This counts as the August update

09.07.2020

The past month has not seen me be productive from a hobby standpoint. If I tried to pick a reason for the lack of anything content-worthy over the past month, it would be "lack of artistic gumption". There were some things I started, but decided not to continue/finish. Things I worked on took way too long for the end result. But hobbies are for fun, so I shouldn't be worried that I don't have much to show for August.

I thought I would make a good, old fashioned model - an A-10 Warthog that I picked up no telling how long ago at Hobby Lobby. The last model I made was a tank last year. For the A-10 I started with paint details in the cockpit, and then started to put the body of the plane together. At that point I both wasn't sure what to do next (prime what I had, add more parts, what about painting more details?) AND I just kind of lost interest. I don't remember getting to the point of a hobby project and just saying "eh, I don't really want to do any more." Again, since hobbies are supposed to be for fun, I didn't force it and just decided to put aside what I'd done.

From there I went to the old stand-by of I Can Paint Some Minis. As the Reaper Chronoscope batch was getting ever smaller, I pulled out a couple of blisters to prime. Of the 6 ladies I saw I was going to paint, I'd painted 4 of them before.

• Jessica Blaze, Smuggler - sci-fi gun toter with an unarmored belly button.
• Bobby Jo, Redneck Princess - copy #2 that I've painted/
• Karla, Anime Heroine - a nurse, which I didn't notice until priming.
• Townsfolk: Ladies of the Night - third set of this trio of ladyfolk one might find along a darkened street corner. Evidently I think my miniscape has certain needs.

The painting was uneventful beyond trying out some new skin tones. I faltered when it came to working on the bases - this is when the lack of inspiration really hit me. Usually I enjoy bases the most, but at this point I was just ready to be done with it all. I tried giving one of the bases a rain/wet/puddle look, but I don't think it works unless you know what it's supposed to be.

6 more minis down on the Completed column. On the Chronoscope side, I think the ones I have left to paint are all duplicates.

On the "what next" front... I don't know. Over the next 6 weeks I'm taking a bootcamp course for Salesforce Developer certification which should eat up a lot of free time. This is one of those things I've been putting off since April so I really need to bare down and study. There's plenty of hobby stuff for me to do, but for the next few weeks I need to find things I can spin up and then put away (when needed) quickly. With that in mind, there's a couple of computer/graphic centered things I can put on the list, but I don't know how well my hobby mood will align with sitting in front of the computer.

I've also been enjoying GTA with Jer. We play a couple of times per week. Sometimes we grind away at missions, other times we do goofy stuff. It's been a good way to get my mind off, well, everything.

Permalink gaming miniatures hobbies models reaper chronoscape

(Useless?) Base Painting Part II

07.28.2020

Being that I had 2 large bases I would never use, after painting one I should just go ahead and paint the other. Facebookians suggested adding green to the water to help show depth. I had originally thought about it, but wasn't confident I could pull it off. The 2nd base gave me more chance to play, so greenish water it would be!

Atop grey primer, I found the lightest green paint I had and it became the base layer for the water. On top of that was a Sky Blue glaze (2 coats - homemade glaze isn't known for sticking on smooth, non-horizontal surfaces). A darker, forgotten shade of blue was added on top of that, and it was all topped off by an ample coat of glaze.

Depending on the angle you're looking at, and the light, it works. When it doesn't work, it looks like some slimy stuff.

Speaking of slime, I'm not sure what I was going for coming out of the pipes but this is what I got. In trying to blend the splash at the water, I ended up with..... broccoli. The poop water coming out of the pipe on top of the bricks doesn't look as muddied water as I was shooting for.

Brickwork was fun on this base, too. Instead of repeated dark washes, I just used 4 shades of red on the bricks, then when through with an earth wash to really get into the grout lines. My dun thing to play around with here was to add some flock between some of the bricks - a dab of glue on the tip of a toothpick and then try to smoosh the flock down with some help of very pointy tweezers. I give it a solid C+ effort for a 1st attempt.

For the past few weeks I've done nothing, hobby-wise, that I planned to do and instead have done little things like paint the base above and 3D print stuff I hope to use in the upcoming months. My planning has gotten too big and unwieldy compared to what I end up managing to do in a week or two - time to pare it down to something manageable, something I can finish in a week.

We'll see how that goes.

Permalink gaming miniatures random

(Useless?) Base Painting

07.19.2020

I paint minis without much intention of ever playing a game with them. I paint for fun. I find some mini advertised that looks like it would be fun to paint and promptly grab it, sure that I'll paint it in the next decade or so. Even then, there's always the option in the back of my head that something will come along and I can say "ah, I have just the mini for this game!"

And then, there are things that look(ed) fun to paint that I don't know how they'll fit into a game. During some, most likely Black Friday, sale, I picked up what can best be described as over-sized decorative bases. One such base is below. 4 inches in diameter, with bricks, leaky pipe, and moistness about. It looked fun to paint - I still remember thinking that. This past week I came across said base - 2 of them, actually - and again thought it would be fun to paint. I had just wrapped up painting cowfolk, so why not go ahead and prime a base and see if the mood and inspiration to do something with it hit me.

On Saturday, I was properly inspired. For once I thought I'd try to document my process and hope that the end result turned out to be presentable. I wanted to try a little wet blending where the pipe water meets the regular water. Some variation in brick color would add interest - what's the best way to do that without getting bored? Those pipes would need to get rusty, too. I've added rust plenty of times with pigment, but I've never really tried painting rust (I tried, but ended up relying on the pigment more).

I didn't mean to get the whole thing painted in a day. I would paint a little, maybe 10-20 minutes, and take a break while it dried. Then I would think of the next thing to try, and the process would repeat. Before I knew it, I was done enough. Enough, but there's always room to go back and tweak, but in my experience that tends to end up screwing everything up horribly.

Over on Facebook, where I seldom post, I read a handful of miniature oriented painting groups. I posted my finished pic along with a little blurb about sometimes you paint for fun and expect no real use out of what you paint. Although the internet is renown for people sharing their harshest opinions, I got some compliments along with people asking how I pulled off a couple of things. Pic even got over 100 likes.

This "I'll never use this in a game" has done wonders for my painting confidence.

Permalink gaming miniatures random

Cowfolk of the Ancient West

07.03.2020

After more than a month of on again-(mostly) off again painting, there's a batch of western themed minis that are wrapped up. There's actually 2 more that didn't make the cut. On 1, I forgot to paint the base, and the other hasn't made any progress beyond getting primed. I'm not in a hurry, and I wasn't feeling a good paint scheme for this one.

Reaper Chronoscope has been my favored mini line for a long while. Quality for the price of their metal minis has been hard to beat, and I would just pick up whatever I could find along the way. Western figures? Sure, I have no idea what game they might fit in but they'll be fun to paint one day. Turns out I was right - although I took my own sweet time, they were fun to paint.

I did a little more prep work this time and scraped mold lines. I got a carried away on "Ellen Stone, Cowgirl", as what I thought was a chunk of errant metal was the stock of a shotgun that had gotten twisted up pretty bad. In the end, I tried painting the whittled stock as a strap to... something. It works if you stand far enough away. Far, far away.

My playing around for this batch was to weather dusters. Part paint, part weathering pigment. Down where the coats would drag and gather up grime I grimed it up. Luckily there were ample web pics of these minis for inspiration. The other play-around was Doc Holliday's stripes on his vest. I'm becoming a fan of brush tip pens for this sort of detail. The details stick as long as the final spray of sealant isn't too close (tends to water down the ink and make it run/disappear).

The painting progress chart shows, well, if you can track down the last time it was updated in April you would see no change overall, as some new releases for the Walking Dead game made it into the backlog to replace these cowfolk that qualify as Done.

I have on my To Do list to wrap up 1 mall store with furniture. I'll see if that's what gets updated here next.

Permalink gaming miniatures reaper chronoscape

Last of the Foundry Minis / Monkey Time Zoom

04.15.2020

That last of the batch of 10 Foundry Hitmen (and either Professionals or Detectives) primed in December now have a coat of paint. I've complained before about the quality of these sculpts. They're most likely not as bad as I make them out to be, they just don't jibe well with my level of painting skill. My new technique (for me) to try out this time was to finally switch brushes while painting a color/area based on need. Using a detail brush to swath the back of a coat wasn't doing the detail brush any favors toward longevity. I also tried to remember to work from the inside of the mini and out, instead of hitting everywhere the color on the brush was needed. This gave some better lines between skin tones and whatever they abutted to. For once, I did the heads last - and I'm not sure if it made a difference.

It's been long enough since the painting spreadsheet was updated it's hard to tell what's changed. Foundry, Buildings, and 6" tiles have all had progress marked since the last shown update of the spreadsheet.

Next up on the hobby table: I don't know. Mall stores need furniture. I liked having primed minis to paint for when the painting mood hit, so I may go ahead and prime another batch. There's some 3D-printing associated things I need to do (mostly mall related).

Tangentially, in today's pandemic world, I've been working from home and staying sequestered like everyone else, or at least everyone else has been encouraged. As homelife is just me, my social interactions have been a Friday trip to the chiropractor (he's not just my chiropractor, he's my buddy!), avoiding people when I go to Publix, and a couple of Zoom meetings for work. Repeat this weekly for a month. I'm ok with the day-to-day living (or maybe isolation?) as I've geared myself to live mostly this way over the past couple of years. Within that, Jer pointed out that once our pandemic is less pandemicy, I need to make sure I force myself to get out and socialize.

This made me think of when he, I, and Keith worked together at whichever job it was at the time (I alternate riding their coat tails, so it's hard for me to keep up with when things happen). We developed a tradition of taking a break at 3:00 to grab a Coke. Thanks to Google, 3:00 is also The Hour of the Monkey, even though it's 2 hours long. 3:00 became Monkey Time not long after, and calls for Monkey Time would have us grab change and head to the vending machine. Keith also referred to this as Jingle Time, as a past job had a coworker who would walk by and jingle the change in his pocket as the sign for taking a break and grabbing a beverage.

Last week, thanks to Zoom, the 3 of us had a virtual Monkey/Jingle time.

That's now a recurring meeting on our calendars. Even if you're stuck at home, take some time to virtually socialize with your friends.

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