Happy New Year!

Good morning/afternoon/evening everyone!

Welcome to 2023, The Year Of Getting Things Done...

So, I had this great, long post written (twice...) going on about new year's resolutions and the trials and tribulations of such, and how I was not going to set myself any resolutions (for the sake of my mental health) and how, instead, I was going to set myself some goals, both hobby- and professional-related. Long post. Consigned to the bin. Instead I wanted to reflect on the year just gone, before looking to the year ahead. 

The main thing in 2022, work-wise, is that I've gone from trying to squeeze in a little bit of painting here and there to near full-time commission work. This came about because of a big decision the Better Half and I made in the second half of the year. Since mid-2019 we have both been working night shifts in a care home, looking after adults with severe disabilities (the Better Half trained for it, and is an absolute natural at it, with incredible empathy and the ability to remain positive no matter what the job throws at her- I just fell into the job after spending years looking after my dad, pretty much 24/7, as he slid into the clutches of Parkinson's- once you've been around that, caring for others becomes relatively easy.)  However, over the last 6 months (basically since we both contracted Covid) the night shifts have been taking their toll and we decided to reduce them as much as possible, and push towards doing self-employed one-to-one home care as our primary source of income. This has taken a few months to get off the ground and, while we were still getting set up and gradually reducing our hours at the care home I took the opportunity to push on with my commission painting and, so far, it's been going well and I haven't had to organise any self-employed care work (The Better Half is doing great guns with her own home-care by the way) and we're really optimistic about how things are going for the foreseeable future. We're still very much finding our feet, and I know things are going to be close to the cloth for a while yet but I really feel that 2023 is going to be the year where we really make a go of being self-sufficient completely. 

And that's my real goal for the year. It's not a resolution, it's an aim. I want The Better Half and I to be completely self-sufficient by the end of the year, working for ourselves solely. It's a nice thought. Along the way, there's a few other things I want to deal with but, luckily, they will all help me towards that goal. 

First off is my change of location. For the last couple of years I've been working out of the spare bedroom in our house but, over the festive break, I've shifted my workspace up to the loft, and here it is:

There's still a bit of finagling to do (I need to replace that blanket hiding the end wall with something more groovy, for a start) but it's all set-up and ready for me to start painting later today and, more importantly, it means that The Better Half now has her own hobby space to make her Moomin House and do her puzzles, as well as all the other artsy-craftsy things she's always wanted to do but never had her own space to do them in. I've always felt bad that she's never had such a space, with priority going to my workspace, so I'm glad to have been able to sort that out at last. It's also given me a nice underline point, at the start of the new year, to bring me into focus for what needs to be done over the next 12 months. Which leds me neatly onto:

THE PILE OF SHAME

Every hobbyist has one: The Pile Of Shame. Boxes of miniatures that they're absolutely convinced that they'll definitely paint one day, and we all firmly believe in that fact but the truth is more like we'll keep adding as much to it than we actually get through, and the Pile will never get any smaller. In my case, however, my Pile Of Shame has real shame within it. Over the years, because of my complete inability to say "no" to anything anyone asks me to do, coupled with my ongoing issues with my mental health, and the innumerable normal challenge of life, I've built up a considerable pile of unfinished work for other people, some of it going back years, and the very thought of it makes me feel utterly awful. So, this year I am going to do something about it. I might not be able to completely banish the Pile (there's quite a bit) but I'm damn sure going to finish out the year with a chunk of it gone. How is this going to help my achieve my ultimate goal? Well, as I said, this pile of unfinished projects had been a huge weight on my shoulders and my conscience and clearing some of that weight will get rid of a lot of mental baggage that has been slowing me down. The goal is to clear one project a month and I'm starting small, with this Zombie Rocker, a job that's been sitting there for years.

So, that's the professional pile of shame. I do, of course, have multiple personal piles of shame. The main one* is, of course, the GW plastic pile of shame: the ever-increasing collection of sprues, units, limited editions...It's easy to be overwhelmed by what's there so I've been trying to sort through it all and try to whittle some of it down into what I'm going to paint (hopefully in this lifetime) and what I am definitely not going to get around to, and some of it will definitely be ending up on the trading pages. While I sort it through, I've decided to focus my hobby painting on miniatures that I'm going to actually play with. That means armies are out, Kill teams, Warcry warbands, and other miniatures from boxed games are in. I'm in a couple of gaming groups, where we mostly play Warcry and Kill Team so doing some models for those is a no-brainer. I'm also trying to get to play more games with The Better Half and she really likes the quick, skirmish games. On top of that, painting models for games makes for very finite, definite projects that have a focussed beginning, middle and end. Ideal for those lovely little hits of satisfaction that help to keep the motivation going so expect to see plenty of game-based #hobbygoals2023 on my Instagram feed. The first one, my goal for January, is this Necron Heirotek kill team.

Speaking of Instagram, In the summer I started doing a streak** on my Instagram page, charting the daily progress of my commission and hobby painting. Unfortunately, due to an increased workload at the care home (which is part of what pushed us to make the decision to move onwards), I was rarely able to maintain more than a couple of days at a time and it kind of fell by the wayside. The thing is, while I was doing the streak, I had a few comments from people who said it was encouraging them to do more hobby stuff themselves, which was deeply heartening and flattering. So, I've decided to restart the streak, with the goal being to try and get it into treble figures. The dream would be to finish 2023 with the tally up to 365. I'm making it achievable by setting the target at just an hour's worth of painting/modelling a day, and I'm going to allow myself to include gaming time in that too, as it's all hobby-related and, what the hell, my streak, my rules. That should make it fairly easy to keep it up as, most days, I'll be doing some commission work (which will be included in The Streak- again, my streak, my rules, nobody said it had to be just hobby stuff and, anyway, job/hobby crossover is a big thing in any creative endeavour...) I'll be keeping track of The Streak over on my Instagram with the hashtag #thestreak23 The first one is already up, detailing the projects I want to get done this month. Feel free to pop on over and keep up with my own projects, as well as my commission work. What would be really cool was if others joined in too, and posted their own streaks with the same hashtag. Come on, let's get #thestreak23 trending! Anyway, the whole point of the streak is as another way of keeping the motivation going with those little hits of satisfaction on a daily basis. 

At this point, I've realised I've been rambling on for quite a bit, and the shortened post I plannned is actually longer than the original one it replaced, so I'm going to call it a day. 

One final thing is the rather pleasant surprise I had which was to find out that this skeleton from Cursed City had won the Miniature of the Month painting competition in my local GW store! I was dead chuffed! I had no idea of the results of the competition, as the store's Facebook page had been taken down, so finding out the result when I popped in a couple of days ago was a really spiffing end to the year! Ooh, and talking of competitions, it's nearly time for me to do my annual job of judging the 'Eavier Metal 20 Year Challenge painting competition except that, this year, it's going to be a little different. Keep an eye out for an announcement soon!

So, all that remains is for me to wish the very best of luck to you all for the year ahead. I hope that 2023 brings you all you could hope for.

Thanks for reading!

Stu

p.s. if you like what I'm doing here, a click on the link below and the donation of the price of a pot of paint would be a wonderful gesture. I'm thinking of adding special stuff to the Ko-fi, like competitions and prize draws, so it'd be a good idea to at least have a look there now and then 😁 

*I'll talk about the other piles of shame in another post.

**no, not that kind of streak. Believe me, that's an image you don't want in your head...