I usually have several secondary projects going while I work on more serious things. It keeps me from getting stuck - when I run out of the gumption required to work on a serious project, I can work on something secondary instead of going inside to eat Cheetos and watch TV. Not that I eat Cheetos very often; that Orange Hand of Doom thing gets to me. (I sometimes have nightmares of picking up a partially completed model while both hands are completely covered with orange Cheetos-substance.)
Here are a couple of secondary things I've been tinkering with on and off while waiting for bright ideas on bigger projects. I don't think of myself as a figure painter by any means, but I kind of like painting them, at least as long as there aren't 34 of them to do at one time...
DML's 1/35th scale 88mm "Puppchen" antitank rocket launcher and crew. Nice kit, mediocre execution of same. Years ago I bought a stack of hexagonal styrofoam pieces designed to serve as terrain in tabletop wargaming (Micro-Armor in specific, as I recall). I never did really do much tabletop wargaming (not because I didn't want to, but because opponents were hard to find). These days I use them as bases for things of this sort. The snow is just Celluclay painted white a bunch of times, and the stuff that's supposed to look like dead winter grass poking up is mane hair snipped from one of my wife's horses. The kit contained no small arms, so I threw in a couple of MP-40s and a Panzerfaust from a generic Tamiya German weapons set.
I think this is a Verlinden figure, a 120mm figure of a soldier from the US 101st Airborne Division in Iraq. It's been in work for a while and the package is long gone, so I'm only guessing that it's Verlinden. The paper towel backdrop may be extra-absorbent, but it's also extra-cheesy.
