Exercise and Miniature Painting 1: If you make time for it, you will do it

The most basic advice I can give when it comes to painting miniatures and/or doing exercise is to make time to do it. Even better would be, don't do anything else until you've exercised/painted your miniatures after work/school that day.

The idea here is that you want to make it a habit that you will do these things that are hard to do, so if you exercise/paint soldiers before you do something you always look forward to (watching certain shows, trolling on facebook) you'll sooner get into the habit of taking time to get things done.

What does this look like?

Back when I started painting miniatures, I loved playing online role playing games. The big change for me came when I decided I wouldn't log onto the computer until I had painted one color, just one on multiple models that day. If I did, I could log onto the computer guilt-free.

And so I painted a lot of stuff.

And once I painted a lot of that stuff I realized something; I was getting better.

Heck, I even started to like painting my toy soldiers.

Which leads me to exercise.


I had developed a new habit. In place of television and video games I was painting up armies because I was getting better at it and because I was having fun doing it (which is probably a side effect of getting better at painting). So the next big change was to deny myself the paintbrush until I had performed some of my exercise (walks and weightlifting).

And what do you know? I've done a lot of exercise since then and lost a bit of weight.

So this is my first advice. Set aside a time and do it, whatever it is in your case. If it's exercise, do it before you get too comfortable. If it's painting, do it before you decide you're too tired to do it because of some show.

Then maybe you can be like me, painting and exercise like no one's business.