC.

 So when we start to debate (and isn't that a misnomer on the internet, argue then) hobby on line we will run in to these people who can sound terribly authoritative and don't actually know any better. As a result, it is these opinions that will be listened to. Now, here is a central tenant of this hobby. You cannot be truly wrong. You can be mistaken in your understanding of a rule. That is about it. There is no army build that is "wrong", no means of playing that is "wrong", no paint scheme, dice rolling method or victory dance that is "wrong". What there is, however, is wrong for you. Any advice for example that comes from a dedicated tournament player for whom the win is their enjoyment will probably not work for me. Some of my advice probably won't work for you. The problem is that there are people who set themselves up as the experts, their shining pedestals not the commitment of rules to memory of the playground. No, it is a big shiny blog to speak from. Clearly they must be worth listening to, not just anyone can have a blog right? Oh, wait, yeah we can.

I think the central summing up of point one is that we must be careful not to be "that kid". To use a spurious bestowment of authority to shout down others and their opinions. You all have the right to your opinions. Just as I (and you obviously) have the right to disagree. That doesn't make either of us wrong. Just different. That brings us neatly onto...

2) The polarisation of Tournament vs. Fluffy play.
See what I did there? Jargon. Fluffy is a term used - incorrectly, I think - to mean someone who plays for the story rather than in a competitive fashion. These two groups, on line at least, have become as polarised as Republicans and Democrats in the United States. You have to believe in one of those philosophies on line, declare your allegiance, NOW! This is complete nonsense. Wargaming is a spectrum of opinion and styles of play, not some battleground divided into camps.

From the oftimes excellent Bunny webcomic

We all, all of us, play competitively. The only way you can play cooperatively is if there is someone on your team! The two camps and the array of styles between should be characterised not by how they play but what they get out of the hobby. The tournament player likes the win. If they haven't won it is not really going to be a good game for them. There is an art to playing the rules not the game, looking for weaknesses, exploiting them. It just isn't for me. I'm pretty much the opposing camp, I play for the story. Win or loose it has to be a cool game for me to enjoy it. It's why I mostly play with friends, I can rely on them to provide that. There isn't really a lot more to say about this other than. C'mon people, give peas a chance. They're good for you.

3) Math-hammer.
Oh, dear, god. Now we've strayed into crazy-making territory for me, I will be deleting a rewriting sentences regularly to remove vitriol. Math-hammer is the term I - and lots of others - use for the practice of using statistics or just the bare rules to judge a unit. In other words, declaring it's worth before it ever, ever is used on the table. A typical mathhammer opinion would sound like "yeah, but you're going to get twenty shots, half will miss, you'll only wound a third and two thirds of those will be soaked by armour so at most you kill one marine".

There's a lot wrong with that statement. First the words "most of the time" have to be added regularly. This is a hobby where dice are involved, where luck plays a role. People will tell you that it averages out. No, it doesn't. Not in one game. That unit will act, at most, six times. That is not enough for randomness to be shaken out of the equation. Ask scientists why, we'll tell you, really we will. Secondly, that is a space marine we are talking about. There are nine codexes out there that are not space marines. The only time that it matters to talk that way is if you are trying to guess what your opponent will bring and thus beat them.

Me and my boyz is about to become a case in point see...

There is a bigger problem than those, however. That is the assumption that our hobby is a game of World of Warcraft, where all that matters is damage per second. That is ludicrous. Lots of people have told me that Ork Kommandos are worthless because they won't survive long enough to kill enough things to "make back their points". As though that is how we should judge a unit. Ask the people I play with Orks. Dayum they hate those Kommandos. They are a little bit to strong to ignore but not so expensive that I won't sacrifice them. They tie up a couple of units killing them for a vital turn or two while the rest of my under armoured bullet magnets run into position. Their worth is not in what they kill but in how it allows me to influence my opponents actions. Ork players will know this, so how can a dedicated Tau player who has never fielded Orks in his life tell me that they are worthless? The answer? They can't. There are NO worthless units, just ones that don't have a place in your strategy. Please, I beg of you, if you regularly mathhammer. Put away the forums and play some games. Your opinions will improve because of it.

4) Homogenisation
A big complicated word for everything kinda becomes the same. Ask yourself why handmade food tastes better than pre-made in a factory. Go on, think. The reason is because the pre-made stuff has been made to offend the least amount of people. Its all about market share. Companies who don't care about the quality of their product would rather have 90% of people think their product is "alright, nothing special" than have 25% LOVE it and another 50% think it is "alright". In their deluded minds this is better. Its a capitalist model, market share equals power. But it means that everything winds up tasting "alright", nothing is stand-out, nothing is delicious.

Where am I going with this? If everyone winds up agreeing with a few authoritative talking heads then everyone gets the same army, the same build, plays the same game. I'm yawning as I speak. Worse, it can have a toxic effect on anyone whose instinct is to go another way, isolating them. It works for painting too. Look at Cool Mini or Not, it started as a nifty idea but has turned into its own Voice of Authority. There is one style of painting that gets results there. Non metallic metal, over blended cartoony. That is what is considered good. This may sound like sour grapes "aww, whassamatter Jeff, the nasty people on CMoN didn't give you marks?" but I don't care about that. I like my painting. Not everyone does, when people say "oh, that's a bit dark" I say, "yes it is!" not "oh, is it? I'd better repaint it.". There is not One True Paint Style any more than there is One True Game. But listen to the intertubes and you would never know it.

Where am I going with this? Well there is one central point to consider when it comes to Homogenisation = Bad. Almost everyone complains that there are too many space marines out there. Usually while owning two power-armoured armies themselves. Why are Space Marines so ubiquitous? Because when we were young some Voice of Authority told them that Space Marines were best. So they bought them. This sets up a loop where demand drives supply. Whose fault is it that there are so many Space Marines? Not GW's, it is ours.

So to sum up...
And that is it. My four bugbears associated with the Voices of Authority. Why does this bug me so much? Because our hobby is tough enough to get into. It is complex, expensive and intimidating in the number of skills you have to learn. Why do we then also make it Clique-ey? Why do we put up barriers to understanding? Why, oh, why do we tell people that their opinions are wrong? It can only be to make us feel a little bit important, an ego stroke. If you think this I am overstating the impact this can have consider this. I do not attend any gaming clubs in a city the size of Cardiff. There are loads of them. I avoid my local gaming store (not a GW) if I can possibly help it. Why? Not because of the staff, not because of the stock. It is because every time I go in I feel like a stranger in the room, an unwelcome intruder. The few loud people holding court and declaring their superiority. They drive me away. I've been doing this twenty three years. Imagine how a kid would feel, with all those hormonal brain wonks telling him he's worthless anyway, imagine it. Walking in to an established clique and then being told his ideas have no merit.

Our hobby is a niche in a niche. In a world where entertainment can be found at the push of a button ANY new member who is willing to sacrifice the time to paint and game is precious and shouldn't be shoved away. We can't take responsibility for every new player, and they don't need baby sitting. They should be able to find their own way. It is up to us to make sure we don't abuse our positions as apparent authority figures and allow them to have their own way. Even if it bugs us.

Here endeth the ramble. [edit: Now read the comments, I know this is usually the point where your eyes begin to bleed on the intertubes. Comments have become a CAPS LOCK shouting match between trolls, not these ones, the debate continues...]

TTFN

The Genuine joys of tracking progress

Greetings people of the internets. I bring to you glad tidings! To my considerable surprise organisation can be beneficial, satisfying and dare I say... fun?

Poor Mulder, he does seem to get the short end of the stick

 Now be honest. Most of us wargamers, especially those like me who suffer from butterfly brain or shiny thing syndromes, are fairly disorganised creatures. It's how we wind up opening a box and finding half an army that we not only had forgotten about but can't remember buying at all. The same goes for projects, "Hey! Over here!" yells the shiny thing and we're off like a weasel chasing string (I can't really back that analogy up but it feels right). The weird thing is that finishing things feels great. To look at something all laid out and completely painted is awesome. So how do we actually get there? Well, here's a strategy that I've been using lately to achieve just that.

Workometers

What the hell is a workometer you ask? Essentially it is a simple way of focussing your efforts and giving you a nice instant visual feedback that gives you that sense of progress and achievement. Start with an army list:

This makes sure you don't waste money buying units you don't need and equally will inform your planning. Watch out for ways to use leftovers from one unit to make or improve another! For instance, at least two of my Blood Angels units were made out of nothing but spares from other units. Once you've got the list convert it into something that looks like this:

Each box is a model, big boxes are war machines. As you paint and base a unit, fill in the boxes. This gives you that nice "ticking things off a list" feeling and will keep you focussed and trucking along. This may seem like a no-brainer but it really works. I've managed to complete more army projects in the last few years than I have ever in my life. That's not just because I am painting more, it's because I am more focussed. Left to its own devices my brain would have had me paint random units, wind up with lots of painted models, but no armies. Food for thought.

On a similar note, I am trying something similar with my work and I am making it public:

I'm using Tumblr to run it as it easily binds into my Facebook and Twitter feeds. The feed is called "Today I have mostly been..." and will have snapshots of the work in progress stuff I have been doing that day. Mostly this is for clients to check on progress but there is no harm in anyone popping in and getting a sense of what I do day-to-day. Check it out folks.

Until next time

TTFN

Getting the most fun from your hobby

Greetings all, I thought I would talk about a subject I consider essential. Making The Hobby into Your Hobby and getting the most fun out of it as a result. This might seem to be fairly basic stuff but it is amazing how often you hear people talking about elements of their hobby as a chore or seeing a proscribed view - often I'm afraid from the internet - as being the one true shining way that they must follow. I'm here to tell you different. First, some definitions:

The Hobby: The entire spectrum of activities relating to Wargaming that exist regardless of whether you like them or not.

Your Hobby: The elements of that vast spectrum that give you pleasure and thus form the activities in which you most often partake.

So straight off the bat we see that there is a need to identify what the elements of our wonderful hobby are. To help with this, I've made diagrams (get me with the technology):

 

In its simplist form the hobby exists in three parts: Collecting miniatures; Painting & Modelling them and then Gaming with them. Now straight away we can recognise different sorts of hobbyists, the fellow with boxes and boxes of unpainted figures might emphasise the Collecting element. The chap - or indeed chapette - with lots of individual painted figures but no recognisable army falls more firmly into the Painting & Modelling section. Most of us are somewhere in the middle. Now this is as far as most people take thinking about their interaction with The Hobby, but in order to take that next step of truly making it Your Hobby we need to go a little complex. Lets take Gaming for example:

Most games played fall into one of three catagories: Casual - or Garage - Gaming is where you have a circle of friends who play, you meet up semi regularly and have a game. No more organisation than that. Club Gaming by contrast starts with strangers meeting in a venue provided for the purpose to play games. Tournament gaming is where you actually journey to a place where a competative gaming event has been organised. Now notice that I have not talked about competative vs. so-called "fluffy" gaming. That is a whole other thing and is spread across all of the different elements of gaming. It is though essential to your creating Your Hobby that you understand what sort of gamer you are and find people to play who share your views on what makes a good game. But I digress, we are still defining the elements of The Hobby, not yet crafting Your Hobby.

Collecting is one of those weirder elements of The Hobby, we all do it to a greater or lesser extent. Some people write army lists, only buy what they need from that list and therefore have a very tightly controlled Collecting element. These people also have more money than me because their discipline avoids the Shiny Model Syndrome that causes people like me to buy something on impulse. Then there are the completionists who like to own an entire range. The "Gotta catch them all" mindset. Nothing wrong with this - your bank manager may disagree - I've done it with Dwarfs. Then there are those who chase the rare and limited editions, essentially a more classic form of collecting that is in essence the same as the antique hunter. Most of us do a bit of everything, some do almost none of it and just wind up with the models that they thought were cool at the time. All valid options.

Now the section I know most about, Painting & Modelling. This splits down further into Painting, Modelling and Scenery Building. Modelling also has its subdivisions but they are mostly small, Kitbashing vs. Conversion and Sculpting and so on. Essentially for me, modelling is working with the construction of a model to make it suit your needs. How you do so is largely a matter of skill, imagination and practice. Likewise Scenery Building has it's distinctions, scratch builds vs. working with kits and the like but you tend to either like it or not! Painting though, oh, Painting can be the very devil of this hobby and splits down as follows:

There is Batch Painting where you are content to churn out larger groups of figures. This is closely linked to Army Building in Collecting and tends to be how people with fully painted armies wound up with the whole thing finished. Character Painting - for my definition - is where you lavish attention on single figures or small groups. Competition painting deserves its own catagory because although it is a facet of Character Painting, the time investment for competative painting is ridiculous. Check out Sproket's Small World if you doubt me!

So now we have defined the elements of The Hobby, how do you make The Hobby work for you. First, decide which of the many and varied elements of the hobby appeal to you. For example, this is mine (debated whether or not to do this as it feels like I am proscribing a hobby, ignore that! Hobby for yourselves):

So looking at the image above. I now think about what I am actually DOING with my hobby right now. Unfortunately, being that I have thought about this process I have sort of optomised my hobby experiance over the last 23 years so instead, I shall use my wife as an example of there being a difference between what you like and what you are doing. Lucy - Mrs PVP - loves lavishing attention on a single model at a time. She's good at it and likes the results. Batch painting has almost a physical repellance for her. Just does not enjoy it. However, she was designing a Skaven army. Now this straight away sets up an area of conflict within Your Hobby. In order to ever, ever finish a Skaven army you will need to chunk out some serious piles of Clanrats and that just isn't Mrs PVP's bag. Instead, we took a look at why she likes the Skaven - bestial, mostly - and found an elite army that would meet those likes, in this case Ogres. So now she has an army to work on that has less models that one unit in her Skaven plan. Now this isn't to say that she shouldn't paint Skaven, far, far from it. Just don't expect to enjoy grunting out 3000 points of them if there isn't the enjoyment of the process.

Other solutions to that same problem might be to shift to a skirmish style game, Mordheim for example, that encourages the style of painting that you want to do. If big fantasy gaming is your bag then look for an option that allows you to do it while enjoying the entire process. In my case, at one time I was doing most of my gaming in a club environment. Now I know lots of people love gaming clubs but I am not one of them. I prefer to know my opponant before the game starts as that means that the social experiance will be good as well as having a compatable gaming mindset. It had gotten to the point that I thought I didn't like gaming so much. It wasn't that, I just didn't like playing total strangers. Once I shifted all my gaming to Casual style I was in hog heaven once more.

Essentially what I am trying to say is that if there is an element of Your Hobby that you are not enjoying examine it. Find out the root cause of your lack of enjoyment. This is Your Hobby for heaven's sake, if you aren't enjoying it then there is nothing in it for you! Seek the root cause of the problem and then make changes to accomodate it. This might mean some dramatic changes, different games, different opponants, abandoning projects but ultimately you will have a happier and healthier hobby. I finish by including one of those compiled Your Hobby images that I used to show what I did just in case it helps. Let me know what you think in the comments and share this as much as you like. Lets get everyone thinking about their hobby, not The Hobby.

TTFN

How I got in to the hobby

Well then, Warhammer 40,000 is 25 years old. Today is its official birthday. A very happy birthday 40k, you changed most of our lives forever. I thought that this would be a good opportunity to talk about the birth of my own wargaming hobby as it is almost as old!

22 Years ago I was a tiny wee 10 year old Jeff living in a market town called Wisbech in Cambridgeshire in the UK. I had always liked putting models together - a Lego fanatic - and had played about with Airfix stuff. I had heard some of the older kids in the playground talking about this game with Chaos and Orcs and dragons. Then a guy called Daniel Norman gave me this:

White Dwarf 139 has a special place in my heart. I must have read it thousands of times over the years. It had the background for the ancestor of Battlefleet Gothic - Space Fleet - in it, suddenly there was this world of kilometers long starships and space travel in a hell dimension all illustrated with twisted gothic artwork. It contained within it a complete step by step guide to how Mike McVey chose, created and painted the studio's brand new Blood Angels army. This was where they decided that devastators would have blue helmets, that sergeants would have reversed shoulder pads, everything. It was also where a generic blood angels captain got his name. Tycho. 21 Years later I would finally realise the dream I had then of owning that 3rd company army. The nostalgia almost puts a lump in my throat.

We didn't have a proper Games Workshop in Wisbech (still don't) but there was a shop called Prams and Toys that stocked various bits and bobs. Amongst them was this game. Heroquest. This was the first miniatures that I ever legitimately owned. My others had been scrounged from friends. Oddly enough Wisbech was the site of the old Games Workshop plastic manufacturing plant down Weasenham Lane - now Renedra plastics. There was a sort of tradition of "Urban Scrumping" of miscast sprues out of the bins of this place and most hobbyist kids in Wisbech had a few "hot" RTB01 marines in their collections! Heroquest was an odd game, slightly larger in scale miniatures than 28mm and designed by MB and GW together. I enjoyed it but sensed that there was more out there. Then came the day when we were going to London and we would be in Oxford Street. I harrassed my parents until they agreed to find the Plaza store and I saw my first GW. This place was an Aladdins Cave to an 11 year old Jeff. Wonderful. As luck would have it they were having a shop soiled sale and I picked up a copy of Waargh the Orks! cheap and this:

The third edition of Warhammer Fantasy Battle. This was when it was still essentially a way for Roleplayers to use all their models at once. The rules were complex and full of exceptions but the book was magical. It was full of pictures of huge (for the time) armies fighting over actual modelled scenery rather than a dining table. There were stories of dark and terrible things creeping in the hidden places of the world and there was a treasure trove of wonderful, twisted, gothic artwork. I had never seen anything like it. I was hooked and 21 years later I still am.

TTFN