Painting: washers v. blenders

Well, it's office hours in good old Bartlett hall which can only really mean one thing: blog. Oh, I know what you're saying. "What if a student walks in?" Yeah, right. Like my students are going to walk their happy asses across campus to see me before the grades are out and there is any need for whining. Come now.

So, as the rest of my cast and crew who share my office hours with me at this particular time in this particular place are studying vehemently one thing or another, and as I have forgotten to bring my next African American Satire book to read, here I am. And there you are.

Today's post, or at least this post, is about painting miniatures which will probably be pretty boring for those of you not the slightest bit remotely interested in painting. I promise that when I get home and have some access to my pictures, I will put up some examples.

Harlaquins: 1, 2, 3, 4

I'll start with the useful information. This is the best site on the internet for painting: Dr. Faust's Painting Clinic, and aside from being investigawesome, it also lists some life saving (or at least money saving tips), such as common household glycerine will act as a retardent for acrylic paints thus allowing the paint to remain "wet" for longer. Good to know because Glycerine runs about a $1 a bottle at any drug store, and Cream coat retardent is about $5 a bottle for a smaller ammount. Delta Creamcoat makes the only acrylic retardent that I could find for a comparison. I imagine that GW paints would run twice that if they made a retardent (or decent paints for that matter).

Anyways, the newest thing that I've tried from the painting clinic is the magic wash. Go on the side bar to clinic-to "inks and washes"-to "magic wash." The effect is this--you buy a bottle of Future floor shine stuff and you mix it four
parts water to one part Future and you use that the way you would water with a normal wash and vwalah, magic wash, and this stuff really works. But before I get into my full endorsement of this product I must first explain a necessary component to the process and that is, namely, what is a wash?

Look, miniatures are small. Light does not fall correctly on them, which means that they don't shadow correctly. A miniature that is not highlighted and/or shadowed will look...well, lame. Therefore, the main trick to the art of miniature painting is to learn how to shadow and highlight, and most miniature painters are defined by their reliance on one of these two tactics. I am most certainly a shadow painter, which means, amongst other things, that the miniatures I admire most are painted by highlight painters. They have mastered a skill that I am, quite frankly, not too good at.

Let's define that difference a little further. A highlight painter paints the base color and then blends upward to lighter and lighter colors for parts of the miniature which are clearly less shadowy. The blending here requires that the paint stay wet and then you sort of mix the paint on the miniature. Sort of, anyways. I can give a better description of this later, and I'm sure I will but for this blog that seems sufficient.

Okay, a shadow painter paints the miniature a base color and then washes or stains areas darker to get the effect of shadow. Mind you, this should ultimately mean that the only thing that is left the base color is effectively a highlight, and so there's a whole philosophy for shadow painters on correctly picking a base color. You want the miniature to be red, well then, you're base color is light orange, then you shadow orange-red, red, dark red, reddish brown, and finally black, all in various amounts. This is a simplified version of the process.

The trick here, and the reason that magic wash is magic, is that you create a stain or wash by mixing paint with water (for those of you for whom all this is
new and are interested, put paint on the brush and keep dabbing in your water until the wash looks less like thin paint, and more like dirty water). Well, water doesn't dry "right" for the effect you're trying to achieve with a wash. Let's try it this way, theres a crease in say the inside of a miniature's elbow. Perfect place for a shadow, so you take your dark wash and you apply it to the inside of the elbow. Most of the wash goes into the groove but some of it rises up onto the inside of the forearm and upper arm staining that area as well. You have to fix that or else the shadow in the groove will not stand out. Okay say you've been really careful and/or fixed the previous erroneous stain (and keep in mind fixing a stain isn't easy, by the time you get to the inside of elbows your talking stains of stains of stains--you can't just paint the area the base color anymore), well when water dries it does this one last osmosis trick that really sucks. The stain is a thin line in the inside of the elbow when it is wet, but as it dries it leaches out of the crevice onto areas that you didn't want stained at all. All of my miniatures, for this reason, look better wet than dry. They look the way I want them to look wet. Dry, they are simply a compromised version of my vision.

Okay, so Magic Wash. I don't know how it does it, and I don't care. First of all, it really doesn't stain until it reaches the nooks and crannies and then once there it dries. You have to worry about it staining the wrong areas a lot less than you have to do with simple water washes. Furthermore, and this is probably the best part, there is no osmosis factor. The damn stuff does not leach. It's great.

Now, a wash painter obviously relies on the leeching a little bit. So, you still have the previous options, but if you're trying to shadow the little grooves along a hose on space marine armor then this stuff is for you. I know of no other product on the market that will create this effect. Future floor shine polish stuff costs about $5 a gallon.

Good painting to you all.

Gravity's Rainbow-Tarot: The Magician

Here is the card. Here's a brief bit from section 1.

All right let's get down to basics. As Gravity's Rainbow, or at least, this first section, are about the rise and fall of the V-2 rocket (quite literally), it is no wonder that the figure in the tarot card is both pointing up and down. Of course, we may think of the most famous picture of Plato and Aristotle, and that's part of it too, but on the most basic level, there's a rocket up in the air and it's coming down to Earth. In fact, in this first section of the book, Pirate Prentice can see the vapor train of an incoming rocket as its acceleration and lift are falling off, getting smaller, until it levels, reaches zero, and arcs downward, thereby going "Beyond the Zero." Everybody with me so far.

What's more impressive about this card is that it represents all things. The magician has all four suits of the lower arcana in front of him. He's wearing a belt made of a snake that's eating it's own tail, above his head is the infinity symbol. The flowers are lilies and roses. What we have here is a man standing in the midst of infinity--infinite cycles, and infinite power. Of course, there's a danger--his cande's burning at both ends after all. But let's dwell on the infinite for a moment.

First of all, this card is a culmination of the planes of existence, material, intellectual, and spiritual. And the scene represented by the card is centered on Pirate Prentice who is himself a culmination of the spiritual, physical, and material due to his ability to have other people's fantasies for them (Pirate has other people's day dreams so they don't have to), his role in British Intelligence (he knows more about the war effort than most others), his geographical role (he's a fence and peddles in the wares of other nations), his having just awoken (making him a conduit between the dream and "real" world), his position between past and future (Pirate's is the first flashback out of this section's time frame), and of course, to this other world which will finally emerge at the end of the novel when it is revealed that Gravity's Rainbow has been a movie, but the bomb constructed in the movie is actually going to fall on the audience watching the movie. Pirate has other people's fantasies, the way that the director of your favorite movie has your fantasies. He is a conduit between the culture's needs, your personal needs, and the world of the cinema where both these needs can be fulfilled.

Of course, Pirate is flirting with madness, but this is because the fantasists for which he is surrogate are schizophrenic--wanting the true grit of the war story without all the horror and moral ambiguity. Pirate means to deliver, but what the hell is that story supposed to look like. What is that day dream? For the most part, this represents the greatest tension in the novel Gravity's Rainbow. The reason for this tension, however, is not given until the last page of this gigantic work, and thus the last page, re-defines the first, and you are inclined to believe, just as with The Crying of Lot 49 (another of Pynchon's novels), that you must now read the novel again armed with your new frame of reference. Thus the cycle is repetitious, another likely meaning of the references to infinity inside the Magician's card.

Gravity's Rainbow-Tarot: overview.

I'm working this out as something of a larger scheme that might never come to fruition. Nevertheless, what I'm about is the book Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. This book was first handed to me by the elusive Mike Ruiz, one of my oldest friends who has sadly up and disapeared on me and the whole world. If you know where he is, or have any news, it would be appreciated.

Back to the point, Mike handed me Gravity's Rainbow some time around 1995 with the comment, "you've got to look at this book. You can open to any page and it's just funny as hell." What this suggests is sort of a loss of narrative line. One can open anywhere, begin reading, and finish once one has attained the requisite guffaw. But what if, and I know this is bold, one began at the beginning as one does other books, and did not finish until the end. What then? Well, as it turns out this was Pynchon's intention, but as anyone who has tried this venture will tell you, the book does not gain linear cohesion--it actually digresses in understandability from the snap shot readings that were favorable to Mike. That is to say, read two pages and those two pages, taken out of context, will actually have more meaning than if you read all 760 pages. There is no brain drain in the two pages. The 760 page read, however, is something only the deranged or determined should try, and not simply because...well, that's a lot of pages. No. There's just very little sense to be made, except when there is--and then that sense is brilliant.

Nevertheless, I'll give a sort of example by way of introduction to this project. The first part of the book (of which there are four) is entitled 'Beyond The Zero,' and what that means, as with any other of Pynchon's extended metaphors, is multi-faceted, and not the point of this writing to explain. Suffice to say that the book is divided into 21 "scenes" spannng the nine days between December 18 and December 26, 1944. What is not made clear from the beginning of this section is that there is some correspondence between this part of the book and the Tarot. In fact, the Tarot is only mentioned off-handedly until much later in the book (page 746, Weissman's Tarot). Critics, however, have seen the Kabbalistic nature of the book is indespensible to the book's narrative and as such have, as I believe, rightly ascribed the first twenty one scenes of the first of the book's sections to the Tarot--and most specifically to the upper Arcana.

If the upper Arcana is taken in total, we have twenty two cards, numbered 0 to 21. But of course, the book begins "Beyond The Zero." This being one of a myriad contexts for the word zero. I like this because it has a certain "Pynchonian" charm to it. It's just the type of clue he would leave, and so I will supress my idea that the first section of the book represents cards 0-20, and that the last card is represented in the remainder of the book. At least, I will suspend my inclination until it proves fruitless to start at card 1 rather than card 0 (and yes, the "zero" also has to do with binary, such that when one is "Beyond the Zero," one is switched on, or in an electronic sense, not grounded, or in a computer sense, not set to null--with all the spiritual or language conotations that are carried with those terms).

Anyways, this is my side project for now. Enjoy, and oh yeah, write by W.A.S.T.E..

About Maxwell

Tammy also asked about Max in her letter, and what happenned. Well, Max died. It's sort of as simple and as sad as that. We woke up in the morning and found him. He was not trying to hide, so we don't think he sufferred long, and he wasn't foaming so we don't think he got into anything that killed him. The doctor offerred to perform an autopsy, but I didn't see the point. Knowing why our cat was dead wasn't going to make him any less dead. Plus, I sort of didn't want to know. Maybe that sounds a lot like self-deception, but self-deception has its time and place. I want to believe that Maxwell went to sleep and just never woke up. I'd hate to think that he sufferred. Despite his late night antics, he was a very very good cat, and he will be missed.

Pictures of Lynn

Tammy writes:

So I've seen your school, your house, your cats...when the hell are you gonna post pictures of you and Lynne????????????

Good question. Let's be honest about this. The cats are not going to stop letting me pet them if I put bad pictures of them up on the internet. I will live here, no matter what side of the house I photograph. This is not, necessarilly, the same for Lynn. I can't just snap a picture and put it on the website on the off chance that she doesn't like that picture and decides to beat me with a stick. But, I will say this, I have been working on your problem.

And this is my answer: wedding photos. Pictures taken from our day. I say our in italics not because it wasn't our day. It most certainly was, but given that I hadn't slept in 48 hours and they did about 10 minutes of primp work on me, and Lynn had two pretty good nights of sleep and was seeing stylists and beauticians all day, it seems clear who they wanted looking good in the photos. So without further ado:




Yes, that's my wife at the press conference after the wedding. See that hand? that's Wolf Blitzer! And of course, Lynn and I together



Itn't she cute. Hands off boys. I've made an honest woman out of her.