Just when you thought it was safe to swim as a means of escaping spiders...
Underwater Spiders
Friday, June 10, 2011
Thursday, June 2, 2011
An odd thing happened this weekend. Jen, having previously succumbed to my lures to get a passing interest in Malifaux (hey, look at the artwork in this book. Isn't it cool?), suggested that we have people over to do a painting/miniature prep day at our place. This works out well for me, as Gencon is rolling along here in a handful of months and I've ambitiously signed up for this event where I need to have not one, but three different crews from three different factions to compete for full points. This is a doable objective, to be sure, but it does leave me needing to get off my ass and get painting/assembling, particularly given that the third crew currently exists entirely in hypothetical, half assembled pewter form. As such, we invited over friends who similarly need motivation from time to time, as well as one of Jen's girlfriends, for a sort of geeky sewing bee/Game of Thrones marathon.
Partially by kismet, I needed to work on modeling for most of the afternoon/evening (gluing spaghetti to bases for simulated bamboo. Yaaay. Sigh,) and as such my painting supplies were available for common use. Mike and Jon were working off to the side, but the girls, out of nowhere, suddenly found themselves interested in my models. There was a particular attraction to the..*ahem*..more scantily clad female models, and the next thing you know they were off. Paint was slung. Models were colored. Khal Drogo was drooled over (seriously, the dude could be wearing a nighty with eyeshadow and blush and would still be 10x the man I and my male friends combined sum up to) and all of a sudden, I found myself with a painting partner.
The next night, we sat down together and painted some more. Then, the next day, we were driving to the game store to get more models for her to paint (again, wearing very little clothing). The next night, there we were again, her painting and me putting more spaghetti bamboo to bases. And it occurs to me now that I have a partner in this hobby, potentially for life. And that is basically amazing.
If you've never painted a large scale army for a game like 40k or Warhammer Fantasy, you don't quite have the complete picture of just how draining it can be to have to sit down and paint minis alone. Note, I didn't say want to paint them. There is always the people who just can't get enough sitting down and painting thousands of greenskin orc footmen, but tragically I'm not one of them. I like the story. I like playing the games. Getting from point A to point B, however, involves an awful lot of sitting down, squinting at something 25mm tall and cursing because I just put a black spot in the middle of their white dress, resulting in me coming up with excuses for why I need to do something else besides continue working on them. Don't get me wrong, I very much enjoy painting models when I have a strong feeling for I want them to turn out, but somewhere around the 21st space marine holding his bolter and chainsword in the air and shouting I tend to lose interest. This is one of the many reasons I enjoy Malifaux, actually, since the point of the game is to play small model count scraps based more on a gang rather than a full army. Still, there can even be a measure of fatigue to painting on piles of, say, piglets for my gremlin crews that needs overcoming.
The cure to this fatigue, from what I've experienced, is having someone to work with. I know this from the amount of time my friend Jon and I spent painting and working our way through the early seasons of 24 one episode at a time. There's just something about having someone there with you that makes it all very tolerable. Maybe it's just knowing that people are going through it with you. Maybe it's the availability of immediate feedback when you can show off your newly painted model to your paint partner and get some quick gratification that yes, in fact, it did turn out well. Regardless of the reason, 1500 points of Black Templar marines were born from those hours upon hours of Jack Bauer murders (I liked to think of them as training videos for the Astartes I was working on,) a labor I've really never managed to replicate, at least for anything in the gaming hobby.
Now, something even more special has come along. Now, I have this to share with someone I love. We can experiment together (on painting techniques, you pervs.) I'm the one who knows a little bit more about what we're doing, so I can show her tips on how to dry brush. In return, her enthusiasm for the hobby has re-sparked my enthusiasm for the work, resulting in the fact that I'll likely have the models painted and ready to go for the tournament at Gencon (well in advance, actually, at the rate I'm going.) She's not really interested in playing the game yet, but perhaps some day maybe that will change. For the time being, she's content plow through the back-catalogue of minis I have available and getting them at least up to table-top quality so they can be used in games. And, perhaps even more exciting, this doesn't seem to be a passing fancy. Should things work out in the long run, maybe we'll be working together on this sort of geek stuff for quite a long time to come.
Yeah I know. Guess at some point I must have done something right.
Partially by kismet, I needed to work on modeling for most of the afternoon/evening (gluing spaghetti to bases for simulated bamboo. Yaaay. Sigh,) and as such my painting supplies were available for common use. Mike and Jon were working off to the side, but the girls, out of nowhere, suddenly found themselves interested in my models. There was a particular attraction to the..*ahem*..more scantily clad female models, and the next thing you know they were off. Paint was slung. Models were colored. Khal Drogo was drooled over (seriously, the dude could be wearing a nighty with eyeshadow and blush and would still be 10x the man I and my male friends combined sum up to) and all of a sudden, I found myself with a painting partner.
The next night, we sat down together and painted some more. Then, the next day, we were driving to the game store to get more models for her to paint (again, wearing very little clothing). The next night, there we were again, her painting and me putting more spaghetti bamboo to bases. And it occurs to me now that I have a partner in this hobby, potentially for life. And that is basically amazing.
If you've never painted a large scale army for a game like 40k or Warhammer Fantasy, you don't quite have the complete picture of just how draining it can be to have to sit down and paint minis alone. Note, I didn't say want to paint them. There is always the people who just can't get enough sitting down and painting thousands of greenskin orc footmen, but tragically I'm not one of them. I like the story. I like playing the games. Getting from point A to point B, however, involves an awful lot of sitting down, squinting at something 25mm tall and cursing because I just put a black spot in the middle of their white dress, resulting in me coming up with excuses for why I need to do something else besides continue working on them. Don't get me wrong, I very much enjoy painting models when I have a strong feeling for I want them to turn out, but somewhere around the 21st space marine holding his bolter and chainsword in the air and shouting I tend to lose interest. This is one of the many reasons I enjoy Malifaux, actually, since the point of the game is to play small model count scraps based more on a gang rather than a full army. Still, there can even be a measure of fatigue to painting on piles of, say, piglets for my gremlin crews that needs overcoming.
The cure to this fatigue, from what I've experienced, is having someone to work with. I know this from the amount of time my friend Jon and I spent painting and working our way through the early seasons of 24 one episode at a time. There's just something about having someone there with you that makes it all very tolerable. Maybe it's just knowing that people are going through it with you. Maybe it's the availability of immediate feedback when you can show off your newly painted model to your paint partner and get some quick gratification that yes, in fact, it did turn out well. Regardless of the reason, 1500 points of Black Templar marines were born from those hours upon hours of Jack Bauer murders (I liked to think of them as training videos for the Astartes I was working on,) a labor I've really never managed to replicate, at least for anything in the gaming hobby.
Now, something even more special has come along. Now, I have this to share with someone I love. We can experiment together (on painting techniques, you pervs.) I'm the one who knows a little bit more about what we're doing, so I can show her tips on how to dry brush. In return, her enthusiasm for the hobby has re-sparked my enthusiasm for the work, resulting in the fact that I'll likely have the models painted and ready to go for the tournament at Gencon (well in advance, actually, at the rate I'm going.) She's not really interested in playing the game yet, but perhaps some day maybe that will change. For the time being, she's content plow through the back-catalogue of minis I have available and getting them at least up to table-top quality so they can be used in games. And, perhaps even more exciting, this doesn't seem to be a passing fancy. Should things work out in the long run, maybe we'll be working together on this sort of geek stuff for quite a long time to come.
Yeah I know. Guess at some point I must have done something right.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)