Reply To: Why I do not like hobby butterflies

[redscopeParticipant 2718xp 2]

Psychology of being a hobby butterfly

I have been thinking the past two weeks about the Psychology of being a hobby butterfly. The recent terrainfest is only a month long so why after just two weeks did I find myself losing focus?

At the start throwing myself into the project looking at the subject matter, spending hours of research looking at the topic, looking at real life examples of towns, countless youtube videos of the lore, old vampire films. The next stage is looking at products making choices, the plans, the dreams, the thoughts.

It occupies me at the level that is constant. Consuming, even in the background. Walks in the park drift into examining the shape of trees, passing a skip of rubbish glancing inwards to see if I can find anything to use in the building of the project.

Throwing energy into the build process as the project comes together but still consuming information until. The hobby output starts to slow down. My will power to want to get to the hobby table and paint every evening starts to ebb away but is it just losing interest in the hobby? Is this just the boredom of doing the difficult part, perhaps even the dull stuff or something else going on?

This is what I have been considering this past week. I started to consider what my thought process was at this time rather than what I was doing at the hobby table. I started researching the project back in mid Sept so by now it has been over 4 weeks. After 4 weeks I consumed a lot of information on the subject, watched a lot of lore videos, read parts of books, looked on countless hobby sites, how to build guides.

I should be clear that the scope is very focused just on the project. It’s not reading the whole book or watching the whole video, it is skipping to that part to obtain the information I need to get out of it. Watching a battle report but with more of a focus on what they have terrain wise on the table.

However after time you run out of the high quality resources and it becomes more difficult. The subject becomes watered down and yet worse starts to go off track. At one point rather than just focusing on the terrain build it lead me down a path of searching for russian medieval armor. Why? Because I thought they would make a great town guard. Now I have a box of minis for Russian infantry on the desk. It has nothing to do with what I set out with. BTW I did discover we have a real lack of Eastern European miniatures for the middle ages in this hobby at least ones with pointy helmets lol.

I think I have to be obsessed constantly with something to keep my mind occupied. I cannot just switch off and watch a film. When the subject matter I am looking into dips below that source of information to keep it occupied it goes off onto another project. Then it becomes like an egg timer. The sands of my will power to finish this project are running out to the bottom where the new project is growing in pace. Until the willpower is not enough and timer flips over and we start something else. I hate to admit it but sometimes that happens before the product i just bought arrives.

That’s the hobby butterfly in me i think. I don’t see it as a problem, it is not something to fix it is just me. Being a hobby butterfly will be different in other people but at the core is it the same ? The need to occupy our minds, to set a problem we try and solve or at least until we can set it a new problem ?