Time for a new excuse

Hmmm....

For those of you that have been in the 40k tournament scene, you no doubt will have come across Doug Sainsbury.

For those of you who haven't, he kinda looks like this:

Even if you haven't seen him, you will have heard him; heard him crying about his painting score AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN that is.

After Battlecry, Doug dropped from 2nd place to 5th based on his painting score, and his crying reached an all time high, my god I'm surprised his tears didn't flood the north shore! Deciding enough was enough, I arranged with Doug to sit down with him over a weekend and repaint his army to try get some decent marks.

Last weekend that finally happened :) Doug had been down for a cricket tournament, so naturally given that cricket is a hobby/past time (NOT A SPORT) for fat lazy cravens who can't run (no wonder Jesse Ryder is so good at it), he was extremely hungover. We went into the local GW, picked up half a dozen of the new paints and a can of black spray. From there the race was on!

In a single weekend, we managed to paint 20 purifiers, 8 razorbacks, 4 psyflemen dreads, and 12 henchmen, leaving just the assassin squad and Coteaz for me to finish.

There were a few things I noticed throughout this process though - things that I had taken for granted. See, I learned to paint at the local GW, where I was perhaps no older than 13. For me, painting was always a communal thing, and I never had the struggle of learning things like brush control, paint consistency, or learning a natural order of painting in order to minimise my time and effort.

As I watched Doug labour and struggle with the tasks I set him, I could see why until now Doug took no joy from painting. He had none of the help, advice or guidance I had, and almost all the information out there assumes you know these few initial steps.

Perhaps the hilight of the entire weekend for me was watching Dougs attitude towards painting develop and progress, so that by the end of the weekend he was proud of his results, and the look of his army. He mentioned that for the first time, he could see why people enjoyed painting, and had fun over the weekend.

The tiniest amount of help was all that was required to turn someone around entirely from vehemently hating painting to wanting to do more of it. I cannot recommend enough working with other people to help better each others painting. It takes a sometimes frustrating and difficult task, and makes it significantly easier and immensely enjoyable.

The next step is for Doug to perhaps look at getting a semi regular painting group together, and this is something I recommend everyone does. If he follows through with this, his painting will go from strength to strength and I for one look forward to seeing what he comes up with in the future :)

I myself will be looking at reforming a semi-regular group painting effort I think, it provides motivation, inspiration, and rapid development. Email me if you're interested!

Hopefully over the next week or two I can convince Doug to send through some photos, otherwise you'll just have to wait until Nicon :)

- Charlie