My Journey with Burnout

Having recently suffered major burnout for the 2nd time, following finishing a competition/display project, I got to thinking and tried to understand it better rather than it being this thing I was feeling that I had no context for. 

The first time I suffered it was after painting the Mucha: Music piece back in 2022, after which I suffered nearly 3 months of burnout that made me abjectly miserable. I tried and tried to push through it, but just felt like I was hitting a brick wall no matter what I tried to do. It basically felt like I’d forgotten how to paint. I couldn’t blend, mix my colours right, my brush control had vanished and everything was a slog. 

Then this time it happened again after finishing my Goblin Airship diorama. I felt strange afterward, like I’d been holding my breath during the whole project and finally let that breath out. I wanted to paint and did paint, but again I started going through the phase of feeling like I couldn’t paint anything. Again, I kept trying to push through it and again nothing worked. No matter what I did I wasn’t happy with anything I put paint on. I ended up starting a simple bust for practice and have to date now stripped it 4 times. It was like slogging through mud.

This time round though, I realised what it was and that I was in the middle of burnout. In my quest to understand it better, I turned to good old Google and found a post on reddit that really hit home:  

“Burnout… is totally normal, but don’t think of it as burnout. Think of it as a need to recharge. We put a lot into what we do. Whether we think it’s good or not, it takes a lot! I need recharge time between paintings and it used to stress me out but over time you learn your own rhythm.”

This resonated with me. On both those projects (Mucha & airship), I had put a lot into them for several weeks and months. That’s a long time to be working on something. Obviously not full time as I do have a job, but pretty much all my spare time goes into my miniature painting. Not gonna lie, this hobby has taken over my life…

After realising what was happening to me and not wanting my burnout to last 3 months again, I decided to take a week off from my hobby and basically read, watched TV, cleaned up some models, basically anything that wasn’t painting. 

I am a believer in daily practice so after my week off picked up an old WIP off the shelf that had been sat there for 2 years. I picked this particular model because it was no pressure, quick, fun paint job, and I knew I could mess around without it having to be a competition piece. 

It was exactly what I needed and after completing, even during the painting of this piece, my enthusiasm started to return and no longer felt like I couldn’t paint. 

Was the model I painted the best I could paint? No, it wasn’t, but it was still a good exercise and practice, and allowed me to play and not force myself to churn out another top end piece. 

So, what did I learn from this session of burnout? Well, quite a bit as it turns out: 

1.  Don’t be so hard on yourself, burnout is completely normal
2. Take a moment to recharge after completing a lengthy project. You put a lot into your work, even on those projects that only take a couple of hours to complete.
3. Even as adults we still need to ‘play’ and have fun with our hobbies. Even if we’ve completed a piece we’ve really enjoyed and had fun with, this can still be exhausting!
4. Listen to your body, and try to learn your rhythm and patterns you go through of inspiration and needing rest.
5. Pushing through does not work for me, I’ve tried it and I need to make sure I don’t do it next time. Otherwise I’m just going to end up adding a load of models to the WIP shelf, which I don’t want to do! (And just adds to my stress levels and pressure I put on myself)
6. Don’t overwhelm yourself. Competition painting is exhausting, entering 4 comps last year nearly wiped me out, which is why I’m only entering 2 for 2024. 

It will be interesting to see how this works in practice next time this happens, as I know now it will happen again, but this time I welcome it with open arms. As burnout is simply my body saying; ‘hey, why don’t you have a rest? You worked hard on this.’