Monday, 9 May 2016

The joys of incremental progress


I am getting dangerously close to completing Pokemon X: I've defeated Team Flare; caught the legendary Xerneas (jury's still out on that decision); beaten the final gym in Snowbelle City to get the last badge; walked the Victory Road; and, now I'm standing outside the Kalos League Building prepared to take on the Elite Four and the Champion.

I haven't completed a computer game in years. It might not be much of an achievement but it does feel nice to get further in one of these games than I ever have before. I think my record before was seven gym badges in Platinum and then I got stuck fighting the boss of Team Galactic and his damned invincible Gyarados. So at least I've proved to myself I can defeat the narrative villain, not just gym leaders.

Incremental progress is a lot more important than we give it credit for.

For instance, I've spent the last fortnight hitting my head against a brick wall with my painting. I've been having a lot of trouble painting a unit of sixteen Glade Guard for my Wood Elves. I couldn't get the highlighting right on their red tunics and was blanking on how to do the leather areas.

So last night I decided to change tac. I picked up five of the many, many Skull Pass Night Goblins I have lying around and decided to use them to do some colour tests. I painted them with red hoods and used their shoes to test out a leather method. Both look great, both will now be used on the Glade Guard and now I have five nearly finished Night Goblins and a cool new colour scheme for them to show for it!

I also finally got those damned Skeleton Horse Archers to go together. Great thing about Skeletons is that once you have them undercoated they start to look like something pretty quickly which cuts out that frustrating phase where every model just looks dispiritingly terrible.

Not a bad start to my week off. 

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