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Your reason for painting models


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So considering how painting in total can be extremely helpful with a stressful days, stimulates ones concentration, and can helpful in the more educational forms of learning and understanding our world, as well as our feelings.

 

Now of course those are only theories, and what some of us have maybe experienced in the science of education.

Yet when it comes down to painting minis, it seems as if this knowledge seems to be hidden away pretty well.

 

So too change that I was hoping that us the community of painting models, could help with that.

 

So to start the Question of,

 

How does painting models help you guys with your everyday life?

 

Oh and of course what your reason is for painting miniatures😅?

 

Just as a reminder.

I’m currently working on a project for my own studies, so some of this information will go into my work, of course the person partaken will be kept anonymous.

I hope this won’t be a problem.

Edited by Skreech Verminking
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I paint for several reasons.

On the practical side, a painted army looks better than grey plastic, which somehow makes the game more enjoyable for me.

I see painting as a way of making an army "mine." I pretty much never use official paint schemes and always try to come up with a set of colors that will convey some kind of theme for the army and give it a little personality.

I don't paint "well," but rather paint efficiently, which means I can work through models and units more quickly, and can enjoy that sense of accomplishment from having finished a unit or hero. (I also have quite a backlog, so faster painting is better for that too.)

Finally, the act of taking an hour or so of my time every day or two simply to focus on something that I enjoy, and engage in it at my own pace is rewarding in and of itself.

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14 hours ago, Azlak the Damned said:

I strongly agree with this! Definitely makes the game more immersive.

I also agree. It just looks so much better having 2 painted armies on the table.

I dont like painting that much but i love it when a model is finished and i have something awesome to add to my collection. Recently i started looking into colour theory and the logic behind some techniques and it made painting a bit more fun for me. It made me stop just slapping some paint on a mini using techniques everyone tells me to use and wondering why it doesnt look the way i want to. It made me paint faster as i am getting better at what i need to do to get the result i want.

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Because the end product is something tangible and lasting. I like to have the best of all worlds, I want a competative army, but I want it painted well. This is a tall order but one when I began to sink more time into ended up becoming a key source of enjoyment and satisfaction for me. I have a group of friends and family who enjoy looking at my work - and everyone loves validation! Also, my heart rate is never lower than it is painting - a great sign!

More tangentially, understanding things like colour and art more has helped me appreciate a great many other things. Even more unexpectedly, as a history teacher this has allowed me to cover art colleagues when they're inevitably off sick, and enjoy it a ton trying to see what I can fit into their lessons with my rudimentary understanding of colour theory. ^_^

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I think it's a complex topic.

At first I just enjoy painting. Simple.

But then I want to improve. So I start learning better technics etc 

Ad the same time I want to have a purpose for my minis and also for what I'm doing besides enjoying painting. So I want to play the game, build armies, win tournaments and painting competition.

Then there is something alluring about this minis - Models want to be owned by me. And want to be painted. So I'm forced to paint.

And all this points influence each other. And I feel like I'm trapped in this system 😂

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Without getting too deep.

Painting minis is one of the few things I fee like I'm good at, so looking over my models and feeling pride brings me a lot of joy. Also having a physical object to keep and the end of a day's painting I find satisfying. Plus seeing my gradual improvement when comparing older models to my later models gives me a chance to see progress, which is hard to come by in day to day life.

Also I just think Warhammer looks really cool when it's all painted up.

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I don't generally enjoy painting, or at least I don't enjoy painting armies as I really lack the attention span for it, especially at the moment where my focus is worse than it used to be. However I do enjoy painting whilst I do it for the most part, it's a complex one for many reasons.

I really enjoy having a painted army, It's a rarity for me but when I have one I enjoy playing with them so much more and feel proud of them.

I like being able to flex my creativity and just go wild with what I want to do letting me create unique and personal projects that I am proud of. It's also the same reason I really enjoy conversion projects in armies. It's a really accessible way for me to interact with my artistic side and have things I can show off at the end too.

 

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20 hours ago, Skreech Verminking said:

How does painting models help you guys with your everyday life?

Painting models is a hobby for me. I believe that it is important to have an interest that is not tied to your work. Something that you can just do for yourself, without any pressure to monetize it or any deadlines to meet. At the same time, it is nice that miniature painting is a skill that you can see develop as you do it. It is nice to see yourself improve at something even if it is not the goal.

Like many people, I spend a lot of my time working with a computer. Because of that, I increasingly value having things in my life that are non-digital. Real things that I can hold in my hands and that feel permanent. That is another upside of miniature painting for me. The end product of my hobby efforts is a real, material thing.

What comes next is a bit of a personal reason. I have never thought of myself as especially artistic. I think it mostly had to do with not getting very good grades in art classes at school. I am mildly colour blind and had an operation on my hands at a young age which affected my manual dexterity. This made it hard for me to do well at the kinds of projects you usually have to do in school art classes, like drawing and painting. It was also often something that was frequently used by others to excuse how bad I was at art stuff: It's ok, don't expect to be good at art with your eyes and hands. At the same time, I found mathematically focussed classes easy. That kind of thing pushes you into a niche: Science guy who is just bad at art. Makes perfect sense.

But looking back now, I always had fun doing creative stuff. Even though I was not very good at it, I actually liked drawing as a child, just not the kind of drawing that was recognized as valuable. Even when I got older, I was constantly doing creative stuff like pixel art, another kind of art that was not really taken seriously by the adults around me at the time. Even though I did not start painting miniatures as a means of artistic expression iniatially, this is now one of the main things I enjoy about it. I have been out of school for a long time now and what is or is not artistically valuable for me is now dependent purely on my own judgment. Miniature painting allows me to have the kind of artistic fun that I really always had a desire to have, but neglected over the years. Building my artistic skills also shows me that I do, in fact, have the potential to become good at making art, which is nice for me to break out of some pre-conceived notions I held about myself for a long time.

 

20 hours ago, Skreech Verminking said:

Oh and of course what your reason is for painting miniatures😅?

I started painting miniatures as a means to an end. I just wanted to play games with them. The creative aspect of miniature games was always part of the draw for me, but I was kinda dreading it at the same time, given my own self-perception as somebody without artistic ability. Overall, I had two false starts in miniature painting: Once at around 10 years old, I got a few miniatures, tried painting one, was not immediately good at it and never painted the rest. Then the next time, at around 20 years old, I painted a unit of models (16 skeletons). I did not enjoy the experience and mainly saw it as a chore to get through so that I could get to the meat of what I actually wanted to do: Play a game. But at the same time, during that period I was introduced to basic miniature painting techniques like drybrushing and made big improvement in the quality of finished miniatures. In the end I painted a few more character models, but stopped painting again because I could not imagine working through the rest of the big box of skeletons that I had got and that were kind of looming over me. I also ended up moving for university fairly soon after and had nobody to play with, anyway. I took my models and paints with me, but had them in a box for years without doing anything with them.

Finally, my most recent return to miniature painting was a few years ago, at 30. I had organized a game of DnD with friends and thought it would make sense to paint a few of the models I had to use in the game. Maybe it was because I was not soullessly batch painting models this time around or because my capacity to focus on a task had increased with age, but this time around I found painting a lot more enjoyable. The coworker I shared an office with happend to also be willing to get into Age of Sigmar with, which led to me starting to build up an army again. At some point, the painting process became less strenuous and more fun, and now even though that DnD game has fallen apart and I have not seen my coworker in a while due to COVID, I am still painting away. Only now the painting is no longer a means to an end, it's the end in itself.

I find miniature painting to be an interesting artistic endeavour. There are a lot of artistic things that are perceived as mainly feminine. Sewing, knitting, makeup... But miniature painting is one of those artistic things that seems to be perceived as a hobby for boys, regardless of whether we are talking about scale modeling or painting gaming miniatures. What's more, it's weirdly perceived as an artistic hobby for the kind of boys that are not usually seen as artistic. For me, slipping into miniature painting because of an interest in gaming was really serendipitous. It was lucky that this weird hobby with two disparate components, gaming and art, exists. Without it, I would probably still not have any kind of creative hobby, even though I feel like it's really something that enriches my life.

 

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Like all of my hobbies, it simply calms me down. Sitting down to paint for an hour or two is rather relaxing and the time passes by so quickly.

I don't like having to force myself to paint large batches though, so I no longer try to paint large armies. Which is why I stick more to the hobby side and less to the wargaming side as a result.

Edited by Vastus
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