I'm ready to move on to dioramas. As much as I've learned painting these marines I'm ready for something a little more tasty. Painting makes me happy and I'm ready for the challenge of doing something that turns into an obsession. I remember the girl from the nutcrackers crazy uncle who makes toys in his workshop. I think I might be come like that. I wonder why in modern story telling people don't know any crazy toymakers any more. In the olden days it always seemed like someone was carving some little guy out of wood and then lots of wonderful things and adventures would come from it. Pinocchio, the nutcracker, chucky from child's play.

Its time for someone to leave their toys behind and move on to a man's discipline. The discipline of the DIORAMA.

On and on

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I had a picture of a Deathwing terminator but that transmission was lost in the warp to chaos. Instead, I have this video.

It bears no relation to the terminator picture.

I'm wondering what happened to my airbrush. I think I'm ready to admit that Vallejo Game Color hates alcohol and I in turn hate vallejo game color. Never was there a chunkier more prone to separate paint. I know its got good color, lots of pigment and blah blah blah. If you have to treat it like a hindu cow every time you want to load it into an airbrush then what is the point. Minitaire is ok but it dries on the needle tip so fast. Arg.

I think I'm going to get an Iwata. I know I've been thinking only of Harder & Steenbeck for the last year and a half but I think the Iwata is going to be a real quality piece of gear. I mean millions can't be wrong, right?

My first attempt at OSL wasn't a total disaster at least. There is that small sliver of good news out of the total breakdown of my airbrush yesterday.

Another kind of Inertia

A new venue for inspiration. This is where I do all of my best work and I'm hoping that I catch a lot of inspiration here in our new home. My life partner has done their best to make this a home for our labradors and me. Its been an adventure getting to this point. Hopefully I can stop moving long enough to enjoy the life that I've worked for.

Leveling Up

I did a rough estimate of how long I've been painting and now its at around 253 hours. I wonder to myself how I can get to the next level because I'm still struggling at the same level I have since I began. My artistic side isn't well developed and I'm wondering if I should ever develop such a vestigial part of my skills.

Some where on my psychic body it hands there like Arjen Robben's dodgy flapper that he holds at his side when he cuts into the box and then goes left. While I'm charging forward it dangles and flops unwittingly being dragged along by the rest of me.

I can't freehand well and every time I attempt NMM I feel like its unconvincing. I hope Malcolm Gladwell is right and that I've only to invest another 9.747k hours to achieve a master status.

Muses

Sometimes we have to do things. I read sometimes that I should only do things that I like so that would pretty much mean staying home, watching women's basketball and eating cereal. Except that I would probably get kicked out of my house, get divorced and get fired from my job. In no particular order.

I think in the same way I need to keep painting and doing things I don't like, especially when I don't want to. Because that is the only time that its work. If I did it when I felt like it then well yeah. I guess I would never get anything painted. Painting miniatures is inherently unfun for me, only after I start carving the life out of that little chunk of plastic with shadows and light does it really start to bring real happiness.

Anyways, this guy looks like a real SOB, I'm glad he's is on our team:

What makes us Human

I look at the little guy in the hatch and I don't think about him I"m thinking about me. I'm always thinking about me and what I'm going through. The little guy in the tank is trying to get his boys home for the night, he probably wants to get home to his wife, or his zombie dungeon, or whatever imperial commissars like to do when they are no longer fighting the never ending struggle at the front of the imperial army. 

I'm glad I was never an imperial officer or soldier because I couldn't be there for my life partner and our dogs. I know she is out there somewhere, somewhere far to the south and she is getting up and having to face a whole lot of problems. Probably like this imperial commissar when he wakes up in some grimy ditch on some planet he never heard of until a few weeks ago. I guess we all have something in common, we hate fucking xenos.

I plan on weathering this tank within an inch of its life very soon. I'm thinking basecoat today but I have to make sure I practice my camos first, so this after noon will probably just be a lot of airbrushing on plastic soda bottles.

TTFN.

Behold the captured alien technology that is going to take my modelling to the next level. I spent some time doing some small lines and just getting familiar with my new tool. I have found that I need to go easier on the thinning as far as minitaire is concerned but I really enjoyed using my new airbrush. I'm glad I had time to practice with my paasche talon because this tool is definitely a finer iteration of a detail airbrush and the smooth trigger action would probably be less useful to me when I didn't have as much control.

More on that later...

Happy guy

I'm happy with how this guy turned out. I did what I always do, which is that I did a different technique on every single piece of this guys body. I did the mace different from the last model I painted, I did each arm different and the body different from both arms. I did this time, however, pin the feet of the model and glue the arms on separately so that I could paint the nooks and crannies with more ease. The body I basecoated in graveyard earth after the primer undercoat and then I did a gradual build up with bleached bone until I reached complete coverage on the larger armor plates and did a glaze with vallejo model color off white on the upper parts of the armor. On the right arm I skipped the graveyeard earth and when straight to bleached bone using washes to get into the creases and also used diluted washes for the shading and finally on the shield arm I started from an offwhite base and glazed bleached bone down to graveyard earth in some places and then used gryphonne sepia mixed 1:2 with future so that I could get the wash to flow right into the cracks. The only drawback being that the future made the wash glossy so the shiny crevices looks weird until it can be matte varnished. 

I will see my wife soon so that makes me happy and if you can see closely even this grim warrior from the far future has a little smile on his face too.

World Series Champions

I think when I imagined being more succesful than I'd ever been I would be with someone who loved me, in a home and holding them in my arms. Or driving a racecar in Monaco with people shooting pictures of me and blowing past super models and princesses on the road course there. 

Instead I look on an artic tundra far from anything.

I'm wearing the world series champion shirt that we won when we helped the Giants come from behind 0-3 during the divisional series versus the cardinals. I wear it proudly because I know that if it hadn't been for her and me we wouldn't have ever won the series.