Tag: Painting

The Weekend

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Hello folks, how was your weekend? No joke, I’m actually curious.

In the meantime let me summarize mine a little to keep myself accountable for what I did and did not accomplish.

Things I did –

Ran my regular D&D game on Saturday which was a lot of fun as usual. This group continues to prove to be one of my favorites from over the years. One of the biggest ways is that they seem to really enjoy taking things slowly. They don’t need me to skip over the mundane parts of their day and would rather take the time and see what happens when they come down from their rooms for breakfast or what the elf does because she only needs to meditate four hours a night. I think a lot of people incorrectly assume that the “down time” for adventurers is boring and only used as some sort of check book style accounting in between “the fun stuff”. I think some of the most entertaining moments from this campaign have come from their downtime antics. It may not suit every group to take their time going through each day but I encourage folks to give it a try, it might be more fun than you think.

I was pretty exhausted after that as the session was ~5 hours so I’m a bit ashamed to say that I laid down and spent some time reading gaming news and lying by telling myself this counted as work. Afterall thinking of things to write about counts too… right? Buying into that is basically what got me to where I am today starting probably five or ten years too late on getting this blog and my other ambitions off the ground. But hey, better late than never. If you’re reading this and thinking you still have time I recommend you find the nearest mirror, stand in front of it and slap yourself as hard as you can. You do have time but that time shouldn’t be wasted because you can always do the things you want to do later. Invest in your passions so you can enjoy them for as long as possible.

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Suffice it to say Saturday was wasted after 5pm. The MN Wild also lost to the Dallas Stars so that was probably punishment for me avoiding my responsibilities. Sorry boys, lets hope for some better luck tonight. I did my part.

Sunday wasn’t much better but I did start on two separate articles, one of which I published today and the other that I’m hoping to have finished for Wednesday at the latest. I did work a bit on my Star Wars: Legion painting project and got a Stormtrooper Commander and regular trooper finished. They’re not great and I’ll probably redo them but I learned a few important things along the way.

I uploaded photos of a couple of the models here if you’re curious what my work so far looks like. I also discovered that I can’t, at least yet, prime them in grey AND white as it obscures too many details and pools unattractively. It could just be my inexperience or it may work with an airbrush. As I’m only currently working with rattle cans I think I’ll stick to priming in white for the Empire which should help with the smoothness of the armor instead of hand painting the entirety of it.

My girlfriend sent me a link to the Twitter of @GorillaBrush whose work with Atlantis Minis is absolutely stunning. He held a stream on Sunday which I had a chance to watch and participate in, really nice fellow who is happy to help newbies to the hobby. This next Sunday he’s having a special guest on and will answer some fan questions about painting. Suffice it to say I had a few which I’m hoping they’ll have a chance to cover. Either way I definitely recommend a stroll down his Twitter feed or head over to his website gorillawithabrush.com to view some of his work. This past year was his 20th anniversary of painting minis and it definitely shows.

I’ll let you go now and get back to work myself! Going to try and get a couple more Legion minis painted today and tomorrow while trying to put into practice some of the tips I got from the gorilla.

I’ll be back soon, until then I hope everyone is having a great Monday!

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I Can’t Spell Patience Without Paint

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I’m no Confucius, I’ll happily cop to that but the experience painting my very first mini from a collection that I’ve been putting together for too many years was joyous, cathartic and relaxing. If you’ve looked at my twitter or read one of my recent posts, I may have even mentioned it on the podcast, I have been eagerly awaiting the U.S. release of Star Wars: Legion. I wanted to start my path on learning to paint with the release of the set but as with most things I get excited to start something new and it’s hard to wait around just staring at my nicely set up table not getting used. I started going through my minis like I’m sure most people with any sort of collection enjoys doing on occasion and found several primed and waiting pewter figures from a campaign we started years ago. As they can do that group petered out and didn’t continue but I always planned to still go through and paint the figures. Today I got a wild hair and decided I’d get a little practice in before Thursday, figure out good light placements and arrangement for my stuff as I’ll hopefully be filming my learning as I go.

Well, as it happened that little bit of practice escalated and in the span of a few hours I have a completed painted mini sans the finished base which I’ll do as soon as I pick up some appropriate litter, grass and rocks for it. I’ve also been watching a lot of TheTerrainTutor so the prospect of doing a fully realized base for this figure is very exciting. Now, let’s get to what you’re all obviously here for, pictures!

I’ve set up an account at Imgur where it should be easier to look through the pictures. Unfortunately WordPress’ document formatting with images is uh… limited. Either that or I’m not nearly as smart as I think I am. Little of both probably. Anyways, pictures!

I had a really great time painting the mini and I’m stoked to do more. Unsurprising I think to most people is that it was simultaneously easier and harder than I thought it would be going in. I figured I’d get held up just doing the skin parts, not be happy with my paint consistency, color choices or what have you. Piece by piece though it came together and almost before I knew it I was done or at least just touching up little problems here or there. It’s almost silly to think about all the excuses I’d made to not get started on these sooner ultimately all just procrastination of some form of another. Well, no more!

Soapy and I have another podcast scheduled for this Thursday, I think we’re at least a couple ahead now for safety because life can be a bit unpredictable. Once we have a bit of a buffer and a regular schedule we can keep to I’ll start releasing them a bit faster so we can get caught up. Otherwise the fun will continue later this week for now, thanks for joining me and have a wonderful day!

 

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One Piece at a Time

.Reading time 8 minutes.

In an ongoing rally between myself and my good friend SoapBubbles we’re making a concerted effort to boost each others productivity in our various projects. We’ve talked about this in parts during some episodes of The Ourcast and I encourage you to check them out if you have an hour or so to kill and don’t mind two people talk about their lives and futures. We’re not sure where our respective futures will take us but we do know that we want to spend the rest of it creating things for ourselves and others to hopefully derive some joy. We each have documents set up on our Google Drive’s where we can write suggestions for things to help inspire the other to write, it’s not that we don’t have ideas of our own but sometimes it helps to have others expand the scope of your attention.

Immediately after we decided to start doing this Soapy had a list of five or six things up that I need to start working through ASAP. I’m excited to start writing about them and already have the outlines started for a couple but first I just wanted to throw this up because the more I think about it the more important it is that I write down more of my thoughts instead of internalizing them. Otherwise what’s the point of having a blog? A podcast? A Twitter? YouTube? The most challenging thing of this entire endeavor, going back a few years to when I first set up this blog or really became enamored with even trying it is that externalizing all of this doesn’t come naturally. I’m used to having my thoughts on my own, some of them warrant discussion but most of them I consider to not be worth holding on to. If I’ve had that thought surely someone else has had it as well and enunciated it better than I could have anyways, right? The internet is a supremely powerful tool which allows us to find a viewpoint on any opinion we may have or ever have. Over time I’ve discovered that concept can be poisonous to the very nature of creativity. The urge to be standout and unique in the things you do is overwhelming even in the face of it’s near impossibility, that isn’t any reason to not try but it’s also absolutely no reason to not try, either. So with that creative hurdle somewhat cleared and instead just bouncing along dragging behind me like an anchor occasionally catching on some reef or an old sedan, the next one is a matter of habit. Throughout every day, every thing I think or look at and have an opinion on now needs to clear an additional filter before leaving my thoughts forever. Is it worth it write about this? Does anyone care? Do I even care? I still don’t have concrete answers to any of that but I guess like with most things this too will become easier with practice, for now I will write about whatever I get my grey matter on and go from there.

In addition to writing regularly and overall writing more this next week will mark the start of another project I have wanted to get into for some time: Model painting. Specifically minis for games like Dungeons &  Dragons, minis which I have had for well over a decade in some cases, always well meaning about getting around to them but we know how that goes. painting_table

Barring a couple of items this is the setup I’ll be embarking with to learn from the ground up how to paint my mini collection and if everything goes well I’ll be sharing that journey on YouTube through a series of videos. Naturally I’ll post updates about that to this blog as I go as long as things I’m working on that don’t fit into the videos. The first set of minis I’m going to be painting will be from the new game by Fantasy Flight called Star Wars: Legion which I’ve been excited for since it was announced over a year ago, it releases this week on the 22nd. A man who goes by Game Methuselah, or Jim Murphy (Great name, especially after seeing Netflix’s Altered Carbon), recently started his own channel to talk about various table top games, concepts and do videos on model painting. As a Golden Demon Award winning speed painter it’s hard to pass up the opportunity to learn along with him as he ventures into his own new realm of YouTube content creator. He’s a fantastic resource and I encourage everyone to head over and give him a listen! Another resource I’ll be taking advantage of on this path of learning is Sorastro’s Painting guides, specifically the ones on SW: Legion. I’m sure my final product wont be anything up to his standard but they are exceptionally informative which is helpful for a newbie like me. Also, even if you aren’t painter yourself there are just straight up interesting videos to spend a little time watching. Anywho, I’m not what you would call naturally talented at these kinds of artistic pursuits but in one of his recent videos Jim made an excellent point that neither was he until he spent time learning it. Now or never then!

The next post will be on one of the questions SoapBubble was nice enough to provide me with and will naturally be gaming related. She’s given me several fantastic topics to mull over but in the course of writing this I think I’ve decided to tackle the first on the list, has a nice symmetry being that this week will include several firsts.

“Is there a game developer that you trust explicitly and will always play their IP’s no matter what? Alternatively if there is no such developer, what are some that have lost your trust and require scrutiny before purchasing?” 

I’ll be organizing my thoughts on this over the next day or two and get it posted shortly after, hope you are well and I’ll be back to talk to you again soon!

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