Oh My God, What Have I Done?!

So in my newfound enthusiasm for assembling plastic figures that I discussed in my previous post, I ended up finishing the empire battalion and then promptly impulse-purchased about a thousand points of second-hand Orcs & Goblins for forty quid. After stripping and patching the O&G forces I went ahead and assembled my remaining Infinity PanOceania figures as well. This has left me with over a hundred figures that are ready to be painted, and it’s prompted a sort of existential crisis.

Fuuuuuuuuuuck.

Ever since I got back into the hobby four years ago I vowed that I wouldn’t overexert myself in this way, and up until now I had been doing really well. I don’t think I’ve ever had more than 30 individual figures that needed painting at a time, and even that felt overwhelming. Admittedly the past year has seen me become more involved in the miniature hobby, and certainly play more games, than at any time in the past, but I still find this lapse a little disconcerting and I’m trying to puzzle out why miniature gamers are so prone to this habit of buying far more than they can paint.

I’d like to posit a few key reasons:

1. Painting is far and away the most time consuming aspect of the hobby, while at the same time being the one least necessary to actually playing the game. The result is that anyone who enters the hobby in order to play a game system (which is the majority of people outside of pure hobbyists) has a huge impetus to buy and assemble new miniatures, but little to actually spend hours painting them outside of aesthetic reasons.
2. The general tendency among players of any game system to collection more than one faction. It’s very easy to start a new system with a single faction, but as soon as you’ve become comfortable with the ruleset and have faced a number of different opponents it’s only natural to want to branch out and try different things tactically, as well as acquire models with a different look from your norm. Proxying is usually only acceptable for a handful of figures and it’s understandably rare to find people willing to play against a whole army of proxies as something about it is just fundamentally unsatisfying. Thus, we seem forever propelled into spending money on another faction that results in a greater pileup of miniatures to paint.
3. Warhammer Fantasy is the absolute worst system to have to paint. It demands huge numbers of rank and file troops that are boring to paint once you’ve settled on a scheme and technique. Consequently I find it fosters an attitude that painting must be spurred on by a combination of financial self-loathing and a pigheaded stubbornness. I have literally never met anyone who has enjoyed painting their fantasy army, or at least the huge blocks of infantry it requires.

I think that, in order to keep myself sane, I will be simply storing away the Orcs I purchased. Not taking them out to game, nor paint, and putting them out of my mind. I didn’t spend so much on them that I’ll feel really guilty about not using them, and this will allow me to come back in a few months time when I have less to paint to decide whether to keep them or paint them up.

In the meantime I’ll be focused on finishing my Panoceania force which only has five figures to go before its fully completed. But first I’ll be painting the Empire knights i’ve assembled and sprayed in order to be able to glue them to their horses. I’ve tried out the Army Painter Plate Metal Spray on them as there is so much armor, and the results look great so far (I’m a huge fan of the Army Painter metallics). I’ve even tried something new for me and done partial undercoats of white and the metallic for the horses as seen bellow.

I think with the metallic already done it should be a quick job and I’ll be sure to keep the blog updated!