Category: Arts & Crafts

Stormtrooper: Now With Layers!

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Before leaving on vacation I did a little more painting and got started on my practice with layering. A poor choice at the beginning had me doing more layers to bring it up to a clean white than I had originally wanted but you live, you learn.

I’ve largely accepted that the first few squads I paint up for this game will probably end up being re-done or at the least living as monuments to the trials of my learning curve. Either way it’s been fun to continue learning, especially with the help of @GorillaBrush on Twitter. I’ve had the pleasure of hanging out on a couple of his Sunday streams and he’s been a great resource. I encourage anyone looking to get into the hobby to look him up.

I’m on vacation this week so I wont have a chance to paint more till I get back but I will be putting up posts here and probably tweeting about god knows what because that is what I do these days. My grudging existence on that platform has yielded communication with some pretty awesome people thus far so it has that going for it. I’m slowly warming up to it but it’ll be a long haul.

Anywho, I’ll be back Monday or Tuesday with another post, until then I hope everyone is having a great weekend!

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Friday Updates and General Housekeeping

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First off, I hope everyone is having a good start to their Friday! Sadly around where I am it’s freezing because of the hurricane that is currently blowing through. Did I ever mention how much I love spring?

Anywho…

What’s going on with you today? Let me know!

For me just tidying up some small things I’ve been meaning to get to, lets get started!

The landing page for the podcast is here in case you’re bored or just miss us. We certainly miss you. Also starting next week we will begin uploading episodes every Thursday morning at ~7am CST. While we were recording yesterday I decided that we’d earned it as we have kept to our every Thursday recording schedule for the last month which is a not insignificant milestone for us. That small investment is worth it I think and we now have four episodes waiting to be posted which is enough of a pad to account for any unforeseen speed-bumps. SoapBubbles will be on vacation in Paris next week which means she’ll be on hiatus from her regular history updates, HOWEVER! It does mean the return of her daily location posts while she’s there. I highly recommend her last series of travel logs if you haven’t seen them already. Hopefully she has a great time and we’ll certainly talk about it on the podcast when she gets back. The following week I will be in Florida and while I wont be doing a travel log I will still hold to my update schedule here with three or four posts. We won’t be recording new podcasts those weeks but like I said we have a backlog so that will help us close the gap a bit, optimally I think we’re aiming to have a one week buffer going forward.

So look for new episodes on the 12th and 19th! When we get back we’re excited to talk some MCU in preparation for Infinity War as well as our normal chat to catch up.

We’ve also set up an email address for the show just in case, it never hurts to be proactive.

If you want to submit questions, comments or suggestions feel free to email us at TheOurcastPodcast@gmail.com. We can also be found on Twitter: SoapBubbles is @Sophycles and yours truly is @NonWashableGmer.

I also updated the podcast page with a bunch of relevant information as well as links to our individual blogs. I’m sure there are a lot of basic informational and customization options I’m missing but it’s a process and I’m learning as I go!

For this weekend I’ll be getting together with some friends to play some of the X-Wing Miniature game which should be a blast. The rest of Saturday will be writing and hopefully a little painting. Sunday I’ll be stopping by GorillaWithaBrush’s twitch stream to see what a good mini-painters work looks like. I recommend stopping by if you’re even remotely interested in the hobby, he’s a hell of a talent.

I think that’s about it, I want to say thank you again to anyone who has taken the time to peruse our content or listening to our podcast. It’s been a real joy for the both of us to just produce stuff that we’ve always talked about but for one excuse or another we’ve never gotten around to. At the end of the day for us it’s less about what it could possibly be and more about just enjoying what it is at the moment. I think a lot more fledgling creators could benefit from a slightly shorter view when they’re starting out. The totality of your ambitions can be quite daunting but working on a single idea for a post tomorrow is a much more reasonable goal.

Until next time folks I hope you have a fantastic weekend!

  • Non-Washable

 

 

Painting With Mona Lisa Smile!

.Reading time 5 minutes.

Hope everyone is having a great Tuesday! Except for anyone that happens to live in a state where it decided to snow or more accurately blizzard today. It is Spring, right?

Anyways, after shoveling the latest practical joke by mother nature off the driveway I got to work on some things I wanted to get through today and I think I managed to get through just about all of them. First among them was a reminder from my friend and co-host of The Ourcast, SoapBubbles, to watch a favorite movie of hers, Mona Lisa Smile. I’d never seen it and she is chomping at the bit to talk movies so we decided that going forward we’ll devote a portion of the podcast to her talking about movies and getting me caught up on all the culture I’ve missed out on over the years. Right before I started watching it she commented on Twitter about how combined with the painting I was going to be doing was appropriate for the subject matter of the movie. Turns out she was right and I found it doubly interesting because they spent a little time talking about the concept of what is art? A subject which I’ve often discussed because of my somewhat contentious relationship with the ever widening modern definition of it. I try to be accepting and understanding because the reality is my personal tastes cannot and should not dictate what others feel is art.

As Katherine opined in response to her students hoping they wouldn’t have to write a paper about a Jackson Pollock painting they were looking at:

“Do me a favor, do yourselves a favor. Stop talking and look.”

“You’re not required to write a paper. You’re not even required to like it.”

“You are required to consider it.”

It may not be easy for someone like me to stop criticizing long enough to stop and just consider something that someone else spent their time and inspiration to create but I know that I’ll hear Katherine Watson in the back of my head chiding me from now on.

I quite enjoyed the movie and we’ll definitely talk more about it on Thursday when we record the new episode of The Ourcast. This should be our third maybe even fourth week in a row which gives me a deep sense of pride to have carried this on for at least a month straight. I think in the next week or two here I’ll get it set up so I can release an episode a week on our PodBean Page so we can clear our backlog and get everyone up to speed.

I started a new mini today to go along with the movie, I didn’t quite manage to finish it but I’m very happy with how it’s progressing. I was much more aggressive with thinning my paints this time around so I could take my time and get some smoother layers. I can feel my brush control very slowly getting better which is nice as it cuts down on the amount of times I need to go back and fix my lines. Painting minis that are literally only black and white will probably be fantastic practice on that front.

I compiled a few pics in an album if you want to have a look!

A fellow painter and imgur poster @beerjingles was nice enough to offer some pointers after one of my posts. We got a chance to talk tonight after I was done painting and he had some invaluable insights that I hope to put into practice in my upcoming painting sessions. Just goes to show that people who love a hobby who are willing to reach out to us newbies can make all the difference. I look forward to checking in with him again in the future.

Anyways, I think that is about it for me today! I’ll be back tomorrow with… something I’m sure.

Happy painting, gaming, movie watching or whatever it is you enjoy!

  • Non-Washable