Getting motivated?

It really is a case of "how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time"

Specifically for this I think you have to set manageable goals. Stripping and repainting 10k of brets is an insane undertaking. I'm currently painting up my dwarves and I've got 6-7k of them, and was planning to paint all of them in one go. But I realized about 1000 models in, I don't actually need 6-7k of dwarves painted right now, so I made a list of about 4k, I'm going to paint them up, and as I want to play with more units I'll paint them. Makes the goal much more manageable and avoids burnout down the road.

With your Bret project, break it into chunks, decide on a list you want to run, work toward that, play a game, then decide what to work on next.

Like others I tend to like batch painting 10-20 models (or 5-6 for Cav). Very much a conveyor line of paint all the boots brown, then all the tunics then all the trousers etc. I appreciate that this approach will mainly only work for peasants.
Before I started my Brets (they sat unpainted for 20+ years) I found the thought of painting them overwhelming. It was less about the scale and more down to doing them up to a standard I wanted to and thought they should be at. Almost setting myself up to fail before I started, so I never started.

So the following are things I found that helped me (and you can see they are more around painting (which may or may not be useful to you).

I found some basic heraldry patterns that I thought I could do (chevrons, crosses, quartering etc.). I can link some patterns in a drop box if you like. Some are from early WD mags. The 5th Ed Bret army book also had some blank pictures of horses with the cloth over them (the actual name escapes me) so you could sketch out your patterns first.of course it depends how ‘to town’ you want to go with the models. Some folk make each a work of art.

Start with you peasants, then yeomen then knights errant, kotr, questing and then Grail (or skip the peasants). That way you start with the most basic schemes with the Errants and as you get more confident with the Bret painting, you can move onto the ‘higher level’ knights.

Putting together some basic colour schemes (as in sets of 2 colours) that work with each other that I could apply to each model. I put some of these onto a sheet of paper first to see if I liked them

Having a army colour scheme, that I could apply to the peasants to unify them.

Contrast paints. Although not all my Brets were painted with them. I find they greatly speed up the process.

Making the first leap. The trebuchets were some of the first models I painted. As I was able to do the bulk of them with a brown contrast paint, they were super quick to finish. Once you’ve made a start and finished something, I found it helped give me a push to keep going.


Plagiarise. There are many, many superbly painted Bret models out there. Some are to a ridiculous standard but many are painted much more simply but still look really effective. I have a metric ton of ‘inspiration’ print screens taken from Instagram/Pinterest etc. I found that also helped me, knowing each knight didn’t have to be an individual ‘feast for the eyes’.


And the last one for me was deciding to paint each knight unit the same colours. Each individual knight had different heraldry or patterns but they were done in the same colours (so one unit for yellow and black, another blue and yellow etc). For me that made the task far less daunting (though I appreciate that this approach isn’t to everyone’s taste).

I also find that working towards something really helps. Like knowing you have a game coming up can push you to finish that unit. On that front, although I prefer to field all painted units, in a situation like yours, having that mind set can also be an impediment to playing (or even getting started on painting), so I’d aim to get a new unit finished before each game you play. That could be your target.

I also use painting as a digital detox. Being on a PC all day means that painting time in the evening is a way of switching off, almost a ‘reward’.

This has been a great topic to read. For me, the monthly challenge and having a painting log helps.

Like the topic creator I have tons of unpainted minis. If I dwelled on that I'd never paint anything (dwellers below?). Instead I let inspiration take me when looking at or pondering my unpainted things and pick one or two things that tickle my fancy and focus purely on painting that for the immediate future. That ensures my hobby stays enjoyable and gives a palpable sense of progress as the thing I have chosen slowly 🐌 takes shape until it is eventually battle worthy.