how to paint and all that

Perhaps you've noticed a few minor changes, here and there, to my blog. Well, good. I decided to trick out what I could do. I can now write a blog from anywhere, I have a search function, and of course, a much needed quote from The Crying of Lot 49, from which book this blog gets its name. The last thing I was thinking of doing was putting up a home page that included some of my poetry including the poem Monstro. Hopefully, that link will work. In any case, I realized suddenly, once I found my poetry, that I have 131 pages of the stuff. Now not all of it's good, but still, some of it is. Will see though on the webpage and poetry mix. That stuff, looking back over it, is pretty personel in a lot of cases.

Anyway, I promised some commentary on painting, and damn it, I mean to give it. The question on some of your minds might be something like how do you do that. Well, first of all you have to something about painting miniatures. The really hard part is not generally the thing that impresses people. In fact, those little tricks are often ways of getting around real work.

The real work is in shading the miniature. Why? Well, if you don't paint, you may have the idea that red paint thins out to pink, or reddish orange, or something like that. Actually, it doesn't. Red thins out to thin red. That means that when...say you're painting a miniature's leg red and you want to highlight the knee area, you cannot simply expect the red to thin out at the knee, thus creating the highlight effect. As a matter of fact, because the miniature is only an inch and half tall, it is actually necessary to exagerate shadow to get it right for if the miniature was actually a six foot tall soldier from the future.

The problem is this, it would be easy enough to just take a more vibrant of the color that you're painting in (reddish orange for red, for instance), but if you just paint the highlight onto the miniature it doesn't look right. It looks....well...just painted on. That means that you have to blend.

Blending is done when you take the paint, while it is still wet, and you mix a very very very small ammount of the lighter color into the highlighted area. In effect, you are mixing right on the miniature. Paint can be kept wet for longer by adding a retardent, like glycerine (which sells in drug stores for about two dollars). Highlighting can then be done this way. The problem isn't highlighting though, or at the very least it isn't just highlighting. Don't get me wrong, highlighting is a royal pain in the butt, requiring you to have some intuition about how long paint will dry and how much to add--add too much and there's really nothing you can do to take paint away. The real problem is shading. Shading is done exactly like highlighting except its done in the recesses of the miniature--say, between the fingers on a glove or on the divited areas of breathing tubes. Shading is a pain because, not only do you have to deal with the pressures of highlighting, but now you have to do it in tight spaces on the miniature. The grills of face masks, the underskirting of armor, etc..

Keep in mind something else about paint. Put too much on the brush and it will glop. Put too little on and it will fade, and just as with drawing, you really don't want to paint a straight line in more than one brush stroke, else that line will look bulging or crooked. Easy mistakes on little miniatures are magnified. That means you have to mix your paint with a little water, but not enough to make it runny.

In any case, having said all this, you might realize that one of the most difficult things to paint is something like pants. The highlights are too subtle, the shadows come too quick for you to really make them look like a natural progression from light to dark. The bunching up of pants on a harlaquin, for instance, takes place in about a milimeters space.

So, how can you get around all that? Assuming, of course, that you wanted to get around all of that. Well, what I for a miniature like a harlaquin, is I highlight and shadow the lighter of two colors that I will be using. That is, if his pants are going to be checkerboard of blue and black, I highlight and shadow the blue. I'm not even sure this is necessary. The trick is to cover up all that work you're not doing with checkerboards, which look a hell of a lot harder than they actually are to paint. Simply paint out the criss cross in black, start at the bottom coloring in each square, and when necessary square off mistakes. Keep in mind, black covers any mistake you make in any color, but only some colors will cover black. You're best friend here is white. Fix in white, and then paint the fix red.

I'll give more tips later, but here's one last one. One of the easiest way to achieve shadow and highlight is to skip the glycerine altogether. Paint the area the highlight color and then make incredibly watered down versions of the color to "wash" the area with. The darker colors will stain the area, though not so much that the highlights will not come through, and if you are good with diminishing ammounts of pain will relegate the dark colors to only the deep recesses. In any case, that's kind of how it's done.