The year 2022 is drawing to a close and I want to pause again for a moment to sum up. Time to call “Cut”, pack up the camera and send the film crew home. Time to put the brushes to the side, time for “Shootng Closure 2022”
For me, the best thing about a review of the year is when you can look back in future years and briefly recall what you’ve experienced back then. When I look at the Shooting Closure 2021 today, the results are very sobering: In principle, I can adopt the text. Last year, I had little planned and preferred not to announce anything. In fact, I did completely different things than those originally planned, and for most of the year I didn’t get anything done. So what happened?
I was delighted when my older son’s interest in dinosaurs awakened. I’ve always had a soft spot for dinos, too, and at the latest since Jurassic Park, the fascination has been perpetuated. I would have loved to play a tabletop game with dinos, but unfortunately the frustrating failure of the Jurassic World Kickstarter threw a spanner in the works. Thanks to another Kickstarter for 3D printable files, however, I’ve ended up with a decent collection of dinos, some of which are already painted. It was a lot of fun to do this little project, which brings back memories of my childhood:
I took this as an opportunity to generally delve a little deeper into the Lost World and also paint daring explorers, craft jungle terrain and last but not least paint the King of the Jungle:
I wonder what Tarzan, the other king of the jungle, thinks.
Few miniatures, much text
I painted a Batman miniature from Knight Models, but unfortunately that was it with finished results for this year. Generally I didn’t finish any projects in the second half of the year, but more about that later. Instead, I focused more on texts, introduced Saga: Age of Vikings and the new starter box of the Batman miniature game, the not-so-new (and now also no longer available) starter box of the Lord of the Rings tabletop game. One of last year’s resolutions was to introduce 7TV: Fantasy, after the post about 7TV: Inch High Spy-Fi from Crooked Dice is one of the most popular on this blog and I think the fantasy spin-off is just awesome.
I wrote a text about Campbell’s hero’s journey and presented a film book on Jurassic Park. Much, much more was planned. I still have a lot of ideas, but most of all I don’t have the time for them. Also for the work on this blog often the time is missing. When this article is published, I have 14 more articles saved as drafts. Some are well advanced, one is a year and a half old and still not finished. The blog is important to me, it is an addition to my hobby and an outlet for everything else I would like to write about. But I run it alongside a full-time job, family and other activities in what little free time I have. There’s not much left over, and there’s nowhere near enough time to write about everything I have in mind.
Time for the hobby Time for the family
The topic of time/hobby time has already occupied me here in several articles. This year hobby time was even more sparse, because I became a father for the second time in September. We were very much looking forward to the child, even though this already meant during pregnancy and definitely since the birth that we actually have no more free time. We want to give the children our full attention and enjoy our time together, so setting priorities is not difficult. However, since I have always had to look for free time in the past years with little “me time”, often had to squeeze the hobby into everyday life and just as often could not meet my own demands, I have decided to simply no longer try to do this at the moment. At the moment there is simply not the time for it.
Currently, the brushes are put aside and I do not even try to find free space for painting projects. It would degenerate into stress, you would paint under time pressure, it would have nothing of recreation and creativity. It also wouldn’t do justice to the family if I were looking for such opportunities all the time. So it’s perfectly fine with me that it’s just not possible at the moment and I’d rather wait a few months. And if there should be some free time after all, then you can always tinker and do other preparatory work.
Nevertheless, I will continue to publish articles and bridge the hobby break otherwise. There is enough to write about: Hobby aspects, movies, series, books, comics,…
So, Shooting closure 2022: I wish all readers a good start into the new year, good health and time for the important things!
