Is it really over? Noel's Wrap-up

I owe Curt and his many minions, and Sarah, too, a bouquet of thanks for allowing me to take part this second time. Thanks, everyone, for all the work you've done for us and the enormous amount of goodwill that this annual exercise brings. I've enjoyed every minute of it.

It's been a wonderful, if somewhat exhausting, three months for me, with lots of benefits. I've made a huge improvement in my collection. I've painted something like 1500 figures in 3 months. I've created armies for Carthage, Rome, the Celts and Napoleonic Austria, and I've progressed twenty existing projects. I've been inspired by the work of many others, and am thinking about even more potential projects as a result (I've found Tamsin's Pulp work and Ken's Italian Wars army particularly stimulating). I've had my creativity tested, in the bonus challenges, and my ego boosted by some of the feedback I've received. I've felt accepted into a community of like-minded, similarly strange, people, most, if not all, of whom I'll probably never meet. I've learned some new techniques and approaches to our hobby, and I've been alerted to resources I wasn't aware of. And, as a person who sometimes finds his mental health perhaps a little fragile, I've found a great deal of pleasure and comfort in these activities.

This post is in two parts. First, a brief summary of what I managed to do. After the pix, there's a longish account of how I went about the Challenge. I wanted to add this because I feel the mechanics of my approach might be a bit different from the way some people go about it. I feel a bit guilty about my success, as a relative newbie, and I also wonder if there are aspects of how I've approached the Challenge which others might want to adopt or adapt for themselves. If none of this interests you, simply skip the last part of this post.

Here's (most) of what I managed to complete:

It was pretty difficult getting a photo of all this. I think there's around 1500 figures here, sitting on the desert boards I made, an area a little under 6' by 4'. There are a few pieces missing. I've storied the piece I was most proud of, my submission for the "Water Bonus theme", somewhere safe, and haven't been able to figure out where. There's a house missing, probably in the same place! And there are sixteen figures now on display in the local wargames shop.

You can't really see very much in this summative picture, and I don't think there's much point in my trying to describe the areas of the picture piece by piece. Here's three slightly more communicative images.

And here's the compulsory headshot:

My wife will tell you that that smirk is a frequent visitor to my face. In this instance, it's because I've just figured out how to set the timer on my camera, dash round the wargames table, and look like I know what I'm doing.

As it seems that some readers like stats, here's a few on my achievement:

How I Approached Challenge IX (this is long and rambling)

In my view, if you want to achieve a target, you need a plan - just as on the battlefield. (Always recognising, of course, that a plan is merely a framework, not a straitjacket). In Challenge VIII, I didn't really know what I'd let myself in for, but I threw myself into it and, in a rather haphazard way, found myself obsessed by this strange, compulsive three months of painting.

I knew it would be the same this year without a plan, so I made one. To start with, I tend to be obsessive about things I love, potentially to the exclusion of everything else. So I tried to ensure that there'd be the minimum number of real distractions for the three months of the Challenge (not entirely possible, of course, with Christmas and so on).

I feel a little guilt when others write of struggling with work and family commitments and so on. I'm very lucky in this respect. I retired a couple of years ago, so most of my time is my own. I've also a wife and family who are wonderfully indulgent to my hobby, and my family is entirely made up of nerds and geeks. This means that if I'm trimming sprues whilst the family is watching TV (they've learned to duck when errant detritus flies across the room), or there are trays of undercoated figures drying off in the kitchen or spread across the garden, they rarely turn a hair.

In my planning I set myself several targets. My declared target of 2500 points was one I felt comfortable with. But my actual target was to exceed the 4880 points I'd managed last year. So, in my head, the target was actually 5000 points. I also wanted to submit to each of the bonus rounds because I'd found they stimulated my imagination unpredictably and made me paint up figures I'd not otherwise have thought about.

I'd four or five key projects I wanted to progress decently, but I also wanted to hit as many different projects as I could. I know that each time I'm able to achieve a small part of some project, that will usually lead to more of the same, so being forced to start is usually an opportunity for rather more. So the Squirrel challenge was exactly what I was looking for.

In order to hit my high target, I approached the task in a pretty structured way, even compiling a spreadsheet (Miles would be pleased!) My initial plan was to start with 150 points, then build up by increasing that target by 40 points a week. Together with the bonus rounds, that would add up to more than 5000. I also know that I'm super-Squirrelish, so the plan had to suit my tendency to start new things before finishing the last one.

I broke down each planned weekly target against the projects I wanted to work on - the plan for the second week, for example, was 80 points of 28mm Romans plus at least 100 points of 15mm Austrian Naps. This hit the numbers, gave me some variety of work and progressed two of my key projects. Each week in the spreadsheet was sketched out like this.

Of course, this all fell apart in practice! In week 4, for example, I found I'd much more spare time than I'd anticipated, and I was excited by some Frostgrave figures, which weren't part of the plan at all. The result was a massive 415 points, rather more than the plan required. But that meant if I was adding 40 points a week, I was supposed to get 455 the following week - which I then failed to do. And, at that point, I realised my incremental plan worked fine on paper, but it was clear that getting anything more than 400 points a week was going to be almost impossible for me. At the same time, having hit 400 already, it was also clear was that if I could continue to manage that number each week, I'd still manage to reach 5000.

So I changed the plan. Instead of the incremental approach I'd begun with, I aimed for the same highish total each week. Hence the continued "paint bombs". I wanted these to be the norm, rather than the exception. To do this, I had to figure out which bits of all my various projects I might actually be motivated by, and which might not be too difficult to achieve. For example, I'd initially thought I'd paint up Sarissa's model of Hougoumont - a really exciting set of 12 models which my wife had kindly built for me (I told you I was lucky!) - but a careful calculation showed me that the amount of work it would take would not yield the points I wanted - essentially it's not cost-effective to paint smallish, complex buildings. The time they take isn't justified for the points they're worth. Whereas the one massive building I did submit was well worth the effort - 60 points for only a few hours work. If you want to generate points from terrain, large blocky terrain is the way to go - scatter terrain, small, complex pieces are unprofitable.

Of course, the Challenge is only partly about points. For me, that's a big thing, but I also wanted to make sure my key projects were also addressed. This meant that sometimes I chose to paint things merely for variety (Squirrel!) or for points, and other times because they were next on the agenda for a given project. The most important thing, though, was to keep motivated, by whatever means.

Then as the end came in sight, I hit 5000 points. And I began to dream. Was 6000 points perhaps possible? I still had a long list of figures and terrain I wanted to work on, more than enough to bring 1000 more points, if I could manage the work.

My 15mm SYW project had been on the agenda from the start, but I'd got bored with painting the 15mm Austrian Napoleonics. Similarly, I'd hoped to create my desert/coastal board from the start, but kept putting it off as it seemed a complicated task. With about ten days to go, I decided that I might be able to deliver 800 points in the remaining time if I could make big inroads into both these, as well as complete some of the many figures I'd begun but not finished. (In fact, when we did reach the end, I still had 5 pieces of terrain and about 50 figures that I'd begun to paint but which I'd had to put aside.)

For that last week, I pretty much did nothing other than work on the Challenge. My terrain boards were submitted about twelve hours before the deadline. In the final analysis, those 260 point weren't needed to hit the 6000 point target, but I couldn't be sure of that. And the final post of 634 points of SYW was sent around 2 o'clock in the morning, my time, I think about four hours before the deadline.

By having such a focus on getting points, I made some choices I might otherwise not have made. For example, I painted many of my Romans with (plausible) white robes rather than red, because I use a base flesh colour for white, and that same colour, washed with a flesh wash can give, well, flesh. This means that, apart from armour, the same base colour could be used for most of the figure. As we know, though, there's generally a trade-off between quality and quantity. A points-based plan nudges you towards accepting lower quality.

I'm fine with that for some figures: mass units of orcs, for example, seem a prime target for Army Painter washes. I'm happy with 15mm figures block painted, but feel 28mm demands rather more. However, I don't feel every colour on a 28mm figure needs the full three colour shading job - some work with only a base plus shade, or base plus highlight. So a big part of my approach was to choose colour schemes that weren't too difficult to apply.

Next time round, (if Curt is happy to include me again) I think I'll behave differently. I'll still want to do well, but I'm going to attend more to quality. I'll probably develop a different approach, perhaps focussing on command groups or vignettes to revel in the beauty of the object rather than the completeness of the spreadsheet.