Sunday 11 April 2010

Breaking the Block

Apologies to everybody for the extended period of inactivity on the blog for the last couple of months, especially to my latest follower Peter W who unfortunately began following me just at the point I got hit with a serious case of Painters Block.

In the past I've had periods where I haven't had much inspiration with models I'm painting, but never the sort of complete lack of ideas that hit me this last couple of months, even painting islands for the Uncharted Seas League I'm running at the club had me drawing a blank.

Any time I tried to sit down to paint I'd end up just having no idea what I wanted to do and if I made myself paint something I couldn't stand whatever I ended up doing. All VERY frustrating.

Thanks to leonmallett for some words of encouragement and ideas to help me out. In the end though it all came down to needing to find something to spark an idea in my daft brain.

In this case it was sorting out what the guys I roleplay with wanted to do once Steve's Star Wars game comes to a the end of "Episode 1". Once they'd decided they wanted me to run D&D again I started planning the adventure and whilst I was sorting out the overall story I suddenly got hit with the idea of having the main bad guy have a Minotaur bodyguard/Right-Hand-Man (or creature) and having had a Rackham Minotaur sitting based & ready for paint in my lead mountain for about 3 years now I got going almost without thinking about it.

So after a week of fitting in a bit of painting around coursework I've got him to the following point:



Still a ways to go, but the main thing is that it's working out well and I'm enjoying the process again, so much so in fact that on Friday I started planning out the board I want to use when I start playing Pulp City at the club. That in turn led me to finish off Rook today whilst I was waiting on a couple of bits to dry on the Minotaur.



Literally just finished sticking the grass tufts to the base before I took the photo, now all he, (along with The Gentleman), needs is some varnish, which now the weather appears to be behaving itself again I might actually get done this week. I feel the need to get some members of ARC done now to balance things up a bit.

It's good to be back, and I hope to have more photo's next week, fingers crossed.

J

3 comments:

Pete W said...

Good work on breaking the block there. I know what it's like to hit the painting block and changing pace/direction is definitely a good way to deal with it.

I was getting sick of painting my red and gold space marine colour scheme so I broke out the white and tried a totally different tone on the next squad. Now I've got some warmachine figures from a friend I have to play around with different styles as well as colours.

Thumbs up on the models, they look very good.

Pete

pulpcitizen said...

I am glad you found something to help - it is great to see the blog up and running through painting again.

undead_jon said...

Thank you gentlemen, I appreciate the comments.

J