Tag: Personal

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!

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The Weekend

.Reading time 6 minutes.

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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Things I Desperately Need to Do

.Reading time 5 minutes.

How often do you look around at your life and realize how many little things you desperately, urgently need to do? Followed by the instant realization that there are not enough hours in the week to get them all done. Hopefully you don’t do this too often because it can be a somewhat hellish vortex of despair. Once in a while though it can help you to put together a bullet-point list so you can prioritize those needs into something resembling sanity.

In the spirit of transparency here is what my current list looks like:

  • Make and eat lunch
  • Stay on top of the ongoing Magic: The Gathering Arena beta
  • Keep up on my RSS feed for news
  • Finish editing two videos I’m working on
  • Officially start on my SW: Legion content – Unboxing/Assembling/Priming/Painting 1 or more models by the end of this week.
  • Write-up on Ni No Kuni and my first handful of hours with it.
  • Back to Vermintide 2 for at least an hour or two this week.
  • Podcast tomorrow with Soapy – Need to write my outline
  • Editing and finalizing the last two podcasts we’ve done so they’re ready to upload
    • Improving my editing and looking for ways to improve the cast
    • Music of some kind for the intro? I dunno, something I’m thinking about.
  • Finalizing my notes for this Saturday’s D&D game
  • Choosing a topic for the next blog post (Not including this one) options i’m considering:
    • Epic open sourcing $12mil in Paragon game assets after its closure.
    • Some thoughts on the Might and Magic mobile game
    • A “Why” for the Nintendo Switch for a friend who didn’t buy one and is curious. Plus I really like the system.
    • Video Game Movies
    • Probably other things too
  • Making additional tweaks to the camera I’m using because blurry is not what you want while working with minis.
  • Working on taking more editing time with my posts. I really need to do this. For now I’m just happy to get things done and up but the quality could really be better. Better to establish good habits now than try to do it later.
  • Stream a little more often when I make time for games. I may as well since it’s not really intrusive to what I’m already doing and it seems fun? We’ll see.

And of course there is more that isn’t even related to what is going on with this blog because life is life. The one thing that I will say about my head first dive into all of this starting a couple weeks ago is that it feels so markedly different than anything else I’ve ever attempted and eventually abandoned. I don’t mind doing it. All of the other things I’ve had to learn while doing this don’t feel like a burden, it’s fun and educational but it keeps me at 100% capacity all day with few breaks. I don’t know if that is good or bad right now but I didn’t burn out after the first day or get bored with any aspect of it and that isn’t really something I’m familiar with.

So… good? We’ll see but for now I’m enjoying it and it feels good to be productive on things I actually care about. I don’t know where it’s going or how it will end up but I’m going to try and find out for once instead of tossing it. I’ve already cleared quite a few speed-bumps which is another thing that usually derails my ambition.

At any rate, no more rambling. Stuff to do! I’ll be back around here on Saturday or Sunday evening with one of the articles I mentioned up top. I’m hoping as I continue to do this a few days a week that it’ll help me tighten my game up and get faster as I do it.

Now, for some fun! Someone on Twitter was asking about the molds on the SW: Legion figures so I took a few close up pics so he could get an idea. I honestly think they look great and the details look like a lot of fun to paint! Feel free to have a look.

Thanks for hanging with me, happy gaming!

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