Painting Warhammer is a lot of work. Let’s face it: you have to build the thing, then paint the thing. And that can take a lot of time and energy. Sometimes I find this overwhelming. It’s really hard. It’s easy for me to lose my Warhammer motivation and it’s difficult to find it again.
Last week I really wanted to paint something. I had a free evening after work and my wife was looking after the baby. I had the time, I had the space. But I didn’t have the motivation to get started. After much tribulation, I cleared my desk. I set my paint station in order. That alone really made me want to put brush to hand and get painting!
So what do I do when I lose my hobby mojo? In this article I’ll try to explain my method. You’ll be surprised how easy it is to implement! I call it the Paint The Boot method.
Motivation is a lie
The first thing to understand and keep in mind is that motivation is a trap. Motivation is a fickle lady. See, you can’t really rely on it when you need it, because it’s not always there.
It’s an emotion that tends to always run away the moment you have time to hobby! It happens to me all the time. Picture this.
It’s a Sunday afternoon, I’m free from chores and I can do whatever I want. Result? I just watch TV all afternoon. When evening comes around, I’m frustrated. I haven’t done anything meaningful with the time I was given. Yes, well said Gandalf. I was waiting for motivation to arrive and do some hobbying, but it never showed up.
How to keep your Warhammer motivation up?
The secret here is that you can create motivation yourself instead. No need to wait around – just go and do it. The phrase that I really like to remind myself is this one:
Activation comes before motivation.
That’s right, you have to kick yourself into gear first, then motivation will arrive!
My trick for this is to limit my expectation to only do one very small thing. I call this the “Paint The Boot” method.
The “Paint The Boot” method and how it can help your Warhammer motivation
The name of the method should already tell you all that you need to know. Just Paint The Boot!
By setting my expectations low, I can just focus on one small thing which is really easy to achieve. This way I’ll get my dopamine hit as soon as I finish painting the thing I set to paint. This kickstarts the motivation I need to carry on!
For me, this looks like painting one boot on one miniature. I sit myself to the desk, then force myself to paint this one boot. After that’s done, I want to go ahead and paint the other boot. Then I’ll finish the trousers. And so on…
And just like that my 10 minutes painting session becomes a 2-hours one!
Just Paint The Boot – bring back your Warhammer motivation
So remember, the key here is to nudge yourself to begin with. This will create a landslide motivation loop that will keep you going without even realising it! You even finish your entire army this way.
What about you? Do you agree with my Paint The Boot method? Maybe you have another way to overcome the lack of hobby motivation? Let me know in the comments! Until next time
Hello friends, and welcome to another article where I challenge myself (and you the readers!) to not buy any Warhammer for the whole of 2024. Smash the NO warhammer year challenge and you’ll be titled master of your own destiny.
You’ll receive a cookie as a reward.
Why no warhammer for a year?
In my previous article I mentioned how I want to tackle my backlog, and well. My backlog is big enough – I could buy no miniatures for years and still have some grey plastic lying around my home. I feel this is a state that many hobbyists in the Warhammer sphere share. I know that some of you out there love your pile of unfinished plastic, and that’s fine. If you like it that way, more power to you.
Personally, having lots of unpainted Warhammer minis stresses me out. At the same time I like buying new models as much as the next guy, so you can see how these two aspects can create tension in my life.
This said, I think that my Warhammer collection is big enough (and old enough), that if I were to pick a box at random from it, it would feel like it’s new and I’d get the same buzz of buying from a shop.
Basically, I may be able to recreate that shop experience in my own home, meaning I won’t need to go out of my way to spend my money on yet more models.
A mindful approach
Secondly, I want to be more mindful and more intentional with my wargaming hobby in 2024, especially when it comes to Warhammer. I love Game Workshop products, and I’ll never stop following and being excited about the next new releases. And yet, I don’t like the aggressive release schedule that Warhammer has at the moment.
A new set of pre-orders every week is just too much for me. I feel that this is at the detriment of the hobby and takes away from the enjoyment of it. As an example, just in the last couple months we’ve had the christmas boxes, Legion Imperialis and now Warhammer: The Old World just went to pre-order!
How does the NO Warhammer Year Challenge work?
Here are the rules:
Cannot buy anything for a faction or game system if you already own miniatures for it.
You can only buy more miniatures from the same faction or game system if you have no unpainted models left in that faction/system.
You cannot start any new factions or game systems.
I think this set of rules is tight enough but also loose enough to not feel like a burden to me in the next 12 months.
How would it work in practice?
As an example, the new system won’t allow me to buy any more Gloomspite Gitz until all that I own is painted. At the same time I cannot start a new army, so it’ll force me to stick with the green skins!
On the other hand, since I’ve painted all of my Lord of the Rings miniatures, I am allowed to get something new for it.
Another example is that I won’t be able to buy more Star Wars Shutterpoint until my collection is painted, and I won’t be able to buy into a new game system like Kings of War.
The plan
Of course my big item is to carry on with the Gloomspite Gitz, and sprinkle in there a few smaller collections. These are:
My Moonstone warband – 4 models
2 Shatterpoint squads – 8 models
Blood Bowl Skaven team + Rat Ogre + mutated skaven – 16 models
Wurmspat Underworlds warband – 3 models
Finishing one of these 4 collections would allow me to buy something new for it. For instance a new Underworlds warband (best model GW products btw), or a cheeky Blood Bowl team.
Some of my Gloomspite Gitz collection, send help.
Conclusions – NO Warhammer year Challenge
There you have it, this is my personal NO Warhammer Year Challenge.
I’m doing this because I want to reduce my growing backlog of unpainted minis and be more mindful in my hobby and spending. This way I’ll live a more intentional hobby life and have completed collections at the same time.
What do you think of this Challenge? Will you be trying the same? Or maybe you are just happy as it is? Let me know in the comments!
As the year 2023 draws to a close, I’m trying to figure out what to do with Badgeroid – the Tabletop Counterhype blog about wargames, hobby, Warhammer and the like.
This year has been an year of experimentation for me in terms of building an online audience for myself. Of all other things, I also have this website which I haven’t touched in almost 2 years now – and so I want to try and figure out what to do with it. Do I want to keep it? scrap it? or have an on going blog for Warhammer and my miniature painting hobby?
As it’s the end of 2023, I decided to list what I have achieved this year, collate a Warhammer retrospective for my hobby so far, what the plans are for Badgeroid in 2024.
Streaming on Twitch
The big thing that I tried this year was to start streaming on Twitch. I figured if I’m painting Warhammer anyway, might as well try to stream it online and see what happens. Would I enjoy it? Would I hate it? Would I make any money?
Turns out I really enjoy streaming, and so this will carry on in the new year!
The main thing on Twitch has been the interactivity that it provides, which Instagram does not. I’m super lucky to have a small community of people who follow my streams almost every week. I think I would’ve dropped out of it fairly quickly if I was streaming to zero people. For that, I will be infinitely thankful for their time. If you want to join our small community of lovely people, why not check out our discord?
In terms of growth, I’m sitting at 24 followers since starting in February 2023. Not a big deal at the moment, given that I only stream once a week and I had a bit of break over summer. I know that to succeed I should really stream more than what I do. But that doesn’t really matter to me so much – I’m having fun doing it and that’s what makes me happy. Yes, it would be great to be able to make a bit of money to re-invest in this little venture of mine but at the same time it’s a hobby and it’s ok.
I have my crappy streaming station that I’m slowing working on improving – got I new mic last week! and I hope to up the production value of the stream over the next year. If you drop me a follow, that would be massively appreciated!
1000 followers on Instagram
This one I’m pretty proud about! I have a love/hate relationship with Instagram – I quite like it, but I feel the pressure at times to have to post something, or I feel bad if posts and reels don’t reach as many people as I’d like. The Algorithm seems pretty sporadic at times and quite hard to interpret!
2023 has seen experimentation on Instagram as well. I have made reels over the last year to see how they would go and tried a bunch of different styles – WIPs, rotating shoots of finished minis, memes, narrative reels, tutorials etc.
Of my experimentation, Warhammer memes reels were the most successful in terms of reach. I had a couple of them getting more than 50k views and quite a bit of followers as a result of it. The other type of reels which were fairly successful were also WIPs and Completed reels of big miniatures. The Mangler Squigs ones have done fairly well for example, although my Treebeard ones have not. :shrug:
Posts don’t really seem to make a big difference or “go viral” for me.. On the other hand, people seem more willing to follow you from posts. By comparing the likes/follow ratio, I noticed that posts may have lower reach but better conversion (if we want to call it that!).
The main take away for Instagram was that consistency was key. I saw the most growth when I was posting 2-3 times a week over few months. Instagram is the platform where I have seen the most success so far (and I’m most familiar as well), and I plan on keep going with it for 2024.
What? Youtube?
When I started Badgeroid I created a Youtube channel mostly to reserve the username – I knew I wouldn’t have time to make long form videos but I wanted to have username just in case. Turns out that Shorts are another way to build your channel and Twitch has integration with Youtube so that it is quite quick to post your past streams directly to your channel.
I have only started with this experiments but so far it seems promising. A couple of short have got 1-2k views and I have garnered 10 subscribers! (mind blown lol). Considering that I only posted Shorts from my streams and that the quality if pretty low, it looks like it may have potential for growing an audience there.
As will Instagram Reels, I find myself really enjoying creating short form videos, I cannot be asked to spend a lot of time editing long videos so Shorts and Reels really suit me!
As I result, I will carry on with Youtube in 2024, so expect more Warhammer Shorts and experiments on that platform.
About the Badgeroid website
This website has been sat dormant for a long while, and when I think about it, it makes me sad! I like having my own space, which is own by no one by me. I don’t have to deal with my social media overlords and their algorithmic whims. This is my Warhammer blog, and no-one can touch it! I think that for this reason alone, I will keep this website around for 2024.
My plan is to post a new article once a week. Hammer the Backlog was a massive inspiration for it, and I want to try and follow what Lee is doing on there. I want to post here once a week, probably on Sunday evenings. There, I said it! no turning back now!
In term of content you can expect here, I will be stepping away from Boardgame content and will focus instead of Warhammer and miniature painting articles. Mostly these will be my musings from the past week. I decided that I will spreading myself too thin and in reality my passion in for Warhammer. I may do an occasional piece on boardgames but don’t expect much.
Other things I want to do regarding the website is to update the theme to use one with faster loading times. Currently OceanWP seems a bit sluggish – I’m not on a super powerful plan with my hosting platform so the theme needs to be lightweight and quick to load.
And your Warhammer Minis?
Turns out I have painting quite a few things! I don’t have a list but I can say that I have 1 (and a half) miniature left to paint from my original army which I described in my How to paint your Warhammer army article back in Sept 2022. This means that I have painted 30 models from that army since then. Not bad if I say so myself! I have also painted other stuff outside of the current army:
Lord of the Rings Treebeard
Merry and Pippin
Bilbo
Gandalf
Squigboss with Gnasha Squig
Ambot
Others.. Don’t remember!
I didn’t keep track of everything so I cannot say for sure but I think I probably painted 40 minis or so in total over the past year? Not bad!
Moving forward I’ll set myself the challenge to Not Buy Any New Miniatures in 2024. What do I mean by that? Exactly that – do not buy anything. I will think about some rules for this challenge for future blogs, but the main idea is to make a proper dent on my backlog.
I have accumulated a couple of Warhammer big boxes: Trugg’s Troggherd and Braggit’s Bottle-snatchaz. I also split the Star Wars Shutterpoint starter box with a friend, not to mention the Moonstone starter (again 50/50 with another friend) and I also have other projects in mind which are not Gloomspite Gitz focused (Oldhammer Skaven bloodbowl team anyone?).
This will be the biggest challenge yet – I love browsing the Warhammer Community website to see what’s new, I like staying in the loop with what’s going on and what the latest releases are. It’ll be difficult to resist! And with Age of Sigmar 4th Edition looming, I hope I won’t get too hyped and fall for the latest big box set.
Conclusion: a review of the year in Warhammer
2023 been a year of experimentation and I think that 2024 will be similar. I want to keep experimenting with posting pictures, shot videos, streaming, blogging. I am curious to see how I will manage the workload that will be required. Time will tell.
I think the main struggle will come from being consistent. This will require a lot of effort and planning on my side to make it work. I’ll have to be organised and focussed if I want to make this work.
