My two are:
Making sourdough. I personally always heard like this weird almost mysticism around making it. But I bought a $7 starter from a bakery store, and using just stuff in my kitchen and cheap bread flour I’ve been eating fresh sourdough every day and been super happy with it. Some loafs aren’t super consistent because I don’t have like temperature controlled box or anything. But they’ve all been tasty.
Drawing. I’m by no means an artist, but I always felt like people who were good at drawing were like on a different level. But I buckled down and every day for a month I tried drawing my favorite anime character following an online guide. So just 30 minutes every day. The first one was so bad I almost gave up, but I was in love with the last one and made me realize that like… yeah it really is just practice. Years and years of it to be good at drawing things consistently, quickly, and a variety of things. But I had fun and got something I enjoyed much faster than I expected. So if you want to learn to draw, I would recommend just trying to draw something you really like following a guide and just try it once a day until you are happy with the result.
Painting miniatures. Anyone can do it and make their board games look way nicer.
All you have to do is avoid paying New-In-Box GW prices, and avoid/minimize GW paints and the cost of the hobby drops through the floor.
Tons of skirmish games in all settings are around, many of them with free rules. Battletech is cheap because it basically needs skirmish game amounts of minis. Even playing 40k is cheap(er) embracing third party and scratchbuilding.
I managed to sidestep Games Workshop pretty neatly. I’m huge on Battletech and pretty much exclusively use Army Painter paints. I also have a lot of board games like Scythe or Betrayal that have plain gray minis that I’m working on.
Can you recommend good paints to get? I’m interested in getting into model making but all the options are kind of overwhelming and reviews are all over the place.
90% of my paints are Vallejo Model Color. Good value for the price, never had any quality control issues.
Vallejo Game Color is their newer line where they’ve focused on brighter and more saturated colors for the 40k audience. Same company and quality.
I supplement my Vallejo Model Colors with some Duncan Two Thin Coats paints when I want super saturated colors. This line also has pretty decent metallics which I now use, since I can’t find Vallejo Mecha Color anymore.
I do still use Citadel Nuln Oil and Agrax. I have the old formula bottles, and I don’t use wash that often or much, so it will be a while until I buy new ones.
A few random products from Tamiya, MIG, and AK. All are speciality things like rust effect washes. Not really needed for starting out.
I also have a collection of cheap Applebarrel paint from WalMart. These are great for painting bases, doing low importance areas of vehicles, painting terrain, and being drybrush paints for vehicles. Much more cost effective than using hobby paints for this purpose.