Warhead On Legs

Only five days between updates this time! And life continues to be not too exciting. The scourge of the menstrual cycle punched me in the stomach on Sunday but the week has been less full of unprecedented system errors and I've been able to get a fair bit of work done. Including some websites that made me scream. Look, all I'm saying is, if you're going to do a site in English for US buyers, you might want to also make sure your back-end code and labels and everything else... is also in English. Not fucking Italian. And ... was that Spanish? Because it really looked like Spanish but for all I know it could look the same in Italian. my Italian isn't THAT good.

The longer I stay in this job the more I scream about people's HTML decisions and yet I know, generally, it isn't an individual decision but the decision of a WYSIWYG website maker. And I don't entirely know how to square that with "make cleaner code you assholes" but well. Strangling gestures.

I'm down to the last four Janissaries to paint, and I've tried out some of the terrain products I have, these gel compounds that I couldn't readily find a recipe to substitute for that are meant to go on a base to quickly mimic sand, lava, dirt, mud, what have you. They do work pretty good, their cure time is not 30 minutes. Vallejo. I am looking at you. But I suspect they meant that as, time to cure enough to be paintable or workable rather than time to cure for full hardness, so I will allow it. Anyway, I am definitely going to use the sand one for most of the janissaries, and put some grass tufts down and maybe a skull of their enemies or something.

I had an exhausted on both our parts conversation with my doctor about what to do with the latest virus making the rounds, what vaccines I should get at my November thyroid check and flu shot. We were both very tired. He tried very hard not to refer to monkeypox guidance as "it's a gay disease so they're only treating gay men" but I get the feeling he, too, was not impressed. But the upshot is no new vaccines for me against anything, unless the guidance changes between now and November. And it wouldn't bother me so much if my husband didn't work in a hospital where periodically he will come home and say "Guess what fun new disease we worked with today!" At least they do have protective gear, and I know he is scrubbing regularly and taking appropriate cleaning precautions.

I have a dentist checkup tomorrow. I don't wanna. I am le tired of humans, this week has made me more tired of humans for some reason and I really don't want to go and deal with some in person. I suppose it's a good idea anyway, being as mouthbones are expensive to maintain and fix after the fact and I do have dental insurance these days. I'm still dealing with the effects from when I didn't, 14-15 years ago. Ugh.

I've also been mainlining murder cozies on various streaming services, this time ones that have been recommended to me. Because I'm out of Midsomer and Death in Paradise and Father Brown and Miss Fisher and ... Grantchester? I think that's it. And I need something nice, predictable-ish, and that isn't trying to push emotional buttons, just give me some decent resting noise for a while. Currently I'm on the Brokenwood Mysteries and while there are aspects of it I'm not really loving, I do love the nearly unique thing they have where the small town characters actually reappear. And there's some continuity of their story, including the gay pharmacist who ran for and if I heard that right was elected mayor, and the bar owner/tender who accidentally murdered someone (just meant to make them sick, not murder them) and is now in jail. And relatives of previous victims have shown up now and again. It's refreshing and kind of nice. And I like the gay pharmacist. I also liked the one guy played by one of the dwarves from The Hobbit who played a Shakespeare-obsessed actor and claimed he'd been in Lord of the Rings with Ian McKellan. Nice bit of meta hilarity there.

So it goes. And so I go to spend the evening painting more Janissaries and probably cackling to myself over whatever they're up to in Brokenwood this time.

Oooh I need to be in better habits about posting here. In my defense though, not much has happened. We went grocery shopping. I painted mummies. I did take that one bug to standup at work, and my boss got me about halfway to fixing it pointing out a couple things I either hadn't thought to look at or hadn't yet gotten used enough to the built-in functions to use. And then while she was helping other people I got myself the rest of the way, so we double checked it and it worked. So that was a moment of victory. And then I got another scan afterwards to do, but Friday was pretty quiet, and so was Saturday. And so has today been, a lot of sleepiness and playing phone games and putting sand on mummy bases.

Thankfully Past Me was apparently a smart woman and set the meeting for the last stubborn bug tomorrow for 11, so I don't have to worry about being coherent for a 9am meeting. My sleep schedule lately has been, for some odd reason, go to sleep at 2. Achieve functionality around 10. I don't know why and it's vastly irritating especially since the boy wakes me up when he comes home at around 8, but I suppose I should just go with it since I don't actually have work hours at this point. Or something. I can't decide if I want to just go with it since my work schedule is whatever I say it is or if I want to try and drag my ass back to a more 6/7-11/12 schedule.

I did discover painting the mummies yesterday that I am in dire need of acrylic retarder. I had mixed up a pretty good grayish dead flesh color and wrote down the formula to use for Mumm-Ra the Ever Living, and I was going around the 8 mummies I had left touching the exposed bits of their hands and face with it to give some sense that there was once a human being under all that wrapping, and by the time I got to the last few the mix had almost completely dried. Definitely need some retarder. And now I'm trying not to place another huge order from the online hobby shop just to get some retarder because it's a $4 product and I do not need $100 worth of hobby materials for a $4 product. And yet.

One of the hazards of living in a small town in the mountains is there are only three stores in the area that carry the kind of supplies I need and one of them is fucking Hobby Lobby. We do not patronize the Christofascist hobby store. And the other one is Michael's, which is okay but ugh, and then there's Hobbytown USA. Which doesn't have as much of the D&D gaming type stuff as I tend to play with, but they will have acrylic retarder. So I will stop there, especially since it's by one of our customary grocery stores, rather than pile on a bunch more hobby stuff I don't actually need because my job pays well but I don't need to be that profligate. I can wait until next month. or the month after. Right? Of course right.

I say this, and then I look longingly at the hobby store website anyway. They have Vallejos.

Another thing I've been contemplating doing is I get emails from Stuart Semple now, because this is what my life has turned into during the pandemic, an assload of art supplies I'm too scared to use most of the time. And he sent out this one about a contest, how everyone should mix their own color with his four magic powder color things. And they're neon. And I have Vallejo Matte Medium which I think could be used instead of SuperBase. And I have an assload of minis that need paints. Some of them could definitely be neon. So now I'm contemplating joining this challenge just to paint up some neon minis. Preferably something in a Greekish vibe like the horror of when we all discovered those statues were actually painted. Maybe horror is a strong word but you can't deny there was a moment of extreme dissonance.

Anyway. Anyway anyway. This is my life now. It's quiet and full of art supplies and code that I yell at, which isn't the worst thing in the world, especially now that covid has settled to, well, I'm still pissed that I can't really go anywhere without risking my health and maybe other people's lives, but at least I'm not worried that the boy is going to die or that he's going to bring it home and I'll die. I would still like to go out periodically. But I have a job, and it's one I'm doing from my home, and... things are okay. Which is more than I can say for the rest of the country. So that bit of dissonance is still going on, I guess.

Oh. Right. Did you know that in the middle of the night, and probably even not in the middle of the night, a click beetle in close enough proximity to an outlet can sound exactly like the outlet is making ominous about-to-catch-on-fire noises? I found this out at four in the morning last night. Hence the sleepiness and sullen usage of phone games. Fucking click beetle.

All right, I have no idea why I stopped posting here but time is slipping away from me and so are events, so I'm going to try to make an effort to remember to post here every night just so I have some place I can go back and google and go "oh right. That happened."

Anyway. Today it's not a traumatic event or anything, today is just I made dinner and did a bit of cleaning and spent most of the day playing with my new airbrush. A gajillion years ago (six or seven judging by the last time I bought any amount of minis online) I stopped painting miniatures abruptly and for no reason I can remember, but towards the end of that I was considering getting an airbrush to prime miniatures. Six awful years and (no, this was before the Yam Sham I'm pretty sure) some worsening climate later I picked up minis again thanks to a friend who decided to paint a Warhammer mini like the Arizona Green Tea bottles, and once I got started I went back to contemplating, hey, airbrush.

I still have some primed minis, of course, I have minis in all stages. And a lot of them I think I'm going to dunk in Simple Green and redo them. But I wasn't sure of my aerosol cans, and I had three bottles (black/white/gray) of Vallejo primer to muck around with. So I watched the videos, did some looking around, resurrected my old notes, and ordered an airbrush. (And did some paint on with the Vallejo primer anyway, since it works both ways and I was itching to remember how to paint things.) And today I made myself plug it in and try it even though a compressor is a machine that goes brrr and has air at pressure! Oh no! The scary! But I tried it, and I managed to make it work. I primed 20 minis or so off about a tablespoon or less of primer, was very proud of myself, was even more proud of myself when I cleaned up the airbrush and disassembled it somewhat and rinsed it out with brush cleaner and filtered water and put it back together again.

For Future Me and anyone else who might want to know, I'm using an Iwata Eclipse HP-CS and an Iwata Smart Jet Pro. Which is a bit high powered for minis, but that way if I want to switch up brushes or use it for some other purpose I have the power to change it up a bit.

Anyway. That's what's happened today. Faye, because of course we managed to catch and haven't managed to adopt out yet the two tabbies who were hanging around the house, Faye has started coming up to me for pets. It took a couple months for her to get there, but she got there. I'd still like to adopt her and Spike out but we've had zero bites on the rehome site at the Humane Society. Ugh. Sigh. At least we're used to cats.

Okay. Good habits. Time for bed.

The more I realize I know about this shit, the more terrified I get. Okay, here we go, the painting process. Pictures, again, will come as soon as I plug everything in and get them all set up.

( Priming )

I'm trying to mostly take pictures of the same minis, but it just isn't going to happen, since I'm typing this up as I think of it, so. Sorry?

( Painting )

Sealing! There's not actually that much to sealing, which is why I haven't put it behind a cut. You get some spray sealer and you seal it. I think I've used decoupage sealer, I've used acrylic varnish, it really depends. You can use gloss, semi-gloss, or matte, I tend to use semi-gloss or matte, but it's purely a matter of taste. If you are going to do a lot of photographing your minis I recommend matte to cut down on the glare, unless you have some kind of rig to compensate for it with your camera; gloss really really means gloss.

And that, as they say, is that. That is, the basics of what I know of mini painting. A lot of this will be covered later on as I pick a topic to ramble on, especially layering, feathering, shadowing, washes, ugh. There's so much to cover. Flesh. Zombies. That'll probably be my next one, I've got a bunch of necrosis to study and a bunch of shambling undead to paint. But we shall see. In the meantime, go forth and paint many things! Just don't paint yourself. And don't lick your paintbrushes, that's how you get into trouble.

Take that brush out of your mouth. I saw you.

God help me, I've tripped and fallen back into the wonderful world of miniature painting. It might actually stick this time because it's a hobby I can do an hour or two of (unlike sewing), it's a hobby I've done long enough to be actually decent at it (unlike knitting) and confident at, and I have SO MANY UNPAINTED MINIS DEAR LORD. And evidently I have ended up encouraging a friend to start. Between this and every other thing, I'm just going to go ahead and set up a how-to series on this tag so you all can suffer through me learning and re-learning everything I ever knew or needed to know about mini painting.

SO. THE BASICS.

(Pictures to come after I've taken and uploaded them.)

( Essential Materials )

That's the basics, if you're not sure what you want to do, if you've got a handful of minis and you want to do it well but, eh, maybe you're not going to get that into it? That's what you need. Now, if you're getting really fancy, here's some other stuff you can use.

( The Swanky )

That is a very incomplete list of shit you will need to start mini painting, and some people will argue that some stuff on the swanky list should be on the essentials list, or vice versa. And that's fine! As with everyone, your mileage will vary. But that's my starting list of shit I have lying around, and I'm reasonably sure I have most of what a journeywoman mini painter would use. So, okay, that's enough blather for one day. Give me a couple days and I'll start in on what you do before you start painting.

Like yoga. This is a hobby that will have you hunched over a very small thing with a very small brush for very long periods of time. Oh dear god my back.

So. Dude. I took pictures of my minis? And it took about... maybe an hour, hour and a half of fiddling with the lights (I need to remember NOT to do it in a room where the sun is shining on them) and the camera settings and the setup and so on? But I think I have achieved some pretty damn spectacular mini pictures.

( I cut because I care )

More pictures as I figure out this whole mini picture taking thing. I know the principle and the theory, but I'm still getting used to the practice.

So, yeah, any time you see me going on and on about painting minis, this is what I'm talking about. It's annoyingly sitting still hunched over work, but damned if they don't look really nifty when they're done. I may put something in there for size reference later, most of them are between, um, an inch tall (well, dire rat!) to, maybe four inches tall? No, I'll put in a ruler later so you guys can see. I actually have no idea.