A Brush With Greatness, Part 1: Introductions

Hello, my friends, welcome to a somewhat unusual departure for me. Let me explain: You know me as Keewa, one of the painters here at Goonhammer who paints models to illustrate articles, writes painting guides, and reviews models and paints for the site. I like to think that I am a solidly decent painter with a good amount of experience under my belt, but there’s something I’ve been mulling over for a while now. I feel somewhat unfulfilled in my painting; I enjoy the act of painting in itself, but I feel as though I’ve reached a sort of plateau of skill and now I’m stuck there, and no amount of the large, frankly silly batch painting I usually compel myself to do for Warhammer releases at Goonhammer seems to serve in helping to develop my abilities.

Getting stuck in ruts is nothing new when it comes to creative and artistic journeys; indeed, it’s not even new to me. I’ve sometimes felt much the same about my guitar and bass playing, and I’ve been doing them much longer than I’ve been painting (23 years and counting, including a music degree). Sometimes all it takes is one moment to put the first hole in the wall separating the plateau and continued improvement, a particular crystallised instant where understanding pours into your head and reveals the way forward, suddenly you comprehend what had previously been a sort of muggy fog (“Oh there’s 5 different pentatonic shapes, you can move all over the fretboard at will once you understand those, I get it now”, and so on).

Seriously, I was not very good when I started

What, then, should I do? I’ve spent time talking to friends and colleagues who are more advanced than I, thought about it a lot, and drawn a conclusion: I need to start competing. Not at Warhammer or any game, really, I’m broadly quite hopeless when it comes to tabletop wargaming - my career highlight being a silver medal in a store Kill Team league where everyone but three players dropped out, and I won my final game against an opponent who subbed in for his brother at the last moment and who’d never really played Kill Team before; suffice to say I will not be troubling my competitive colleagues any time soon. No, what I aim to compete in is painting – display painting to be precise, through single models, small units, or large-scale figures and busts.

There are a number of roadblocks and difficulties that come along with this that cannot really be surmounted, the first and chief among those that because of rather serious health problems, I am unable to travel, the radius of where I am able to go is, on an international scale, extremely limited, and most painting competitions (Golden Demon, Kontrast et al) require entries to be submitted in person, so in that regard I am, unfortunately, fucked. Unless my health improves rather dramatically in the next few years, I am not going to be darkening the doors of Spiel Essen, Kontrast, or Warhammer World any time soon. I get it; they make their money from ticketing and attendance at their events, and if entrants have to be both ticketed and pay money to submit something, not only does it make them money, but it also reduces the number of entries they have to wade through.

I wasn't always a good painter

It wouldn’t be unreasonable, therefore, for you, the reader, to read the preceding paragraph and conclude that this whole thing is pointless and I’ve wasted the few minutes it took for you to read this article so far. There is one molecular silver lining, though, there are one or two competitions that take place in Vienna (where I live, and can therefore get to) and a small (but growing) number of competitions that allow entries to be submitted online via photographs. It is to these events that I turn my attention now. I am going to enter as many online competitions as I can, and document my progress.

This is going to be a learning experience for me, too. I’ve never even attempted to paint something to the level where it could receive any notice at a painting competition, and I’ve never really painted any large-scale figures or busts either. So I hope you’ll be interested enough to follow me on this particular journey.

I hope to not only bolster and improve the skills I already have, but also find an answer to the question “why do I paint?” So I suppose this series will be part how-to, part hobby-progress blog, and part psychodramatic self-discovery journey.

As an irredeemable weeb, I'll be kicking off this series by painting this charming bust of Casca, look forward to it!

If you've any questions, comments, or need some hobby advice, feel free to drop me a line at keewa@goonhammer.com or (if you're a Patron) hit me up on the Discord. I always love to hear from readers!

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Tags: Painting | hobby | a brush with greatness