A change in focus for a new year

With last year not being as productive as I'd have liked, I've been having a bit of a think about how I work on my painting and modelling.

Firstly, I've identified that I'm a bit burned out with so many committed to and half finished projects that I'm trying to push myself to complete. It's just discouraging me from going to my painting table. So, to solve that, I've taken everything 'in progress' and either put it into a holding box to be picked up as I get motivated about them again. A couple of exceptions to this were made where I had no longer got a clear idea of what I was trying to do with the model. These got dropped back into my stash. Out of sight, out of mind.

Secondly, I'm going to making my focus be more about larger projects this year. I've previously described individual models or squads, which are a single item on my kanban board, as 'projects'. That's a bad term for them. They're basically 'work items' - projects are much larger.

So instead of focussing on, say, a particular model or unit, I'm going to try and get some significant pieces of work done, involving multiple models and squads. I think getting one a quarter done is a reasonable thing to aim for - we'll have a look in a few months to see how  that went.

Finally - I'm getting a bit put off by the lead time between me getting enthused about something and me getting to apply paint to it. I also end up buying stuff and it just sitting around in boxes for ages, never seeing the light of day.

The planned solution to this is to try and move towards immediately assembling anything I get, getting it undercoated, then packing it away ready for me to get enthused about painting it. I'll get a better visualisation of what there still is to do, and less lead time if I want to get something finished. This means one of my early projects is going to be starting to get some of my existing, massive "to do" list assembled at a reasonable pace.

Beyond that, goals really come down to "try and paint more stuff than last year" and "actually, thinking about it, two items completed a month doesn't sound too bad as a basic target".

Lets do this thing.

Games Day 2013: Fake Rumour Competition

So, I'm back from Games Day 2013.

As a 'teaser', while I'm writing up all the interesting things I saw and learnt, I asked some of the staff to come up with the best "fake rumour" they could think of. Some of them were good enough sports to join in, so here's the "entries".

Mat Ward: "Mat Ward is working on ______."

Phil Kelly: "We're doing Codex: Primarchs next. We're moving the story on they've broken into the Emperor's original gene labs, and managed to clone the Primarchs. Every model in the army is a cloned Primarch."

Jervis Johnson: "This is my first draft of the next edition of 40K."

Tammy: "Fish people are next."

Jes Bickham: "We're going to combine Wood Elves and Bretonnians into one book as they're in the same geographical area. It'll be great. There's a new unit in there which is a flying forest hog."

Andy Hoare: "We're doing an Inquisition skirmish game."

Andy Hoare: "We're doing a Titan skirmish game."

Alan Bligh: "We're doing Ogryn Empires. It's like the Ogre Kingdoms book, but in 40K."

Talima: "30K in 30 minutes..."

Please don't be too angry with any of them. I goaded them all into it. I'm a terrible influence.

Proper reports to follow shortly!

In the meantime, whose fake rumour do you think is best?