Not bad, just rusty




The two hardest parts of the hobby

I thought I’d write this little post, whilst I’m waiting for things to dry. The first of which is, ironically enough, about that very thing. Waiting.

For me, it truly is one of the hardest parts of the hobby. May sound silly to some, but oh my God the waiting… but it’s so important, especially when dealing with something like resin ( like I am right now) and have to wait 24 hours minimum between layers. The discipline of that… and when you are so close to finishing. It’s hard. I have a lot of patience, I mean you have to in this game, right? But when it comes to waiting, I suffer BIG TIME. Of course, this part is incredibly important. If it gets the better of you, chances are you’ll have to re-work something and wait all over again (this isn’t what happened with my basing recently, by the way. Polyester just refused to work in that amount)

Second: burn out. Dioramas take so much out of me that, even when knee deep in making them, I sometimes have to push back from my desk, put everything down and walk away. I get that close to burning out sometimes. It’s a mixture of things that can bring it on, frustration when something isn’t going right or simply a moment when you look up and see the sun outside and think to yourself “why am I inside and not outside right now?” I partly blame this as to why I had a two year hiatus. I just wasn’t ready to come back to it (that and I was really busy with life). Sometimes the seed of the idea (burning out and that I can’t start another project again soon) can eat away at me and actually overcome me.

I know someone who has an incredibly high painting skill. So much so that it’s now the way he earns his money. That’s great and of course he knows that. However, he’ll always say that the journey in honing his skills and experimenting to find them was the most fun and rewarding part of it. The journey was his hobby, the destination was his job.

That got me thinking how easily you can jeopardise the hobby by expecting final results within a matter of hours or days or sometimes weeks. Or, rather, being capable of achieving them at your current skill level. For some reason, the hobby blind sights me into thinking its different from any other hobby or skill or trade, in some cases. It’s not. Like all other creative outlets, it needs to be learnt, studied and practiced. We fool ourselves into thinking that picking up a paintbrush is easier than picking up a guitar.

I toil with both of these things on a weekly basis and I always get through them by reminding myself that whilst the reward is great, the real fun is what I’m doing in that moment. Even if that means spending hours watching Miniature Mentor videos or BuyPainted on YouTube. It’s all part of the fun.

by Craig on May 23, 2014