Time to get Squared Away..

It's funny how time passes by..and how quickly motivation and creativity comes and goes..! The past 8-10 days or so is the first time in years that that I have not touched a figure for over a week, nothing, nada, zip! Usually I will do a little everyday, but work has been intensely insane, many days working 14-16 hours, but hopefully that's done and over with now, and I can once again have a life outside work!
It's been very unproductive lately, there are several reasons for this, and since you are reading (or perhaps used to read...since I been horrible at keeping it updated properly) this blog I assume you are at least a little bit interested so I'll vent a bit here about everything. A lot has been going on, and even though I have been extremely inactive on the forums and about sharing what I've been working on I have done a few things. Five commercial sculpts have been completed over the summer (Rev War, American Civil War, Zulu Wars and WWI) and they should start trickling into the market in the near future. I must say I am quite happy with a few of those pieces and I feel that I can incorporate what I am doing in original one off's into production pieces more easily then I have in the past. However, doing commercial stuff is a huge killer of personal/commission project productivity. I really like to work on one project at a time, but due to what I was working on I ended up with a workbench of 9 figures in various stages of completion...and it's not good! Now I have to regain momentum on each piece instead of following the rhythm of a project, you see, usually I am a bit like a ball rolling down a hill, once I get started on a project, there is not much stopping me and as long as there is forward momentum I'll keep on rolling. However, when the momentum stops and for whatever reason the project grinds to a halt, it is hard to get started with it again. That is what I am going through now. There is some hope though, and I feel it's coming back. It usually comes back with a vengeance, which will be useful considering we are 2 weeks out from  the Chicago show and I have about 5 figures to complete..!

Lately I've also been doing a lot of other things outside of figures, I've quit smoking and I've started working out,  alternating running and working out every other day, and earlier this summer I'd swim 2-3 days a week as well. I've also picked up a new hobby, which unfortunately is a lot more expensive then figures, which is shooting! I've picked up a couple of pistols which I've enjoyed learning to shoot. I'm also in the middle of applying to become a US Citizen so a lot has been going on for sure. Oh, almost forgot...I have been doing some 1/1 scale modeling as well, I made an old school Chuck Wagon out of an old box wagon to have as a prop near the log cabin we built. Pictures of this to follow as well.

So to wrap up this little venting session I'll share a picture of my epic disaster zone, also known as a workbench. As you can see there are a fair amount of figures everywhere. The next thing I am going to do is to clean this mess up, get organized, throw every piece I am not working on into a bin, out of sight and out of mind, so I can get back to business as usual and start being productive once again.

And this is how it somewhat normally looks like...