Three Years, a Thousand Models

Bless me Internet, for I have sinned. It's been eleven hundred and forty-five days since my last confession.

Ehrm.

Sorry 'bout that.

Where was I? Right. Talking about painting.

It's been a while since last time I wrote here. The starting joke is no lie; it's been over three years. Three years of toddlers, preschool, birthday parties and very, very tired evenings. The urge to write hasn't really been there.

However, I have managed to keep to my hobby streak - it currently stands at an unbroken fifteen hundred. That's over four years of consecutive days in which I've managed to find at least fifteen minutes to build or paint miniatures. Many days - most, even - fifteen minutes have become twenty, thirty, an hour, but importantly, none have been missed.

Assuming I've averaged a conservative twenty minutes a day, that's five hundred hours spent on taking sprues of plastic and piles of resin and metal to a finished, painted state. Five hundred hours.

That time has paid off.

I have painted a little north of a thousand models since my last post. The number quite frankly boggles the mind.

Speedpaints and Contrast paints have helped. But the most important factor is that consistency of painting every day.

Have i become a better painter? I'd say so. My early forays into the Contrast scene are splotchy messes compared to my more recent entries. I've developed techniques for controlling paint that has a mind of its own, and for highlighting colours that are very rarely matched with a line of standard acrylics. My brush control has most certainly improved, as has my ambition for what is a finished table-top standard.

Have I murdered way too many brushes? Yup. I started buying cheap synthetic artist's brushes rather than natural hair because the viscous-but-runny nature of the Contrast-style paints makes them capillary action themselves all the way into the wrong parts of the brush, ruining them very quickly.

I've got good brushes, too, but they never go anywhere near my Speedpaints.

This has been a rambly post. I won't apologize for that. I felt like writing something; I have written something.

Mission accomplished.

Ta.