Warboss Tae's 2016 Painting Challenge

Last year, I took part in the Tale of an Epic Gamer painting challenge.  That challenge is focused on 6mm armies (primairly Epic 40K, but some others sneak in as well).  The idea is to set a goal and to post your results from month to month to show what you have accomplished.

It was a great experience for me and taught me the importance of setting painting goals and pushed me to paint more than 15,000 points of models for NetEpic Armageddon.  So far this year, I have not set any goals because for most of the year I have been working on a home remodel.  Well, the big stuff is pretty much finished and now I need to get back to the goal setting.

While I have not set any goals, I have managed to get a fair number of models painted.  I posted an update in January with a list of projects I planned to work on this year.  Much of what I've painted lately has fit into those projects.

I came across some videos on YouTube of some people taking part in Warboss Tae's 2016 Painting Challenge.  The videos were pretty good and showed people of different levels working on their projects.

The challenge offers different levels.  The Adventurer; lets you paint what you can and post a video of your work at the end of the month (or periodically if you can).  The Emperor, is a hard core commitment where you post a video of your project every day to show your progress as well as including a story that is tied to meeting your painting goals during the challenge.  The middle ground levels are Lord Commander and Loremaster.

I think I'm going to try my hand at this and will kind of split the difference between the Adventurer and the Lord Commander.  So, I'm committing to posting 31 videos of my projects and the progress that I make, but they won't be sequential days as I don't get a chance to paint every day.

The first step in the challenge is to go through a Boot Camp.  This is a 5 day project and sets the pace for the bigger challenge.  I've been working on painting up some models for Dragon Rampant and KoW games.  These have been Lord of the Rings models;  goblins and men of Minas Tirith.  I've got a good force started for the goblins and have started on the Minas Tirith force.

Part of my existing Goblin force.

My goal for this 5 day boot camp will be to paint a unit of 12 goblins to add to my existing force.  I will be painting a unit of Moria Goblins with Spears.

Not everyone is a fan of painting.  I get that.  I probably spend more time painting than playing, but I guess I'm special that way.  Taking part in a challenge like this is a great way to motivate you to paint some of the pile of models you have for your hobby.  Setting a goal focuses the mind and pushes us to achieve something.  Set a goal that works for you.  Don't set a goal that you know you can't achieve because that will kill your motivation.  Also, don't be afraid to adjust your goal if you need to.  If you haven't gotten as far as you planned, scale back.  If you get everything done in 2 days, add more models to complete before your deadline.

Stay tuned to see how this challenge progresses.  I have decided I will be finishing my Goblin Kings of War army for the full challenge.  I've already got a few units done, but I am confident I will finish the whole thing by then end of this challenge.  I will detail out exactly what I plan to get painted very soon.

Day 1 is in the bag and I made some very good progress.  Let's see how these look at the end of the boot camp.

I'd love to hear how you keep motivated to paint your piles of lead and plastic.  Do you set goals or do you have some other way to keep you focused?