Miniature painting progress on the new site

Back in April, I ended a 450-day hobby streak. I’d started it to keep inspired and to grow my skills. The plan was to work on the hobby for at least 15 minutes each day and then post that day’s progress to social media with the hashtag #hobbystreak. For the First 400 days or so, it was great! Then I suddenly found myself struggling to get even the minimum 15 minutes of work done. I was getting more and more frustrated with my work, feeling like it wasn’t getting better. Social media algorithms didn’t help either. While the goal of #hobbystreak is to help keep you and others encouraged with the progress, the influence of “likes” started to affect my work as well, in a negative fashion. I’d post something that would get 100+ likes but the next day the same model finished might only get 30. It was confusing and annoying, leaving me questioning my own work and where I’d gone wrong.
When I ended my hobby streak, I was in a particularly bad spot. I was unhappy with my professional work, my hobby work and myself in general. Since then I’ve managed to kick back up to the surface and am feeling very good these days! While I haven’t restarted a hobby streak, I have been working on miniatures and posting on Instagram, trying to embrace the community, rather than the likes. It helps that there are some really fantastic people there who have been incredibly supportive. Friends I’ve made who I’ve never actually met. It’s pretty rad.

What all this rambling is driving at is that I think I’ll be using this platform as more of a consistent progress tracker. And maybe a sort of diary. It helps to get the thoughts down. Good or bad.