Today while thinking about life and employment, a lightning struck me with an idea for a poll, or better an exchange of opinions. As you all know in the last few years the internet has helped the war-gaming community enormously, not least us in Japan! Thanks to blogs, I had the chance to find other war-gamers and thanks to this blog some war-gamers have found us with the great result of allowing us to enjoy what seemed impossible to do in Japan (war-gaming). So the point I was roaming about is about time management, and figure painting. I didn’t include gaming as it is not something we can manage ourselves, we always need a mate to play. The idea came by looking a different blogs of people with huge collections of painted miniatures, and people doing historical re-enactment while war-gaming and painting. I am jealous! Of course I would love to do all those things, but family, work and worst of all commuting puts my painting time to a merely 1 hour a day, but only when I can do it. There are some days in fact where I am so tired that I can only watch TV as it is a passive past time, while painting is not.
Still I am one of the lucky guys that can paint in the evening, other people can only paint at weekends, and some other can only do that some times!
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| A solid week of painting from Saturday to the following week's Sunday |
The question then raises, to all those people with fully painted armies, historical re-enactment costumes, gaming rooms, families and jobs, how do you manage?
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| My heavy Italian artillery |
Is it for example that people living in the west have shorter working hours and very short commuting time?
Please enlighten me and the other members of the club!
Cheers
Good questions. For myself (in Wakayama), I get painting done at night when the kids are in bed. I can usually go for about a week before running out of steam and then stopping for a while. It means hardly any sleep for the time I'm doing it, but at the moment it's the only way to get any done...
ReplyDeleteCheers,
Aaron
You too then! I have the same problem, I tend to paint after dinner, after my daughter is in bed, but sometimes I get so tired that I have to stop. When I have the inspiration I go on too late and I have to pay the price the next morning! Damn alarm clock! Aaron, you are a historical war-gamer in Wakayama and you never told us! We should try to get together sometimes and have a game, have you got a club in Wakayama? Definitely we should do something together!
ReplyDeleteTo be honest... I think it is way too easy to forget real life with it all. Over the past 6 month I have had a lot of free time and I spend a lot of it painting and posting on my blog. Just this very weekend I realized, that the hobby had taken such a lot of time lately, that the things that were really important in life had taken a backseat and have thus become bleak. I just hope that I can still turn this around!
ReplyDeleteMost of my collection is painted by others who do this for a living.When I do paint it is usually at night after dinner or at weekends. I only have a 45min commute each way to work so no great time lost there.
ReplyDeleteThank you guys for your sharing!!
ReplyDelete@dhcwargamesblog - I absolutely agree with you, for me wargaming has been a sort of way to forget real life but it has consumed so much time that sometimes I am starting to be a bit overwhelmed. My problem is that I feel the pressure of having much unpainted lead and I keep painting, and I happen to neglect other things that I should focus on. Sometimes it feel a little bit of an obsession!
@Willie - Me too I am seeking a way to have miniatures painted by others but here is not a very popular thing, the hobby is not mature yet to have full time painters, I should look into convincing some youg hobbyists to help me!
I think the problem is with kids it can be hard to find the energy to get to painting. I've got my two which are now 8 and 6. It begins to make a difference for both parents. Next lower your expectations for your painting. Target doing a reasonable speed painted job. Look at others doing the same so you don't set your expectations too high.
ReplyDeleteIt goes in cycles, I think. You have spells when you can get a lot done and other times when you need to pay attention to the real world. Good luck with getting things sorted in that regard, DHC.
ReplyDeleteGiovani - I'd very keen to get together for some gaming some time in the future. I don't have a dedicated gaming group, but do have a couple of friends in Osaka/Kobe who I meet up with occasionally for some miniatures or boardgame action. Time is of course the problem, but I'm sure my wife could amuse herself for a day in Tokyo :)
`Darren, I thought about lowering the standard of paining but in the end I have a lot of things that are half painted and to keep a consistency I end up painting the traditional base, wash, 3 highlights that takes a lo of time!
DeleteAaron, sounds great! if we can organize it together with one of our monthl meetings it would be great! So I can also introduce you to teh gang.
I feel it is a good idea to have a network of players that know each other, that would definitely help the hobby scene in Japan.
You have to be patient, set some reasonable goals and do your best to stick to them. But real life is just that, real.
ReplyDeleteI'm trying to do something little everyday with the hobby: model, get a scenario ready, actually play.
THX guys! Will try my best!
ReplyDeleteWhen you get over forty you'll find enough time to paint. You'll send children to live their own life. And you can make this final step and start to paint for life. It's my way :):):).
ReplyDeleteFunny... I am 34 and have no children (yet)... I guess they will be happy to be send out of the house under the age of 10! ;-)
DeleteUnfortunately I have a lot of time to paint being recently separated and soon to be divorced. I can't blame it on the gaming but it obviously contributed. There were probably a lot of days when I was painting, shopping for miniatures, attending a convention when I could of been something with my then wife. But I went two years without painting anything or playing anything other than at conventions just before we separated hoping that things would improve. They obviously didn't and the divorce became inevitable. Now even though I live alone I still do a lot with children and work during the day so painting is usually in the evening (not even weekends as I travel a lot on weekends now). The one thing I will say is universal is how much I paint is directly proportional to how little TV I watch. The less TV the more painting. That is just true. You don't realize how much time TV eats up in half hour blocks. My other tip is to do small "stages" when you sit down. Don't have the expectation of finishing anything. So I will prime say 10 figures one night (I use brush on primer at the moment). The next night I might paint the flesh on all of them or just the base color. The next night I might pull two out and detail them. What I do then is once I get five or six close to done I take a night off and assemble and clean five or six more miniatures. The next night I prime them and so on. So it changes things up but keeps progress moving. I would say I have painted 80 miniatures (28mm) in the last three months using this technique. The last thing is I base in bulk. So when I finish painting I put all the miniatures to be based in one box and wait until I feel like spending a night basing.
ReplyDeleteAnother is to take advantage of the high yen exchange rate by offloading your minis to one of those Sri Lankan painting garages.
ReplyDelete