May Update

I hadn't realised how many months had passed since I last painted. I hit a bit of a mental block in February after stocking up on all the re-released models - I was determined to stick to my plan of painting more than I bought, but that meant I needed to clear out another 40 models, and my Morannon force was all about slower detailed painting which meant that it was (seemingly) going to take forever.

So I had a cunning plan - put aside my current project and paint up a batch of Uruk-Hai as they're quick and easy... Unfortunately it turned out that holding myself to arbitrary rules and painting random models to achieve them utterly killed my motivation and left me in a slump where I didn't actually finish anything in February (although I do now have a lot of half-painted Uruks!).

I took a detour from painting in March when I read 'The life changing magic of tidying' by Marie Kondo and asked myself if my LOTR collection 'sparked joy' for me. The answer was fortunately yes, but not as a pile of boxes shoved into an overflowing storage unit. To fix this I embarked on a major project to document every model I have, organise them into game-legal armies, and then build the miniatures.

The end result is that I have now built every single model I own and they are now sitting proudly in a couple of display bookcases where I can (just about) see all of them. I feel so much better about my collection now that I can see it on display, instead of feeling vaguely guilty about the sheer number of models I had amassed and never done anything with.

Another bonus was that by selling my surplus models I made exactly the right amount of money to reinvest in GW's April 'made to order' run and now have 30 more previously out of print models coming my way...

I've also come up with a cunning new plan - paint what I want, when I want, and buy what I want, when I want (within reason!). In particular, I plan to plug the gaps in my newly written army lists, which should keep my wallet busy for some time.

Oh, and I painted something this month - one Morannon Orc Captain (foot & mounted)

And purely because I like statistics:

Month	Bought	Painted
January	42	2
February	0	0
March	0	0
April	30	0
May	0	2
Total	72	4