Norman Archers - Time & Motion Study

Earlier on Kingsley Park commented that I had turned out some figures very quickly. Time is a vague concept for me, being retired I have lots of it to hand and rarely worry about its passing. I start something, progress it a bit and then finish it; I have no fixed schedule in mind so not much in the way of deadlines.

However to keep (perhaps impress) Kingsley and others in the picture I kept notes while painting my Norman Archers to add a level of detail as to what 'very quickly' actually means to me.

I started off (naturally) by unboxing the figures. This was a standard Kallistra blister pack and took all of 20 seconds to open the box and remove 16 pairs of figures, stash the unwanted bases in my spares drawer and bin the packaging.

I spent 4 minutes 30 seconds filing the bases smooth and another 6 minutes cleaning the flash from the figures with a hobby knife.

Sticking the figures to a couple of wooden strips with blobs of blue tac took another 6 minutes. I spent another 3 minutes Googling some potential colour schemes to refresh my mental picture of the final product.

So, almost 20 minutes into the exercise I started to paint the figures, a single dominant colour for each type, Boltgun Metal for the mail clad archer, Bleached Bone for those in linen and a variety of browns and blues for the rest.

This approach seems to save a lot of time, particularly with larger numbers of figures in that a smaller proportion of the overall time is spent opening the paint pot and cleaning the brush afterwards.

The next couple of phases involves a touch of flesh on all the appropriate places on each figure and also the second most dominant colour, mostly on legs.

In total the painting phases took 116 minutes, not necessarily consecutive and spread over a couple of days. I do like to sleep at night, every night. Gone are the days when I spent all night painting something to meet a deadline, usually for a show which is at a fixed point in the calendar.

A final wash in Gryphone Sepia and a coat of gloss varnish completes the painting stage of the figures adding another 5 minutes of activity with a spell of drying time not counted. I try to use dead time in one painting project while something dries actively pursuing another project. I rarely have only one project on the go at one time, usually three or more.

I already had a number of plastic bases cut (I did enough for quite a few units in one batch earlier on) and also had magnetic strips stuck in place. Glueing the figures to the bases took 30 minutes.

Finishing off the bases with plaster and a three colour paintjob took 48 minutes. In this case I put the first coat of paint on top of the not quite dry plaster with no ill effects. I usually leave plaster overnight to dry.

So, the total active time for actually working on the figures came to 2 hours 38 minutes and 50 seconds although the total elapsed time was around 3 days. As well as eat and sleep during this time I managed to progress another couple of projects, update my blog, perform my household duties, watch a dire DVD, read some of my books and spend some time battling across Skyrim. All in all not bad, not bad at all.