a quick thought or three

I'm planning on putting up a couple minis for auction soonish, a farting bird (toot-oriole, get it?) about tools and equipment, and a page where you can access my tutorials without reading the whole damn blog, but for now I'm going to talk a bit on the philosophy of painting.  I just spent a good 3 hours painting, I plan to toss another 1.5 hours at it before I call it quits, and I only just did some preliminary base work, finished up a face, and did about 68% of the leather on a model.  All in all, only about 1/2 of a mini's total surface area.  And mind you, this is a 30mm miniature, about 1.5 inches high tops.  I'm not doing my BEST work, I'm doing good, accessible work.  Do I sound like I'm bragging?  I'm sorry.
Why do I spend so much time adding tonalities and layers that most people won't notice?  That I can barely notice?  The answer is that I like doing it.  I like perfecting that one ridge, that one scar, gaunt cheeks, whatever.  Adding a thin filter of color over cheeks and tips of ears to make them look suitably flushed is enjoyable.  Sometimes I like doing quick work, it's a different challenge and I can just kind of let go and not care about smooth blends and the like, but sometimes the feeling grabs you and you have to push yourself to be as close to perfect as you can.  At least, that happens to me.
So when you paint, all of you out there, don't care about how long you're taking.  Care that you're doing what you want.  When you look at a finished mini, I want you to see room for improvement, but I don't want you to have any regrets.  If you think, "man, I should've pushed the highlights to be way more vibrant," or think "I should've spent more time on the base," or "this color scheme is really generic," that's what failure looks like.  If your mini looks like shit but you took risks because you thought "man, this person looks grizzled, I'm gonna use a lot of grey in their skintones," you succeeded.  Slap paint on your minis and just go until you feel some modicum of satisfaction, and then go even further.
And though I've not said it before, if you have questions or want advice or something, contact me.  I'm happy to help.  Pax.