Samhain’s the pagan festival of harvest. It’s not really about reflection and planning, but it’s a useful gathering up of work. So here’s sort of a summary of what I produced in the last year. Did my first bases, practiced with non-white skin tones, did a smattering of leather, and maybe not army painting but definitely a whole lot of batch painting of thematic groups. Battletech, OPR firefight squads for Doa and Ork, half an Ork army with Orks and some kitbashed grots, experimented with DIY speedpaints for desaturated zombies and full saturation kobolds, and a brief experiment with undershading and speedpaint to get shared tones. I kitbashed my very own killa kans and then my cats destroyed them. I got my airbrush and started working on OSL, fell in love with my airbrush, use it for all sorts of things now. Started working on SF terrain for TTRPG and wargaming, and did a lot of that.
Okay, a little bit of reflection, but not about lessons or plans or anything. I keep my head down most of the time, enjoying the painting process. As soon as I put a project down I reach for the next one. Kung fu is sort of how I work and how I’ve seen things improve. But taking a moment to step back and really look at what I’ve managed to “harvest” in a year sort of takes my breath away. Learning basing and kitbashing and airbrushing and I think most impactfully just vastly increasing my speed by learning to army paint? Some of this was stuff I assumed would take years. That last closeup of the dude in the red jacket? He took me a couple of hours to paint instead of a couple of days or a couple of weeks, and he was the most one-off model I’ve worked on all year. I cranked out 40 Orks in two weeks iirc, and my Dao fireteam in less than that. I’ve got plans blah blah blah, I always have plans, but now I’m looking at the remaining grey plastic in my hobby shelf and thinking I might actually get it done. Or, if not, the pieces I do finish are going to look a lot better than what I worked on last year in much less time.
So yeah. Sitting back and feeling really satisfied and grateful. It’s energizing for my hobbying. I’m having so much fun!
