May was a pretty crazy month, painting wise. It was actually going to be a somewhat light month. I would have worked a normal 5 day work week and begun getting things into a regular routine. That's not how it ended up, though.
The first week went well enough. I painted the Tantive IV and managed to create three videos following its progression. Because of the videos the project took a little more time than it needed to (as is normal when I do videos) but since the next two projects weren't overly large this wasn't a problem.
The second week is when the month took a turn. As I was looking over the miniatures for the Myth project I noticed that the box had a lot more minis than were on the original quote. It turns out both myself and the client hadn't been a observant as we should have been in the initial quoting phases so there were some discrepancies about what I thought I was painting and what he thought I was painting. Once sorted I decided that I was going to fit the whole project into the same time-frame rather than giving him the second batch two months later. This meant that my light month turned into my crazy-busy month.
Over the past 5 months I've realized that I can paint until about 7pm and then I'm done. It doesn't seem to make a difference when I start. This means that I generally get out in the shop at about 9 or 10pm and paint for 8-10 hours. When the project ballooned I started getting into the shop at about 6-7am and working 10-12 hours. Although I didn't find the hours a problem in terms of my painting, it did cut into some of the things that I would generally do in the morning (chores, e-mails, web surfing). I found it to be manageable but not desirable. In the end I put so many hours in that I managed to have a few days off at the end of the month. It felt like a vacation and I had a hard time figuring out what I wanted to do with my time. Surprisingly enough, I spent some of it painting minis for myself!
June should be a pretty normal month. Which means that I should be responding to e-mails in a timely fashion again as well as getting in that much needed web-surfing.