Overcoming Army ADD

Hi everyone today I have a guest article from Riley Nadeau, thanks to Riley, if you have an article you want seen on the site, send me an email at Editor@dash28.org.

Have you ever found yourself with half an army finished, but your creativity tank empty? The mocking plastic mountain of miniatures seemingly only growing; with each figure you manage to get paint on you wonder whether it’s best to just cut your losses and ditch, rather than slog through yet another horde of Spear Who-Even-Cares.

Sometimes it’s best just to leave things for a bit and switch gears to a new project for some variety, but that’s not always an option when you paint with events in mind. Well, that’s where I was recently. I’m Riley, and recently I found myself mired in this same bog; here’s how I managed to navigate this most recent Swamp of Sorrows, and emerge with a freshly painted army in tow.

Like most things in life, setting goals and due dates is a good way to help kickstart your brain into time-management mode. Some people really like to dig into this and build calendars, with daily reminders and spreadsheets. I’m not going to lie, there is an appeal to all that. Ticking off another box, in the “base coated” category, of your force’s carefully managed spreadsheet just hits that pleasure button in your brain for getting something done, in a way that the actual miniature doesn’t. It’s nice to take a second and recognize how far you’ve come rather than when you’re looking directly at your base-coated miniature and can only see how far you must go. Kings of War being a mass-battle game means that there truly are a lot of models to get done; keeping yourself on schedule is not just helpful from a practical standpoint, but also a psychological one to keep morale high.

That said, if you’re anything like me, all the morale in the world isn’t enough to save you at times. Sometimes there’s just a sense of ennui that sets in after the second or third regiment/horde/legion of the same unit in the same color scheme. You start to wonder, “do I even like orcs,” which in turn slows your progress on the next unit to a crawl. If you force it, you can end up with subpar results, just to get things done and over with; while done is an accomplishment, it doesn’t necessarily spark joy now does it?

This is the time in a project when I start experimenting. Sure, things might look a little wonky, but I assure you it won’t look worse than something you forced. I like to start by messing with my painting as a whole—from products to execution, everything is fair game. With my Nightstalkers as an example, I started trying things like:

⦁ Painting entire regiments as one model
⦁ Switching techniques for some variety
⦁ Trying out new paints I hadn’t had the opportunity to use yet

For my first break, I chose to do something a little off, and paint my Scarecrow models as a single piece. It didn’t produce my best results, but I was happy for the attempt. It really got me looking at the units in my army in a different light; I generally paint all the models then build a base to put them on. With the Scarecrows, I had to consider the composition before painting which lead me to care more about it than I generally would have.

The second time I felt my deadline’s chill shadow upon my back, I swapped gears in technique. For the most part, I prefer a style utilizing a lot of heavy glazes to act as shadow and tinting, before following up with rough two-brush blends to produce my finished models. While I thoroughly enjoy the results of this process, it is time consuming and somewhat tedious.

So, for my Soulflayers I decided to swap to a mixture of overbrushing and stippling. While neither of these techniques are particularly challenging, they left me with a far more textured finish which not only helped me bring back some old techniques I hadn’t flexed in a while, but also left me so pleased that I wondered if I hadn’t gone far enough. Were I to add to these units in the future, I’d love to combine these techniques with some crackle paint to really sell the idea of creatures being covered in (or made of) sand.

By the last unit I needed for my 2300 list, I was burned out. It was the day before the inaugural event I wanted to have my Nightstalkers ready for (people keep saying I need to at least play my Masters army—let alone my list—a few times before the event); and I still had a whole unit left to do. I had a general idea of what I wanted them to be like, and a pile of models to choose from, but I just didn’t have it in me to get them onto my painting table. In the end, I asked myself what I was excited about trying paint-wise. The answer was something I think most people have on their minds right now: the new GW Contrast paints. (For a review of these paints check out our Contrast Review– Editor)

While I’d used these paints before for some basic glazing and dark lining, I still hadn’t tried them out as the basecoat replacement they are advertised as. I ended up doing just that: after setting down the base volume of the models with a zenithal gradient, I just slopped on a few of the colors I knew I wanted to try. While they weren’t exact matches for what I had done on the rest of the army, they ended up close, especially after I highlighted them back up with my normal progression. A bonus was the nostalgia to be using inks again on minis like I had when I first started painting.

While this isn’t an exhaustive list by any means, I’m thankful that you’ve indulged my ramblings about hobby Viagra, and hopefully you’ve found something to help you out whether you’re struggling to finish a project now, or in the future. That’s really the trick of it, because it’s inevitable that this’ll happen. Everybody; even those one-army-only weirdos, needs a little spice in their hobby life to keep things interesting. As great as “done is my favorite color” is as a motto, it’s even sweeter if you can manage to have fun on the way. Until next time, I’ll keep on pushing through my self-imposed hobby slog and I hope you join me on the other side!