Returning to the desk…

Christmas is a done deal, the New Year has passed… most of us have either just gone back to work, or are starting again very soon. With those boxes checked, a lot of us will be planning to also get back in to our regular hobby habits. However… a return to habits may also mean a return to bad ones. With that considered I thought I’d spend my last day off work throwing my unsolicited opinion at you, on how to kick some of those bad ones.

A Rack Full of Paint Bottles

Respect Your Space, Be Brutal

There is no new wisdom in the idea that keeping your workspace as tidy as possible is good for your hobby in myriad ways… however I think now is a great time to double down on this and be a little more brutal than usual.

For me, I have a policy that if I haven’t used something in the last two months, it shouldn’t be anywhere NEAR my immediate workspace.

That doesn’t necessarily mean it needs to be thrown away, but creating an archive of the paints and tools you only seldom use and storing them somewhere that isn’t in your immediate workspace is big and clever for mentally optimising your experience.

For example, whilst my paint racks follow a loosely ordered pattern, with colour groups all in similar places… this organisational method takes second place to the priority of keeping my most used paints closest to where I actually sit to paint.

The eagle eyed amongst you might have noticed in videos that all of my AK stuff tends to sit in the two racks nearest to where I sit to paint. I still own a ton of Two Thin Coats paints as well as a smattering of Reaper and Vallejo, but if I’m only using them on one-in-twenty paint jobs then keeping them in my work area is just making it take longer for me to find what I need.

The first thing I’d do, when you sit at your hobby desk this year is take some proper stock of what you actually need to have around you.

Run a cloth round, dust, clear, and rebuild your immediate selection based on what you actually use. It will pay off in so many ways. Do it before you even paint your first mini of 2026, if possible. Respecting your workspace is respecting yourself, your craft and your mental health. It matters. Do it.

Red-haired farm girl with chickens. Miniature is by @female_miniatures

Stop Painting the Same Stuff Over and Over

The famous saying “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results.” rings SO very true in the world of miniature painting.

Look… if you paint to wargame, this probably doesn’t apply to you, but I know for a fact (I’ve asked, extensively) that a LOT of you out there collect armies and paint like wargamers, despite having little to no interest in actual wargaming.

I would quite confidently risk saying that more people are interested in painting miniatures, than playing games with them. I’m almost certain of it… It just makes sense to me.

So if you’re in the majority of people who’s primary motivation for painting miniatures is to… well… enjoy painting miniatures… why are you slaving away over huge armies of super detailed minis? Why are you chasing the latest hype releases that EVERYONE else is painting too? Why are you abandoning more projects than you’re finishing? Why are you buying more in a month than you paint in a year? NONE OF THIS MAKES SENSE!

Look, I know I sound preachy here… I know it sounds like I’m having a rant, but believe me this comes from a place of love. This is a non-issue for me, and I paint for a living!

So optimised to my tastes is my personal painting now, that even alongside my professional work its pretty rare that I ever sit at the desk and don’t have a pleasant day of painting. If I can achieve this despite ADHD, despite burnout, despite professional pressures and despite only actually getting to CHOOSE about half of what I paint, you can too, and you’ll be so much more satisfied if you do.

All I ask is that you try a few projects that aren’t the kinds of things you normally do. Rather than “new year, new army” or “I need a break, I’m gonna do a kill-team.” grab a bust, or some military figures, or a weird fantasy piece from some tiny studio…anything that will shake you from your routine and introduce some novelty.

You don’t have to crush it, it doesn’t have to be the best thing you’ve ever painted, the point is just to stretch your wings a bit and experience a little freedom from the weight of painting like a wargamer, when you’re not one at heart.

Also… for those who need to hear it… You DO NOT HAVE TO WARGAME to contribute value to the hobby space.

My Gobbo Bust from @carlo_miniatures - This won a Gold in this years MPO Online!

Understand Competitive Painting and How it Relates to You

I think competitive painting might be the most insecurity triggering and misunderstood facet of the entire hobby ya know? I would LOVE for everyone to go in to their 2026 hobby year with a more comfortable relationship with it though, so I’m going to do what I can to lend something that vaguely resembles wisdom.

Firstly, I’ll talk about why I compete, for those who might relate. The most important part of this story specifically is that I’m only in my third year of competition and I spent most of my life absolutely despising competitive painting. I, like so many people out there, had completely misunderstood the point and so avoided it forever.

However once miniature painting became my full-time job, I think I ended up in a better position to understand competition more. See, for me, I compete because it gives me a strong incentive to push myself harder to achieve the best results I can. Not only does success in this field promote my business, but taking part also directly benefits my customers, by pushing me to create a higher quality product.

Thing is… this is just me. There are lots of types of competitions and lots of different reasons to enter them.

Golden Demon, whilst still the gold standard in terms of drawing the highest density of incredible talent, is actually somewhat archaic in its awards method - being one of very few major comps that hasn’t adopted the “open” format.

MPO, Squidmar Open, Fen Model Show and many many more major comps now use this method and I think it is SO much more valuable than just awarding single top 3 awards and best in show awards.

If like me, you compete to push yourself, then having a series of bars to clear makes for a really direct correlation between effort and reward. The first year I entered MPO for example… all my pieces were just “stuff I’d painted that year” so I picked up a mix of silvers and bronzes. The following year, I tried pretty hard on one piece, but the rest were again just stuff from the shelf… again, silvers and bronzes. This year I actually painted some pieces that I fully intended to be competition pieces and to show off a lot of effort. I still chucked in some stuff off the shelf to fill my categories, but the result was strikingly different… fewer medals than ever before, at 2… but one was a gold and the other a silver. FINALLY I had cracked it… I’d impressed those judges enough to deserve a gold from them.

And that’s the key… those judges. Because the important thing to remember about ANY competition is that the value you place in the medal itself has to align with how much you care about the opinions of the specific people judging the comp.

If you enter a local and you genuinely think you’ve put up the best piece, but it doesn’t win…that doesn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t the best piece. The experience and taste of the judges are what decided your position and locals are often judged by a single store owner, for example… in a lot of ways it can be HARDER to perform well in these kinds of competitions.

Similarly, if you’re entering a huge international comp, you’re probably going to be judged by super experienced, highly renowned painters, who are often highly decorated in competition themselves. Impressing them is going to take a very different set of chops.

So not only are your personal reasons for entering important, but the type of competition you enter is too. The worst thing you can do is enter a competition purely for the hardware. Chasing medals in a creative space is a fools errand. If you place all of your motivation and personal value in that disc of metal, you are entrusting far too much to chance and whim and I think we can all agree that that’s really bloody silly.

The reason I think this is important to get out there isn’t just for the competitors either. If you’re a non-competitor, going in to a fresh hobby year, you and I both know you’re going to see and hear a lot of competition stuff over the next year. Approaching it from a healthy mindset and a place of understanding is not only going to help you appreciate it for what it is, but also to not feel any kinda negative way about something that you don’t even take part in.

Some people compete to win, some compete to grow. Some people compete to be seen, some compete just because they like going to painting events. The competition community are some of the most generous, accommodating and supportive people you’ll ever meet and one of the first things they’ll tell you is also probably the most important:

You should never be competing with anyone else. Your competition is you, yesterday. That’s the person you should be competing against. Everyone else is a colleague, an ally, someone to motivate you, inspire you and drive you forward.

Night Lords Freehand, by Me!

Set Goals that Make Sense!

A ton of you have probably already fallen in to the “New year, new army” trap… hell it bothers me so much that it’s already come up once in this article, so we may as well get in to it.

A while back I did some polling on Instagram… those polls had HUNDREDS of responses and whilst that isn’t enough of a sample size to make definite claims, it IS enough to see clear patterns emerging.

I was asking lots of stuff about your hobby habits, because I often worry that I don’t really understand other hobbyists, because I do things so differently (because it’s my job). Turns out that when you’re anonymously answering polls you actually agree with me a lot more than I expected… and some of the BIG things I learned from that polling were about the amount of time you spend painting versus the amount of stuff you buy.

Most of you reading this, based on your own answers to polls, probably shouldn’t be shooting for army painting AT ALL, let alone multiple armies. You should be doing skirmish games, single display pieces or long-term, slow burn, single armies that you intend to paint to a high standard. Mass painting models to “good enough” is probably the most condensed version of unsatisfying that I can imagine as a painter, personally…and I think a lot of you actually agree with me.

So… if that IS you, what are some goals you could explore for 2026 that make sense? Here’s a few suggestions:

• Learn a deep technique (freehand, sculpting, converting etc)

• Master a fundamental (blending, lining, colour composition)

• Learn a style to a high standard (GrimDark, Hyper Colour, Girlypop)

• Paint one model to the absolute best of your ability, regardless of how long it takes (take breaks for as long as you need).

• Make a painting plan for the year (a list of all the models you want to do this year, with details on how you’ll paint them), then stick to it. This also acts as a spending plan if you don’t tie yourself exclusively to release hype.

• Enter a competition.

• Do better in a competition you’ve already entered.

• Spend time painting in the presence of other painters (hobby hangouts).

• Take some classes (You can do them online with us"!)

This is probably just scratching the surface, but I think any one of these (or any realistic combination) is a FAR healthier choice than “New year, new army” for the majority of us.

For me personally - My goals are: To attend a couple of classes, to improve on my 2025 MPO results and to learn GirlyPop style to a really high standard.

For those about to paint… I salute you!

I sit here, writing this article and coming to the end and it isn’t lost on me that a lot of it is quite ranty and ravy, and often I apologise for that… today I won’t be doing so.

I have so much passion for this hobby, and so much love for this community and it genuinely breaks my heart that I so frequently see people burning out, needing extended breaks from painting, and sometimes even leaving the hobby altogether.

Its supposed to be fun, folks… we say it all the time… yet so much of what we say, do and think can directly contribute to why it stops being fun. If I can help one or two of you get back the joy from your hobby then I think that’s well worth a little rant.

I’m not asking any of you to do what I say… it’s not my place, or my right to do so. I would be honoured however, if you’d use my thoughts on this subject to have a little think about your own hobby and ask yourself some honest questions about if you’re extracting all the joy from it that you could be. The start of a year is a really great time to start doing some stuff differently, to have a refresh, to take stock.

I want to see my circles filled with the happiest, most fulfilled, secure and accomplished hobbyists possible. I wish you all the most joyous 2026 in miniature painting. Even if absolutely zero of the advice in this article was relevant to you, I am truly grateful that you read it.

Lets have a kickass year!

Love,

Stu