I can paint and ramble again.

Transcript

Back behind the brush

I’m back. I’m still painting Infinity. I’m in the final stretch.

I thought I’d be due sooner, but the client can’t actually pick the models up until the 22nd, so I’ve got a small break. I gave myself a couple of days to chill and recover, recorded a bunch of videos, scheduled them. One of them didn’t publish. Not really sure what happened, but it was a YouTube problem on their end. So technically I missed an upload. I’m not counting it.

What I had for a long time turned out to be acid reflux, but not the heartburn kind. It was up in my lungs and esophagus, wreaking havoc. I’ve been pretty messed up since December, and it really put a damper on my plans for this channel and on my life in general.

I’m not 100%. But I can talk again. I can breathe again. I’m not in huge chest pain anymore. That alone is a massive quality-of-life improvement, and I feel like I’m coming back to being myself.

The green guy is the opposite of Maximus

This green guy has been so much fun to paint. He’s been the absolute opposite of Maximus.

Maximus still needs the face and the shield done. I want to spend real time on them. I want them to look really good. I want to airbrush the shield, which means dealing with the airbrush, which I’ve been kind of dreading.

The green guy, on the other hand, is just clicking. Skin’s been airbrushed (I do love an airbrush on flesh tones). Brushwork over the top. NMM on big flat surfaces, which is perfect for the sketchy, scratchy paint style I like. And then fur, which I love painting.

The green I landed on for the body was lucky. I have a pretty limited Vallejo Air palette at this point. I bought basically the whole line 12 years ago and most of it is gone. So I’ve got mostly weird leftovers. I happened to have a green that was right next to the box-art color, and the official painters seem to use Vallejo too, so I think I just got lucky.

Why I’m sick of airbrushing single models

Honestly, I’m getting kind of sick of airbrushing single models.

For armies? Absolutely worth it. Zenithal, base coats, big consistent passes. Saves you huge time.

For individual figures? Spending five minutes airbrushing and thirty minutes cleaning up afterward is starting to feel like a bad trade. You can absolutely cheat to a really nice result by brush-painting and then softening transitions with the airbrush. But for what I’m doing right now, I just don’t know if it’s pulling its weight per single figure.

Recreating box art when you don’t really know what it is

I haven’t been making tutorials on the Infinity stuff because I honestly don’t really know what I’m doing. I’m looking at one box-art photo, sometimes a second one from the same angle, and just trying to figure it out. There’s a lot of experimentation, a lot of back-and-forth, a lot of fixing.

I repainted the white on Maximus literally four times. I redid the purple too. I probably spent 40 hours on the purple alone, and I’m still not 100% happy with it. At some point I just had to let it go.

I had to kill my darlings, or whatever Stephen King said about that. If somebody else had painted this and I was looking at it, I would think it was awesome. I would be hyping them up. So why can’t I do that for myself? I just had to accept it for what it is and move on.

Magnus looks sick, by the way. This is the best model I’ve ever painted. The back of it is amazing. I can’t get a good photo of it, but I want to figure out miniature photography properly before I hand him over, because he’s going to a different country and I’ll never see him again.

The math that makes commissions hard

I’m not getting paid for this Infinity batch. It was a trade I didn’t fully understand when I agreed to it. That’s on me. Normally I charge a real amount for commissions. The Dusk commission coming up is like half a mortgage payment, and I gave him a discount because Ice King is my boy.

But run the math on actual painting-as-a-job.

Say I paint a model to the absolute best of my ability. 100 hours in. I charge $500 for it. That’s five dollars an hour. And how often do you find someone willing to pay $500 for a single model?

Even speedrunning it: $100 a model, 20 hours of fast work, that’s still $5 an hour. To make this actually pay, you have to charge thousands of dollars per model, and I’m not at that level yet.

Whole armies are different. You can charge thousands of dollars for an army, and I do. But painting an army is near-full-time work even with the airbrush, even with speed-painting hacks. You’re looking at maybe minimum wage if you’re lucky. Fifteen or twenty an hour if you’re really lucky.

Versus another client in another field where I can make several thousand for a couple of hours’ work a week. That’s the time-math that actually matters.

There’s also a thing where making art for money kind of corrupts the art, or at least pulls the joy out of it. So the question isn’t “what art can I make for money,” it’s “what’s the fastest thing I can do that pays well, so I have my time back to make the art I actually love?”

It took me a while to learn that. I spent 16 to 32 grinding in the corporate world, drinking my life away. Me and a tight group of friends were hustlers before hustle culture took over the term — we were grinding for Magic money first, and those skills translated straight into sales and marketing. I tried multiple times to make a business out of the art itself. Every time, the thing that actually worked was: do something I don’t love four or five hours a day so I get the rest of the day for the things I do love. That’s the play.

What’s next

I’m going to get this Infinity commission done. Then the Dusk commission, which I’m actually excited for — way simpler paint job than these Infinity guys, uniform army painting, and the NMM will be fun.

After that, the channel is going to lean all indie, all weird. That’s been the plan since I made that video about indie miniatures changing how I look at the hobby, and I haven’t been able to act on it because I’ve been sick and painting commissions. I’ll still bring Warhammer in occasionally — I want to do my Inquisitorial agents and a few other cool models — but the direction is indie.

I’m probably going to livestream the entirety of the Dusk army paint. Should start next week. Stay tuned. Bye.