WFB-Getting Started Part 6: Staying Motivated

The truth of the matter is that unless you are playing in tournaments or at stores that have some kind of painting requirement once you assemble your models you don`t have to paint them. They look better though.

There are many ways to motivate yourself to paint. Be serious, the idea of painting 120 infantry is a horrifying thought, 300 rats even more so. I loved the hobby camps GW ran, they were a great way to force myself to set aside time to paint. Now as a busy mom it is harder to be motivated as often so I use the tools in front of me. Mainly tournaments and escalation leagues.

My motivation to start my Empire came, finally, in the form of one of the Greenskin Nation gamers asking if we could do an Escalation League as part of the tournament circuit we are running in 2014 (you can find the escalation league information on my blog).

An Escalation League, for those who don`t know, is a group of people working on their own armies trying to reach certain goals with the ultimate goal of completing a fully painted army. In some cases the groups of people live near by each other and include a gaming component to their leagues. In our case we live on an Island that has all the fantasy gamers living too far apart to include gaming on a regular basis so our focus is on getting a certain number of points built and painted over a certain amount of time: we`re doing 250 points per month which works out to 500 points per stage.  

250 points per month might be one character model or it might be 30 infantry models. In those terms it is not nearly as daunting as you would think.

Tournaments are great motivation as well. There is nothing quite like the panic of needing 2500 points of any army painted in time to play for a tournament.

Despite having a playable, fully painted army there is always that last minute panic check over your army or in cases like Greenskin’s Ryan who finds himself painting alongside club mates the night before. The Friday night before any event you can guarantee  3-5 guys are trying to finish up their last few models.

I personally prefer a bit calmer process and detest the last minute panic-though even I have done it.

You really just have to find what works for you and just keep going:

• Set yourself reasonable goals for you: if that`s 5 models a week so be it, if that`s 100 models a week that`s great! Don’t worry what is reasonable to me just figure out what is reasonable to you.
• Reward yourself when you complete goals. For me that means paint a character model only after totally completing ten or twenty infantry models. 
• Play some games, have some fun and roll some dice!