15mm Gothic Infantry

    One of the things that I stopped to work out, once I realised that my new job would mean less painting time, was not which projects were more urgent and should be prioritised but which projects gave less little wins. One of the biggest ways of keeping myself motivated is splitting projects down into 'little wins', usually in the form of limiting the number of models in a painting batch so that I can finish, for example, 5 models in an evening instead of 10 half finished and then once a model is complete (inc basing) I add it to my notebook with a date*.

*and then a spreadsheet but lets not go there

   So by looking at projects without these little wins I was trying to avoid hitting the project when there wouldn't be much spare time and killing what motivation I had. My 15mm Goth army was the thing that came to mind immediately. Unlike my 15mm Romans, who I could paint a whole unit, base and count as a win, my Goths wouldn't be in a uniform, as I had been sticking them to wooden sticks in mixed batches so I could paint a whole row of identical colours, then mix them in units later on. The downside of this is that as I don't count a model as complete until it's based, I could have weeks of painting without a 'complete' model. Effectively I would be completing 6 units of infantry on the same day even if I had been "finishing" batches every few days over the course of weeks. So this became my biggest priority even though there are other more urgent projects.

   The infantry I painted was mostly from Forged In Battle, but the slingers are from Essex Miniatures. There are 3 bases of regular infantry that I can use as the base of an army or auxiliaries for my Romans, then a unit of archers and 2 half sized units of slingers to add some skirmishing elements.

   Early in to this mass batch painting I remembered I had some civilians from Essex Miniatures**, so they got added to the ends of a few sticks where there was space as it made the most sense for getting stuff moving. Then*** I remembered my plan of having at least one of the civilians on the base of a cart, so two carts got built**** and added to the queue along with some dogs and a cat that I bought at Salute from Pendrakon as I wanted this army to look like families on the move rather than a professional army.

**In another case of project creep

***See above

****I'm not really sure how much time I thought I was saving by not doing the 3rd in this batch

   The downside of this and in an attempt to make real ground, I painted the clothing in small batches, then went back and did all 126 figures skin, hair, wood, metal and shield in one go over for each colour, and I have a new found respect for those people who paint in big batches, it might be faster but I am never doing that ever again.

   I've got at least another 5 units of cavalry, some generals and another cart to paint for this project which I'd like to get on with at some point soon but first I'll be looking at getting some other projects without little wins, or for more immediate games, moving before my hobby time dries up. However, saying that, as I typed that it has very much dawned on me how stupid it would be not to get on with the last bits of this project . . .

Thanks for reading