Over on the Lead Adventure Forum, myincubliss has announced his personal solution to this problem. With a week off work coming up, he's declared it to be the "Week Of Mega Power" and has pledged to do something gaming related, and then blog about it, every single day of the week. I think it's a fantastic idea, just to set yourself a target like this, especially if you wrap it up with a slightly silly name like he has. No seriously, think about it. If you pick a name that makes you grin stupidly when you think about it, your brain starts to associate those "feel good" endorphins with the project, which makes you subconsciously want to think about it more. I'm thinking back to summer of last year when I was doing all that preparation work for the Big Birthday Bash and can't help wonder if the slightly silly name played a part in getting so many figures and vehicles painted and ready. I've certainly not been able to match that level of productivity since.
I'm certainly going to be following incubliss's progress on his blog this week, and see if I can't have my own little "week of mega power" next week. As a slight tweak to what myincubliss is doing, I'm going to make a slightly different pledge. Rather than potter around doing a bit here and a bit there and not actually achieving much, I want to finish each day with something concrete that has been completed. I want to be able to blog every evening and in that post say "See this, here? I did this today and now it's ready to use." Whether it's a steam tank, a building or just a couple of figures, I want to have achieved something every day.
Today I re-setup my miniature painting station at my father's house. As I've mentioned previously in this blog, my day job nowadays is more or less acting as his full-time carer, though fortunately he's in such good health at the moment that I do get a lot of free time between tasks during the day. So having a painting station set up here is a good way to fill that free time (in theory, if I can resist the temptations of the internet!). It's a good job I'm using cheaper craft acrylics as my main paint source these days, as it meant I've been able to afford to completely duplicate my paints set, one for my flat and one for my father's house.
The table's at a bay window that gets the best light throughout the day, but the desk lamp (as suggested by Scott) supplants the meagre winter daylight we have here at the moment. One extra expense, and one that I'd highly recommend, was to replace the bulbs in both the desk lamp and the main room light with 25w daylight bulbs. These are a lot more expensive than the usual energy-saver bulbs, but they're a lot brighter and more importantly the light they produce is a closer match for natural sunlight than any other sort of interior lighting (old fashioned tungsten bulbs tended to be too yellow, flourescents tended to be too blue). The daylight bulbs produce a clear, white light that is excellent for any sort of hobby work.
While I was re-arranging the room for the paint station, I also dug out my old 4'x4' wargame board. Dating back to when I was mainly doing 15mm colonial gaming around 2000, this was simply a piece of 10mm MDF painted green on one side and covered with cork floor tiles on the other, that could be placed on top of a dining table to give a decent playing area. Nothing spectacular, just a very convenient compromise for someone with no room for a full-size permanent gaming table. Eight years of being consigned to the garage and it's developed a very slight warp but nothing too serious, and the green side has acquired a few marks that I believe to be snail tracks (possibly left by the little fellow who had to be pried off before the board was brought back into the house!). The cork side still seems in pristine condition, so a lick of paint on the green side is all it needs to return to its former glory, but it's still perfectly usable as is and gives me another possible gaming venue for small-medium scale games.
Haha, you managed to explain WOMP better than I did!
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