Painting... progressing

I've recently gained some further insight into keeping myself motivated to paint. This all came about in the past couple months, but here I will try to outline some of my 'tenets' for your perusal.

Getting the trollslayer done really sparked me to keep at it - had a couple slow months for painting. Since then, I've gotten all the armour done on my Raptors assault marines, finished up my two blood bowl goblins who've been languishing in base colours for a while, finished basing both my orc & undead blood bowl teams, and gotten a fair amount of paint onto an old Volkmar the Grim I plan to use as a Warrior Priest in WHQ. All this in under 10 days.

I believe I may have mentioned some points before, but they bear repeating.

1. Keep your batches "moderate" sized. This will vary from person to person, but for myself I've found a maximum of 5 models to be the best size. You can always have more than one similar 5 model batches, or increase the size of certain batches as required. You basically want to pick a size where each time you sit down to paint, you just start because even if you only do a wash on all their faces, you'll at least finish that step for the entire batch.
   
2. Have a few different batches going on at once. Recently I had the assault marines, blood bowl goblins, blood bowl teams to base and a couple individual fantasy models going at once. Stuck on what colour to paint a certain batches weapons? Switch to a different batch while you think about it. Not tons of time? Work on one of your smaller batches.
3. Switch up what painting methods you are using. The assault marines were mostly done with washes, I've done a fair amount of that method recently. Painting the trollslayer using standard paints was a breath of fresh air and gave me something different to focus on. This could work well for levels of detail too - have one batch to be basecoated and another batch where you are adding finer detail/highlights.
4. Switch up your modeling activities. Doing a dozen bases will take you 15 minutes if they are fairly simple, but this will break up the monotony of always being painting. Build another squad if you need a break from the brushes.
5. Keep lists/notes of how you plan to paint. I can't stress this enough - I couldn't find my book with the raptors test mini notes, so the assault squad does look slightly different to the test mini. A list gives you an immediate edge both in terms of tracking how well you are doing (a la "I scratched 4 items off my list today!!") and knowing where you are on a particular batch if you haven't touched it for a couple days ("Did I do one or two coats of yellow?")

Hopefully this proves to be helpful to someone.