I sat up a little straighter in my chair. My RSS feed told me there was a competition afoot at the GW website, something to do with the elite. I began scheming what I could do to bring the pain, what models I could paint up to compete for the trophy. I was thinking of breaking into the terminators, maybe the lost and the damned...
due in a week.
Oh.
I immediately felt my carefully laid plans of several seconds fall away. How could I paint something up so quickly?
Here's how.
Know your resources
I considered everything I would be doing in the next week. Between a full time job, sports practice, spending quality time with my wife, and all the normal stuff I do, there wasn't much time to maneuver.It's important to think realistically about the resources available to you. The number one rule: assume nothing. Don't depend on what might happen in the future. Moore's law is real. The guy who was supposed to get you the sword blade bit you needed so bad will flake, the store which had 2 crates of gorilla glue will be closed for inventory, and the client who hasn't emailed you for the past 3 weeks will be doing so. All of this and more will happen the one weekend you have to make this happen. Be prepared for the absolute worst, and you'll be ready or pleasantly surprised.
Be realistic
I only had one model on hand that I could paint up in a single weekend; the Ironclad Dreadnought. I had clipped it all up for an unboxed article a couple months ago. I knew for sure that I could paint a dreadnought in a single weekend, having just completed the more elaborate Furioso in the same timeframe. If anything I would be done early!...
Yeah, I didn't believe that either.
Know your limitations as well as you resources. If you've never painted a carnifex before, don't assume you know roughly how long it'll take because you painted another model of equivalent size. In this case, any estimates you make need to be apples to apples; no oranges allowed.
In art school, one of the best pieces of advice I ever got was to take the project you wanted to do, and divide it in half. Consider that half by itself, let it really sink in, dedicated yourself to doing an amazing job with just that half... then divide it in half again and go do that. This method has never steered me wrong.
Crush it
With my resources gathered, I stayed up a little extra every night to make sure I stayed ahead of schedule, and could really dedicated some extra time to every facet I wanted to. After all, once this guy was done competing, he would become part of the Howling Griffons charity auction.No matter how prepared you are, working under extreme deadlines will eventually result in you having to sacrifice something, usually sleep. Do yourself a favor and lose only half an hour every day for a week, rather than five hours the night before its due. You'll avoid the inevitable crash, your work will be better, and for you mathematicians out there, yes I just compared three and a half hours to five. You work will go faster when you're not exhausted.
And there it was, all shiny and ready to take to the field after less than a weeks work. I wanted to take some time off from such hastily executed paintjobs, but that would have to wait. DeviantART, one of my favorite communities on the interwebs, was hosting a custom character competition that was due in less than two weeks!
Here we go again...
