And now for a change of pace space marines.

The new year began with a bang and with a steely determination in my eye. So now almost two months later you can see what a little determination do. I am now nearly 1/35th done with my army. At this rate I estimate I will probably have it all done before the World goes to shit in 2050 and megacorps rule the world and elves, dwarfs, faeiries and trolls return to the world. And dragons. Lots and lots of dragons.

Many of the dragons that were thought to once be alive now are laying dormant in the earth or have taken human form in the shape of media moguls.

Anyways, the basing will commence today and and additionally the shoulder pad shellaquing in the hopes of getting decals set and seen to and so on.

A disturbance in the force: A new hope in miniature painting.

I started painting again after we had a new baby lab show up in our kennel. She was very fussy and barked and barked for the first few months of her life and we never could find out what was bothering here. Finally my partner and I took her to the vet only to find out she was the picture of health. I guess she was just born that way.

I bought some new paints called scale 75. I have every set they make and I love them. They make blending very easy and I find them to be probably the best model paints I've ever used. They are a little pricey but I guess they are worth it.

There is a new Set for fantasy and wargames coming out focused on fantasy skin that looks like a must buy. TTFN

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.

The rhino shaped mandala

I quote wikipedia "A sand mandala is ritualistically destroyed once it has been completed and its accompanying ceremonies and viewing are finished to symbolize the Buddhist doctrinal belief in the transitory nature of material life."

I was recently holding my partner as our chocolate labs were bounding all around us. Skippy, scout, weatherby, reggie, buck, Nina, and Sanchez we call them. I realized that we were only going to be together for a short while in the scheme of things and even though we might sabotage one another at times that we had to really cling to each other or what is the point. 

So as I went outside filled with the thought of seizing my small slice of happiness from the pie of the cruel world, weather rhino clutched in one hand 
and my can of matte sealer in the other. I really should have laughed aloud at myself for trying to capture this moment. I know the above mentioned monks would have. I was just trying to capture the moment that I had found. A snapshot in the lifespan of this poor, long outdated rhino who's designed relevance ceased centuries before it was recovered and pressed back into service by my company of marines. When I tried to capture the perfect moment of weathering I had glimpsed the moment I finished it, rushing to the intertrons to try and get some input on just how wonderful a job I had done the matte sealer blew away all traces of my weathering save for some muted red where I had painstakingly scratched away the paint on the outer hatch with my minitaure tyranid fore limbs I keep around for just such occasions.

Who knows how many birthdays space marines had inside of it before my rag tag squad found it. How many heroes of ages past bled out on its decks... So I'm going to go home to my labradors and my partner and hold her as our time together slowly ebbs away and watch us grow rusty together.

Grandma's Army

Grandma, here is the first model I painted from your army. Its not the best one I did but the quality is about a 7 compared to the other one. I think its ok considering the time they take to paint but I know you are a bit more critical.

The new white dwarf hobby magazine is supposed to be all new, all improved but I haven't bought them  ever I think so for me it will not be a noticeable dip in my monthly income (ahem). The forge world books weighing in at around $113 US is something else entirely. As I've found my way to my painting table again I feel that there may never be a chance for me to fully enter this hobby until I'm well into the second half of my life's parabolic trajectory. I'll be sliding down the golden rainbow into retirement and start thinking about splurging on a $255 tank.

I told my life partner already that I think I'm going to move into the scale model side of the the tank decorating world and indeed the Gods are ominously tossing my boat in that direction with the latest GW price hikes in an already tumultuous GW pricing ocean. More posts full of overworked analogies coming soon.

Edit- And another thing! I just realized that after my latest MMORPG purchase of guild wars 2 that something very serious is going on inside of my neuro-chemistry. I'm finding that my brain no longer releases a pleasant rush of dopamines when I begin loading my favorite games of old and more importantly, with guild wars 2 I bought it sight unseen and expected it to be amazing because the world at large was raving about it and I ran into a bitter truth. I'm not like everyone else. Or perhaps I flatter to think of myself as a unique snowflake but no! I'm like one of many who do not enjoy video games as much any more. I've felt the urges waning in me for a long time but I was wondering aloud the other day as my partner and I were walking our 6 chocolate labradors, maybe this is no longer my thing? Just as I began contemplating that unthinkable position I felt the icy fingers of the spectre of age tickling my lower back suggestively. Was this indeed the sweet call of oblivion? was I sliding closer to the funnel end of the vortex and what seems like autonomous choice is only my inability to perceive or receive pleasure on receptors that I burnt out long ago!???!!?!?!?

Control

My mom used to have a bumper sticker that said, "since i gave up hope, i feel better" When I was younger I didn't understand why someone would say that. My mom is a bit of a character and she was always finding ways of tricking herself into not disliking her job so that was one of her strategies. To loosen the grip on expectation and rather deal with what comes.

A week or two ago when I was making the turn from my apartment on to the freeway I make every day I saw someone coming at me at about 50 miles an hour from the opposite direction. It wasn't a unique thing because every day people hurtle around the corner and only a few inches of paint and the invisible social contract keeps everyone from smashing into each other over and over in a never ending 20 car pile up at that bend. Every time I would go around at the busier times of day I would find my mind starting to wander and really start to embrace terrible scenarios where I would end up eating it right there after getting head onned by a chevy blazer or some suburban moms odyssey. I would be clutching the wheel of my car and just bracing for impact like I used to on the ship when we would have faux torpedo impacts during drills. Then I would grab the wall and wave my hind parts suggestively like I was trying to catch the torpedoes attention to come find me high in the island so it could kiss my ass. "come on mr. torpedo, come and take a big bite of this!"

I was one of only a few who found any humor in pantomiming a missile attack because it was so absurd but if you have never been in the military that is just the cherry on the top of a huge absurd iceberg cake. But I digress, so there I was, holding on for dear life and thinking of my wifes face as she would throw herself into the arms of the uniformed men who came to tell her that I bought it on the curve right in front of  our house. I see her rolling around and wailing and shredding her clothes in anguish. But a moment later I had a cool calm come over me. Sort of like christian bales face at the end of the dark knight rises. A serenity descended over me because I knew that I was doing everything I could to not throw my huge metal chariot into anyone and they were probably doing the same and if god, or allah, or yahweh, or calamitous unforeseen even were to unfold in my biting the big one right there then that would just be that. So it goes. And such like.

I can't stop it I can't even predict it. so why am I burning so many calories thinking about the highly unlikely when I need to get to school and finish a project? A new freedom began to dictate my every thought, since I had zero control over almost everything why not just do what I wanted and tried not to hurt anyone? Why not just do what I can as well as I can and live with it? The fear of failure is always following me around, a personal black bummer cloud that is non-existent. So why don't I just paint the fuck out of some plastic guys and see what happens?