 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video. Today's going to be a little different because today we're talking all about motivation. Today's going to be the top six tips to help you stay motivated and keep painting and turn all that grey plastic into beautiful miniatures. So let's get into it. The strict techno-mancer that is Vinci V. Let us get to the technique and learn it Vinci V style. I think one of the biggest challenges we have sometimes in this hobby is just literally picking up that brush and painting. I hear this a lot. I can't find the time. I just don't want to paint anything. I don't know what I want to paint, etc. It's a very common complaint. And people often ask me, how do I stay motivated? Now, I'm not really sure I'm the best person to judge by. For me, this isn't a hobby. This is a lifestyle. It's something I do ostensibly for a job, but it's also something I'm addicted to. I have to paint. If I go more than a couple days without, I get the shakes. You don't really need a lot of motivation when you're an addict. Now that being said, there are still tips, tricks, and tactics that I use to keep myself at the desk and going. And I think all of these cannot just help you get painting, but stay painting and build up that endurance and help you to continue to paint more and to really see your projects through. Tip number one, vary your projects. It's really that easy. Do different things. Paint different things. Paint an army. Paint something for display. Paint something for competition. Paint a bust. Paint a larger scale thing. Paint a warband. Paint just one unit. Take a character. Paint a character from a different army. You always maybe thought about playing. Try a new game and paint some small skirmish unit from that game. Find a 3D print you really think is just a neat one off and give that a shot. However, by varying your projects, by not always just painting the same thing, you will find you're much more motivated. There's a lot of research that shows that when things become rote to us, they become boring. We lose our attention and we lose our motivation to do them. By varying up what you're working on, you can really, really change the way you're thinking about the hobby, and it gives you a lot of encouragement to sit down at that desk. Now, I hear you. Vince, what if I'm painting an army and all I can do is work through my units in that army? Hey, I hear you out there, imaginary person. That's totally fair. In that case, vary your units. Don't just work on all your marines. Work on a set of marines or something, and then a special character. Then maybe three bikes. Then a big vehicle. You know, whatever. By varying even within the army, you can still create a lot of those virtuous cycles that keep you sitting down at the desk and exploring new things. Number two, deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is the way you actually improve at things. It's sort of a term of how high-level competitive athletes improve. They don't just go do the thing. If you're a world-class runner, you don't just run all the time. You do lots of different things. You do strength training. You do endurance training. You of course go also run, but you do it all deliberately, and it's the same thing here. Deliberate practice is when you set down and with the project you have in front of you, which, remember, is varied, you're picking one thing, one specific technique or effect or whatever to try to improve in this particular project. With this set of minis. It could be one mini. It could be a unit. It could be your current batch, whatever. That thing you can improve on can be anything you feel like you're lacking with. Maybe it's speed, and you want to paint faster. Maybe it's cleanliness. Whatever it happens to be, pick that thing and go. Now again, if you're an army painter, I think sometimes people feel like this is a challenge because they say, I don't want to vary up what I'm doing. I'm trying to make my army look consistent. Well, I'll tell you, number one, the interest in consistency is, in my estimation, vastly overhyped. It doesn't actually really matter. Real world armies have huge amounts of variance in between the individual units within them. Humans have a lot of variance in between them. These interesting-looking armies often have variance in between them, and whether you want it or not, it will happen. Now, that all being said, you can do it even in an army, even with a strict adherence to consistency, because you can work on things like the clean application of paint. You can work on things like refining the smoothness of your blends. You can work on your brush control. All of those will still create completely consistent paint jobs across the army, but will still be deliberate practice that helps you improve. So don't ever feel like there's not something you can do. And if you're working on a single figure, even again, if it's an army or a display piece or competition, if you're a single figure like a character, that just gives you free license to go nuts. Pick something that you feel like you want to refine. Maybe you need to improve your NMM or your contrast. Or again, something like your smoothness. Maybe you want to work on making weapons look really good and flashy. Maybe you want to paint faces better. Maybe you just want to work on your color composition and learn how to properly balance the colors around the model. Whatever the case, pick that thing, deliberately practice, and then when you get to the end, evaluate how you've done. Even if you fail, you'll learn, and that keeps you motivated to keep going. Number three, copy someone else's work. Now this might sound a bit silly at first, but trust me, this is one of the best things you can do. By copying someone else's work, it subtracts a lot of the deliberation and a lot of the barrier of entry to you getting painting. Because we spend so much time thinking, what's my color scheme going to be? What paints do I use? What color should this thing be? Or on and on and on. By copying someone else's work, you eliminate all of that. So if this is an army, maybe you're looking at the color plates of that army that's in the book or an example color scheme or army sub-faction scheme or something. Or maybe you're looking at someone else who already did a cool version of that army you liked and you try to copy that. If it's a single figure, just google up, you know, painted images of that single figure and see all the versions out there and copy one you like. There is absolutely no shame in doing this. Writers often do this as a prompt. They'll start by literally writing the first few pages of another author's work and then take the story in their own direction to break Writers' Block. The same thing can be true here of you because even if you start from someone else's work and copy it to a point, it's still going to have your fingerprints, your style, and your current skill level applied to it. It will be your work. And nobody owns any trademark or copyright to anything in this. We're all just creating fun pieces. There's a million armies that look roughly the same and you shouldn't feel bad for even a minute about painting a fig in a color scheme from a plate or from someone else's work that you like. Number four, get yourself some new gear or paints that you like and want to experiment with. Now, there's a problem in this hobby that a lot of people think gear equals skill. Now, obviously that's not true and I'm not saying it is. What I am saying though is that if you're the type of person like me getting a new set of paints or even some new colors in a paint can be cool motivation to paint something because you want to use them. Ah, these new paints. Let's see how they work. How do they paint? How much, you know, how well do they cover? How effective are they? Can I glaze with them? How's the highlighting? How's the consistency? This color looks really awesome. How does it look on the model? Right, it gets you excited and things that get you excited will get you painting. So don't ever hesitate to stay within your budget and be reasonable with your purchases, but to get a couple new paints at the store. You know, it's usually much cheaper than buying a lot of figs and it can help you, you know, slay that gray in your backlog. All right. Because you sit down and you think, yeah, cool. Let's, uh, let's try this new teal and pink that I bought. I watched one of Vince's videos. I think teal and pink is cool now. Like Vince does, they're obviously the best colors. Let me go ahead and paint these on a figure. It doesn't always have to be paint though. A lot of things can motivate you to do this. Maybe it's new brushes or a new wet palette. Maybe it's some new basing paste or you got some of the new UV resin that you can cure, any kind of like interesting fun tools, even free stuff. You start, you said, hey, I want to make some cool bases. So I went and got some dirt and sticks and stuff like that from my backyard and dried them out in the oven. Great. It doesn't always have to cost money, but things that are exciting, that are new, that help you build, create, construct your figures can get you back at the table and painting. Number five. Number five is something you've probably heard before because it shows up in all those like self-help manuals, but it is relevant to mention. And that's set a time, set a schedule and have your gear organized and ready to go to paint. Now it's important to mention here, this isn't a panacea. I think a lot of people do over prescribe this because if they're the type of ordered person who sets regular schedules in life, they're like, oh, I just set aside one hour for painting every night and I always paint during that same exact hour from 9 p.m. to 10 p.m. and I do it every night. Well, if you're the type of person who can really regularly do that, then you probably have less struggles with motivation anyways. But it is a good goal to have. Set alarms on your phone and be realistic with it. If you've got a busy job, a partner, kids, whatever, then life will get in the way. But by setting that time and setting it up in your phone and telling your partner and your children that this is your time or whatever, maybe it's after they go to bed, whatever the case, you can help clear a little space in your life to give you the room. And even if you can't do it every time and even if you can't do it for a long time, it still helps you to sit down because it becomes part of your day, your plan, the way you execute your life. And habit breeds habit. The more you do something, the more you tend to want to do something if it's enjoyable. And hopefully using the other four things we already mentioned, it will stay enjoyable and exciting. And this will help you create the time in your life for it. Don't ever beat yourself up over not meeting your schedule. But, and if you find you're not meeting it regularly, then you may need to readjust what your schedule is or where you have those blocks or how often you expect them to be. Don't let failure act as an additional mental weight or guilt you're carrying. So setting realistic goals is important. But even if it's 30 minutes once a week, it will mean you're sitting down painting. And if you're not painting at all now, 30 minutes is more than zero. It's really that easy. Finally, number six, micro dosing. Wait, what are we talking about? No, not anything like that. I mean with your goals. Your brain already has all the chemistry you need to reward you. No need to involve any other substances. Instead here, what I mean is when you sit down for a paint session, set yourself micro goals. It can be for that session, for a whole figure, for whatever. Now this is different than deliberate practice. With a micro goal, what I mean is, let's say you're painting a space marine. Tonight, I'm going to get the leg of this space marine done. Just the leg, just the knee pad, just the foot, just this set of battle honors. I'm gonna put these two decals on his shoulder. Whatever, set that goal. Have it be an out loud, stated, established milestone you are aiming for, okay? And when you achieve it, you will get that great dopamine hit because you met a goal. You will be able to stand up and walk away from your painting desk and say, all right, I accomplished a goal. I did what I wanted. I met what I needed to do. It's forward progress. All forward progress is good. It doesn't matter if it's small. It doesn't matter if you didn't get the whole figure painted. That's not important, okay? You will get there. Enough of these small steps lead to quite a long journey. And I should say, this is really the trick to those very large projects. When I have a project that I'm working on for competition or something like that, that I know I'm gonna spend 100, 150, 200 hours on, that's so much time. There's no way that can be my only goal. By setting micro goals, tonight, you know, I'm working on a giant robot, so I'm gonna get the basic airbrush done on the caribous. Okay, that's a micro goal. If I can get that done, I feel good about it. I've made forward progress toward completing that model. And you have to break it up. With larger projects, you've gotta create those wins for yourself in the middle of the project. You've gotta make it so you're rewarded, you feel good, and those little hits of victory motivate you to keep going. So in summary, what's at the bottom of this? If you think about it, vary up your projects, have new experiences, and continue those new experiences through the deliberate practice that you actually utilize. Open the world up for excitement to be part of your hobby, whether that be through different projects, new tools, new paints, whatever it is. Set that time and open the space in your life for it to happen and reward yourself appropriately. Set those goals and reward yourself for those small successes that you have. Don't blow those by and don't undervalue them. If you sat down and you painted, you're awesome. Keep it up. That's how you keep yourself at the desk and you finish one project and then the next and then the next. Success breeds success, habit breeds habit. So there we go. I hope you enjoyed this video. I hope this got you motivated to sit down and get some painting done. I hope maybe you're painting right now. If you liked this, give it a like. Subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. We have new videos here every Saturday. If you're interested in more hobby motivation, why we have a Patreon down below, focus on review and feedback and taking your next step in your hobby journey and you can be part of an awesome discord community full of really enthusiastic hobbyists. As always, I thank you so much for watching this one and we'll see you next time.