A painting rebirth

A couple of old tricks approached in a new way have really changed the painting landscape around here of late.

One was setting myself up with a good wet palette.

I used to use a contraption that required two layers of foam topped with a sheet of cooking paper (or greaseproof, as we call it in NZ).

It was small, slimy, needed to be cleaned out quite often and was a pain to organise. It was much better than no palette at all, but if I hadn't painted for a while it became yet another barrier to actually sitting down and putting brush to figure.

The internal monologue would go something like this: "Hmm, you know, I could just about do a little painting tonight. Ahhh, but  I'd need to rejig that palette before I could begin. Can I be bothered washing it out, cutting the foam sheeting to size and soaking it for the appropriate amount of time?"

And we all know how rhetorical a question that is...

But recently I saw someone somewhere talking about another way to do a wet palette. It needed a shallower tray and instead of fluffing around with foam you used a paper handy towel to hold the water, putting your greaseproof paper onto that. When not using it you put another tray over the top of it (upside down) to keep the moisture in.

I thought about it for a while, then went to the 100yen store and grabbed the required items.

Needless to say, it has been a big success. The paint keeps for days, so the only prep I need to undertake before painting is to remove the top tray. Over time the paint liquifies, so if you do it right you can use older splotches as a wash or mix them with a more recent (and thus thicker) blob to do, say, a cloak, or horses in a slightly different colour.

The second thing has been to use the dip. I tried a dip substitute previously when I was just starting out, but it didn't come out very well so I shelved it. I'd pull it out again for things like pteruges, but more as a wash than anything. Of course, I used Future / Klear, but again as a wash, to bring a paint job together or to provide a protective covering.

And so I laboured for years with spray undercoat, brown wash, block colours, highlight, the odd wash, Future/Klear protective coat, spray varnish.

It works great, but it takes a long time and there are various steps that you end up dreading, and this all contributes to painting fatigue (or laziness, in my case!).

Like everyone I've experimented with various ways to improve and to speed up painting (some of them catalogued in painful detail on this blog!) and met with varying degrees of success.

The trouble for me is limited time, limited motivation, and a large lead mountain.

Anway, I again came across some posts (isn't the internet great?!!) and realised that maybe I should try the dip again, only this time using it more strategically. "Bugger it," I thought; "nothing's getting painted without it, so why not give it a crack?"

A little experimentation showed what I'd been doing wrong when I last used it: a) I'd been too heavy handed, and b) I'd used it on the wrong colours.

It seemed that the tricks were to dip your brush in water before putting it into the mixture itself (and then to come back with a brush or tissue paper to get rid of any pooling on the figure), and to use it on muted colours, coming back with a highlight if needed.

Having painted almost 50 figures a week since these changes were implemented, they have helped me to put a serious dent in the Dark Age leadpile - so much so that I'm probably going to need to buy more to 'fill in a few gaps in the collection'.

So far so good. I guess we'll have to see how long it lasts!

A new approach to figures

This year has been pretty heavy going on the painting front. I really enjoy putting finished units and armies on the table, but I've not painted anything for months, and when I have sat down and tried to, I simply haven't been able to bring myself to put in the effort required.

I will, for example, pull out my three-quarters done Samnites and find I simply don't want to do the work. The paint jobs are uninspired, what I've done on the body armour looks shoddy, I hate to think about what approach to take for shields, there are areas that my block painting has missed, and the feeling that I'm not sure if I can get the figures looking as good as I want them to has become strangely insurmountable.

It's not usually my style to baulk at finishing figures off - starting them has always been more my problem - so I haven't been quite sure what to do.

And it's a similar story for all the other partly or nearly finished figures I have lying around - the 380 Caesarian Romans, the DBA Saxons, the extra cataphracts for Magnesia, the 6mm WWII armies, and a few other bits and pieces.

In short, as far as motivation and imagination go, I'm running on the smell of an oily rag.

Some of this stems from my last trip back to NZ, when it was brought home to me that I only have a limited time to make the most of work and self-improvement options, and spending the evenings locked away with a paint brush and mornings scouring the web for new figures is not a productive use of time and energy right at this moment.

So, what to do?

I want to be able to continue gaming, so it seems to me that the only thing for it is to send some of the things away to get painted.  I've found it hard to justify the expense in the past but I think that now it just has to be done.

To this end I've taken up a small extra job writing columns for a webzine and am going to use the income from that, and savings from halting all unnecessary hobby purchases, to pay to get the figures done.

Funnily enough I find it far easier putting together a 1000 word article than I do painting figures, so hopefully it will be a win-win situation.

Also, getting the bulk of the figures done professionally will ideally enable me to later attend to the partly-painted ones at my leisure and perhaps with a returning sense of enjoyment rather than a surfeit of subconscious guilt!

We'll see how it goes, anyway...

Musings on projects: their start, middle, and end.

A few days ago, while reading one of fellow ancients enthusiast Trebian's updates on how his Classical Indian army is progressing, I professed admiration for a work ethic that could see figures bought, painted, based and recorded on the blog within the month, and contrasted my own feeble attempts at starting a project with the powerful record he exhibits on army completion.

He kindly offered to outline his method on getting projects underway and completed, and has been as good as his word, as this post shows.

While I read it with trepidation, his post actually makes me feel quite a lot better.  Not only is it full of useful tips (set aside family time being one that my wife might appreciate!), but it helped me to realise that I approach this whole caper from a different angle, this being that 'I started late and have a lot of catching up to do'.

I know very well that my biggest problem is the time lag between the buying of lead and the getting of it onto the painting table. Trebian's solution is to not buy until you complete your current project, but this would not work for me, for my wargaming mostly is one project: the Classical era Mediterranean!

What I have tended to do is keep an eye out for good deals on the figures I need to advance this crazy scheme, and have bought when the yen was strong and/or the price good, and (thank the Old Ones) when international shipping was more reasonable.  My Macedonians, Successors and Achaemenid Persians, for example, were picked up at between 20% and 60% of what I would be paying for them now, and that does not include the recently greatly increased shipping costs.

So I think I can safely say that (aside from getting sidetracked with moderns, Crossfire or ACW from time to time...) this approach has been a sensible one in financial terms, and I can also just about square it with Trebian's method.  As I said before, the Classical Med. is (technically...) one project, isn't it?

As far as painting goes, when I do paint I use the production line method.  I paint in large batches, and usually choose these to augment the armies that I already have.  I will do a whole consular army, or expand the Spanish, Gauls or Numidians of my Carthaginian army into a force in their own right, or perhaps enough Successor cavalry to allow me to do Magnesia, or some other similar mid-term target. So I do set myself goals; it's just that it takes a particular set of circumstances to force me to meet them.

I have to admit though that there are a number of things that will stop me picking up a paint brush and/or do get me out of rhythm, and I cannot match Trebian's discipline in this regard!

1) The seasons in Japan.  Some times of the year are just not good for painting, priming or dull-coating.  It's too humid, too hot, and the paint / spray doesn't like it.  Summer is basically a write-off, and it can take me a long time to get back on the horse once I fall off it.

2) Whims.  I have a lot of them, and they tend to be all or nothing.  I'll get back to playing the guitar, or exercising, or writing, or painting, or studying, or gaming, or following the (mis)fortunes of the NZ cricket team, or commenting on yahoo groups, but I can't seem to do much more than two at once.

3) Existential questions.  Sometimes I feel guilty about gaming.  I know it sounds a bit odd, but I do occasionally feel that I could be doing something more worthwhile, like writing more seriously, or actually getting good at Japanese, or building up some skills that will allow me to bring the family back to New Zealand one day.  These do cause the chain to drag at times.

4) Painting issues.  I'm afraid that I do fuss about a bit with my painting. Unfamiliar armies can give me a bit of a headache, and as I've had to redo a large number of figures because I was a very crappy painter when I started out I now like to try harder to get it right first time.  I will therefore mutter to myself about paint schemes, or research new techniques, and sometimes I just get nervous that I won't do the figures justice and so put things off.

All of these things mean that there are times that it's quite an effort to get started.  On the plus side, once I do get underway I usually get a lot done in a relatively short space of time, even if I start to go a bit nutty while doing so.

Moving on to project completion, I have to say that to this point there hasn't been too much of it in the Trebian sense.  I have nearly finished my 6mm Americans, but not quite; I have finished my Ancient Spanish, but even with these there are some command stands to do.  I guess I see progress in terms of steps (ah, I can now do Cannae, or Dertosa, or Zama, or Pydna, or Magnesia, or lose gloriously to Luke's '70s Czechs with my own models), rather than in 'army done' terms.

So, thanks to Trebian, I've sat down and thought it over, and while it may not be obvious, I actually feel a bit encouraged.  I may still take a long time to get things done and to get things done right, but on the whole I don't perhaps do as badly as I sometimes like to think!

What motivates you to paint?

EDIT: poll is playing up, so sorry about that (see below).


One of the reasons I started blogging was to motivate myself to paint, and to paint better, because I would be posting pictures of the figures here.

To a certain extent this has worked, but one problem I have is that for space reasons I tend to either paint or play, and thus do not combine the two very well.  I need to get on a roll to paint, and when I get out of the habit of sitting down with the brushes (and it doesn't take me long to get out of the habit!) it can be a real struggle to pick one up again.

So, my question to you, dear reader(s), is what is it that makes you pick up the paint brush and paint?  I don't mean just thinking about painting, or researching painting, or - God forbid - ordering more figures to paint; I mean actually sitting down, picking up your brush, opening a paint pot and doing it.

On the top right of this blog you should now be able to see a poll, so if you feel like answering, please choose as many of the options there as you feel apply to you.

I'm fascinated by what it is that gets people from the 'hmm, I really should do some painting' to the 'look, I've just finished a unit!' stage, so if you feel that the poll does not allow you to express your experience properly, by all means add comments below.  In fact, I'd be very happy for you to comment for any reason :)

Many thanks,
Aaron

EDIT: sorry all; for some reason the poll seems to be malfunctioning.  It keeps shedding answers and is not remembering earlier responses.  I'm not quite sure what the problem is, but it looks like it's not recording the information properly.  Thanks for all your responses, and sorry for the odd behaviour of the poll widget thingy.  It was looking good there for a moment :(