Getting Your Army Finished!

If you've been playing tabletop miniatures games for any length of time, you surely have a backlog.  As user "Spaced Hulk" said on the Bolter & Chainsword forums:

Indeed. It's actually the 31st Law of the Lion: "Thou shalt buy more than you build, and build more than thou paint. So it is, and so it shall ever be, until the Sword is reforged."

I've only been doing Dark Angels for a month now - but according to Battlescribe, I already have enough models to make a 2500 point list.  And that's assuming I don't increase the squad size of my Black Knights or any of the Terminator Squads, or paint up the unused box of Scouts in DA colors.

So what am I doing to keep from being overwhelmed and to stay on track?  I'm trying to set goals for myself.  For a goal to be useful, it needs to be reasonable, realistic, and definite.  Saying "I need to eventually finish my army someday" is not a goal.  What I recommend:

1. Know your capabilities:  If it takes you two weeks to paint a 10-man Tactical Squad, you probably shouldn't expect to paint three squads a month.  Repeatedly falling short of your goals is more likely to discourage you than it is to motivate you.
2. Push yourself a little:  Allow yourself some flexibility to account for things which might impact your hobby time (work, family obligations, illness or other unexpected events) but don't take it so easy that you don't get anything done.  Again, if you can put out a squad in two weeks, setting a goal to do one squad a month will take you twice as long to finish.  But if you maybe set a goal of painting two squads this month, plus an independent character, you may find that you can do a little more than you expected!
3. Don't obsess with perfection:  This one tied me up for the longest time.  I like every model I paint to be to the best of my abilities.  It's fine to take pride in one's work, but painting your entire army to competition standard is only useful if you actually intend to enter it into a painting competition!  If you're looking to paint an army you can play with on the tabletop, you'll get one a lot faster if you don't paint every trooper like an independent character.  Besides, most of the time, you'll be viewing your miniatures from several feet away.  You want an army you can be proud of - and hopefully, one that looks better than your opponent's, for reasons I've explored in a previous post - but if you want to get the army finished, you'll have to decide what constitutes a "good tabletop standard" for you.  Sometimes this might mean realizing when "Good is good enough" and proclaiming a model "done", at least for the time being, so that you can proceed with the rest.
4. Find ways to speed up your production:  The best recommendation for this is an "assembly line" approach to squads.  Instead of painting each figure individually, one at a time, you'll be more efficient if you do each step on a squad of five or ten at once.  Assemble and clean the entire squad, then prime them all, apply basecoats to them all, wash them all at once, and so on.  You'll find that each step goes quicker and you'll finish them faster than you have before.  Also, seek improvements to your techniques that will get the same (or similar) results in less time.  For instance, I am not a fan of drybrushing when it comes to painting heroes and leaders.  But if I can get acceptably good highlights on my rank-and-file this way, in half the time, you had better believe I'll do it!
5. Reduce your backlog:  Many of us have a tendency to buy models and miniatures we'd like to work on "eventually" - whether this is due to a long-range plan for the overall army, a new release, or just something that catches your fancy.  Consequently, this can lead to an ever-growing pile of boxes and blisters, awaiting assembly.  As your backlog increases, so too can your discouragement.  Feeling like you'll never finish the army is a big barrier to even getting started!  My recommendation - don't buy anything new until you've painted what you've got.  That takes a lot of willpower, and if you're capable of sticking to it you are more dedicated than me!  Obviously, when starting a new army you will probably buy a large chunk of it at once, but if you must buy new models for an existing army, don't buy more in a month than you can paint in a month.  The idea is to continually shrink your backlog, not increase it.
6. Avoid distractions:  It's all too easy to eat up all of your hobby time surfing the Web, watching TV or playing video games.  But even if you are at your desk for a few hours a day, you might not meet your goals if you don't stick to the plan!  It's tempting to assemble that model you just got, but painting it isn't part of your immediate goals.  Before you know it, you've got a lot of stuff built and unpainted. I have a small "staging area" near my painting table, where I keep assembled models and works in progress.  If it starts to get overly cluttered, I know I need to get it under control.
7. Set a definite time frame and output amount:  This is perhaps the most important part of setting the goal itself.  If you tell yourself "I will paint a 10-man squad every two weeks" or "I will paint 500 points a month", you have set a definite goal - one that has a time frame and gives you an idea of what you will have in the end.  I find that points value tends to work very well for this, as leaders and larger models such as vehicles take longer to complete, but tend to have higher points costs in game.  
8. Participate in challenges and vows:  If you are a member of any sort of group, whether it's your local gaming club, a Facebook group, or an Internet forum, you may find that your group will occasionally conduct a painting challenge.  The scope of these challenges varies, but the idea is to motivate painters by publicly declaring what you intend to complete within the duration of the challenge.  Making a vow is good motivation to complete your work, because of the gentle peer pressure.  If you meet your promise, you will be able to show off your work and bask in the esteem of your peers.  If you fall short, you may get a friendly ribbing from those who lived up to their goals.  There's no real punishment if you fail to complete your vow, but announcing your goals will help you to feel accountable for them.

How does that apply to me?  Well, obviously I have not been able to meet my promised goal of updating this blog weekly.  I try to make up for that with useful content when I do post, rather than feeling pressured to "come up with something" this week.  However, I have been able to meet my other hobby goal - to complete my Dark Angels army in a reasonable amount of time, I have set a goal of painting 500 points of miniatures each month.

For March, I wanted to complete my squad of Deathwing Terminators from the Dark Vengeance box set.  Terminators have always been my favorite unit - I like the aesthetics, design and fluff, regardless of their performance on the tabletop.  And the squad is 245 points, a convenient size for a little Kill Team while my friend and I reacquaint ourselves with the latest rules for 40K.

But that's only about half of my stated goal.  The other thing I really wanted to do was to make my own version of Grand Master Belial.  He's my favorite Dark Angel character, and while his official model is nice, it lacks flexibility in loadout (I prefer to equip him with Thunder Hammer & Storm Shield for close combat power and survivability).  He's nominally only 190 points, but each of the three individual loadouts works out to about 30 points.  So doing all three sets of weapons is like painting up a 250-point miniature in terms of time it takes to build and paint it.

The works in progress were featured in the previous post from a couple weeks ago - but now I can proudly announce that Belial and Squad Barachiel are complete!

This is the first photo I've taken with my new light box.  I'd like to get a portable light that is bright enough for overhead use, to illuminate the box a bit better.  The photo was taken with my HTC One M7 phone, using the DSLR Camera app.  I then used Paint.NET to adjust the color balance and levels to make it look as close to the actual work as possible.  

So, there's my 500 points for March.  What's on deck for April?  I'd like to paint up the backbone of any Space Marine army - my Tactical Squads.  I have two such squads from the Dark Vengeance boxed set, each a 200-point squad with plasma weaponry.  I also want to paint up Company Master Balthasar, who can count as Azrael if I wish.  That's 515 points over the next 30 days - a little more than last month's 495-ish.  I've broken it down informally just to have a benchmark of if I'm staying on track.  Allocating a given amount of time to assemble and prep each squad, as well as how long it will take to work on the details for leaders, heavies and special troops, allows me to stay on schedule.  So hopefully, by Tax Day I'll have the first squad done, and before May I'll have both of them and Balthasar to show off.