chaos and noise

2012 is the Year of the Thesis, but I will also be doing some painting as well. It's become a bit of a tradition to track that, so I know what I need to finish (and how much I've done so far). This is the 2012 Uberlist - a list of the painting projects that I've started (italics), finished (strikeout) or simply added to the to-do list (regular font).

If you're interested in seeing what's on my painting desk at the moment, you can find the list ( behind the cut )

I'm beginning to lose track of what I need to paint when. These are my current painting deadlines, for the next two months. To be fitted into one day a week (around my PhD), and an hour a night on some weeknights.

Monday, March 7th
Commission job.
To paint: Razorback tank and turret.
For: Denis F.

Sunday, March 13th
35 point Warmachine/Hordes tournament at Battle Bunker.
Taking: Cygnar (Major Victoria Haley).
To paint: Black 13th, Gunmage Strike Team (3 models).

Friday, March 24th
Commission job.
To paint: 6 Infinity (Yu Jing) figures.
For: Nick.

Saturday, March 26th
35 point Warmachine/Hordes tournament at Hampton Games Club.
Taking: Khador (Butcher + 5 Heavy Warjacks + 4 wreck markers)
To paint: all of them (10 models). These are a commission job for Joel D.

Friday, April 15th (Melbourne in Flames weekend)
Commission job.
To paint: 10 Horrors of Tzeentch, 9 Chaos Havocs, Firestorm Armada fleet.
For: Ian A

Friday, April 15th (games weekend)
Commission job.
To paint: Hell Dorado starter box, Doppelsoldners & Captain, Swashbuckler (9 models)
For: David P

Friday, April 22nd
50 point Warmachine/Hordes touranment at Conquest.
Taking: General Adept Nemo (list 1), Major Victoria Haley (list 2).
To paint: Stormblade unit and Unit Attachment (8 models).

Seems like ages since I posted any painted figures in here. It probably has been, as I rarely remember to set up the camera before sending commission figures away...

These are some of the figures I'm working on for Arcanacon. Technically I'm running the tournament, and so won't be playing. On the Saturday night, however, there's a grudge match between two pressgangers: me (representing Melbourne) and Terry (representing Adelaide). He's assembling a pious group of Morrowan paladins; I've opted for the far more interesting Dark Twin in the form of a murderous crew of Thamarites.

These are some of the figures finished at 3am yesterday...

Fiona the Black:


Mariner, Heavy Warjack:


Buccaneer, Light Warjack:


Vanguard, Light Warjack:

I went to the third Little Wars event on Sunday, and had a great time. After finding out about Larb's death the previous night, I wasn't entirely sure if I'd make it out of the house on Sunday morning. I'm glad that I did, though.

Little Wars is an annual one-day wargaming event, bringing together clubs, stalls, painters and sculptors from around the country. It's held at Club Tivoli on Dandenong Road: sharing the space with the German Club. As a happy side effect there's a restaurant (good German food, but terribly slow service) and a licensed bar. A pint of DAB with some friends goes a long way to lifting my mood.

Little Wars is also home to a painting competition run by the local OzPainters crew. Despite my late arrival, I managed to get an entry in just before they started judging. They made the final cut but didn't place, which was nice - same result as last year, when I entered another figure from the same army. I didn't paint them with a competition in mind, so it's nice to know that my gaming figures are at a decent standard when compared with the rest of the entries. Next year, I'd like to work on some entries aimed specifically at the competition. You can see the full results (including photos of almost all entries) here.

These are the figures I entered: Remotes from the Nomad army, from the game Infinity. They are some of the most complicated metal figures I've ever assembled (even the Tsyklon's ammo feed is a separate piece, needing to be glued in two places), but I think they're worth the effort. For an idea of the scale, the bases are 40mm across.

Salyut Zond, carrying an EVO repeater for hacking support


Reaktion Zond, with a heavy machinegun and mines


Vertigo Zond, with a guided missile launcher


Tsyklon Sputnik, with a spitfire and marker

I don't seem to get much time for painting my own figures these days. Tournaments are a good incentive: they guarantee that I can play a few games, and give me a deadline to finish painting things by... without the deadline, I don't seem to do anything but commission work.

I've just finished assembling four Valkyries for a commission job, and will be getting the airbrush out later on this afternoon. They are huge, and are probably the most complex plastic kit I've assembled. I'm looking forward to painting them. The airbrush takes care of all the boring part (basecoats and shading), and lets me spend more time weathering the figure: adding paint chips, rust, dust and soot to make it look less like a shiny plastic toy.

I'm playing in a Malifaux tournament on Sunday. It uses about 4-6 models per side, and has a deck of cards instead of dice. The figures are a nice mix of weird west, steampunk and Victorian horror. I have a painting diary here to keep track of what I've done, and new techniques I've experimented with.

I've only tried two games so far, but have been enjoying the game so far. The tournament will have four rounds, which means I'll know a lot more about the game by the end of it...

aeliel is up in Blackwood this weekend, giving food (and love, and attention) to two attention-starved‡ dogs while her parents are on holidays. I spent most of the day out at Battle Bunker teaching some new people how to play Warmachine, and then got home and remembered about a painting competition entry that I needed to send off. Unfortunately, the laptop that talks to my card reader is currently in Blackwood...

Many thanks to miss_rynn for letting me borrow her computer to download some photos. Also, happy stealth-birthday to bishi_wannabe (for the remaining five minutes!). I like living in bike-riding distance of people, as it's nice being able to drop in on people at super-short notice :)

WargamerAU has just started an Iron Painter competition: pairs of competitors, each given two weeks to paint something to match a fairly vague theme. The theme for Round 1 is Weather / Whether, which had me stumped to begin with. My entry was done in a bit of a rush... assembled on Thursday, and painted on Friday.

I decided to paint a model that I bought during last year's Bushfire Appeal auction. It's a Cygnaran Ironclad, which I didn't bother putting into paint stripper - I just painted straight over the old colours. I also bought some soft pastels (Raw Umber, Burned Umber, Raw Sienna) from Riot! art supplies, and decided to interpret the theme as meaning "weathering" - the dust, mud, oil and rust that machinery develops when left exposed to the elements.

Pastels are very easy to use. I painted some water-based matte varnish onto the figure, then dunked the brush into a pile of powdered pigment, and dusted it straight into the wet varnish. Repeat that a couple of times (until the area is dry), and then you have a dusty-looking surface that won't rub clean as soon as it touches something.

Here's my entry:



‡ That's if you listen to the dogs. Humans might tell you that the animals have had regular meals and visitors for the last week, but the dogs are convinced that they've been abandoned forever by their owners...

I was meant to leave the house today. Instead I started experimenting with using an airbrush to paint 25mm figures, and lost track of time during the afternoon...

It's already proving itself well worth the investment. I've basecoated and highlighted a Skaven team for Blood Bowl, used mossy greens and earthy browns to shade some Kingdom of Avalon figures for Alkemy, and prepared some Infinity figures for painting. When I've finished work on the study guide books, I'm looking forward to clearing this desk and basecoating an army of Deathwing figures that have been sitting in a box for almost two years. As it is, I've now covered every available flat surface with basecoated models :)

The airbrush isn't very good for applying an undercoat, as the paint can easily rub off a metal or plastic surface. However, it's fantastic at applying colour and shading over a black undercoat - so I use cheap black enamel spraycans from Bunnings, and then airbrush my colours over the top.

With the Infinity Nomads, I'm trying out some new techniques for zenithal lighting - painting each figure with a clear light source in mind (in my case, directly overhead). I've airbrushed white over the black undercoat to pre-shade the figures, helping to pick out areas that should have their highlights or shadows exaggerated. It gives the figures some subtle monotone shading, which I'll try to preserve by painting very thin layers of colour over the top of.

The airbrushed layers are very easy to paint over, too. No brush strokes, no globs of paint obscuring details, and a very matte finish that takes paint and glazes well. I think I've passed another turning point in my painting style, as I'm likely to use the airbrush to prepare all my figures from now on. It feels light years away from the techniques I started with. I'm also a bit horrified to realise that I started painting twenty years ago, and have been steadily working since then...

Chapters for the Economics study guide are beginning to appear in my email account, which means that the time before and after Christmas will probably become a mad rush to get the book ready for printing on January 6th.

I've almost finished painting some Imperial Guard tanks for Dave T, which I've been enjoying so far: I'm using a bunch of new techniques from the Forgeworld Master Class book (thanks fetnas!), making them the most detailed vehicles that I've painted so far. The airbrush is a godsend for this sort of work, and hopefully it will help me to clear out a lot of my unpainted backlog next year.

Then, I have two figures to sculpt for lena_supercat and altheas's wedding cake. I'm planning to use Sculpey for these, over an aluminium wire armature. Sculpey is much easier to rework and add detail to, but it means I'll have to finish an entire figure in one go - once it's been baked, I can't readily add putty to it.

January's commission painting project is a Blood Bowl team for one of the guys playing at CanCon. I want to sculpt my own Blood Bowl figures one day (for the Nurgle's Rotters team), but I'm unlikely to get motivated any time soon... there are too many other games that I want to play first.

The rest of January will be occupied by writing a literature review, and a draft of my methodology chapter. There's a large shipment of qualitative methodology textbooks inbound, courtesy of the remainder of my 2009 research funds :)

I really want a holiday, but I think I'll have to wait until February as I seem to be working three jobs at the moment. At least the summer of commission work madness will help to pay for some of our furniture, and a new computer for aeliel...

Three P's that are consuming most waking moments at the moment. And in the heat, I'm spending most of my moments awake.

We now have a working phone line in the new house, which I assume Netspace is responsible for - it's now been a week since I called about setting up a new connection. Unfortunately, the phone connection doesn't actually appear in our Netspace control panel, and so isn't available for me to relocate our broadband connection to...

Publishing:

I have corrections and updates for one and a half study guides (National Politics Units 3 & 4, and International Politics Unit 1). In the next few weeks, the remaining chapters for IntPol Unit 2 will arrive, and then there's an Economics guide due in December. Due to major changes to the course, the Economics book is being completely re-written for 2010. Judging by the number of tables and graphs in the current book, layout for the new version could take quite a bit of work.

I'm going home at lunchtime today to work on the Politics books. I could work from the air-conditioned comfort of my windowless box at RMIT as I'll be using my laptop. Unfortunately I need a proper mouse for InDesign, and mine has just run out of batteries... and I'm loathe to buy more rechargeable ones when there's a box of them at home.

Painting:

Three Ulthwé walkers, currently almost finished. I've been asked to add rare-earth magnets to all the possible weapons, so I still have a handful of weapons to finish painting today. I hope the house isn't too hot to paint in.

Four Imperial Guard tanks, assembled and ready for magnets in all the optional bits. I'd like to buy an airbrush to paint these with, as there are many more of them on the horizon. Unfortunately a decent double-action airbrush and compressor (reserve tank, pressure regulator, inline moisture trap) are likely to cost around $500, so I might have to paint them by hand.

PhD:

Literature review chapter has fallen by the wayside. I've gathered a bunch of articles to read through, but as it's not directly needed for any other tasks it's been put on hold at the moment. I still feel like there are dozens of articles that I need to track down, though I'm not sure if that feeling ever goes away.

There's a student conference for the CRC in December, up in Sydney. I'll be flying up early on the Tuesday morning, going to training workshops during the day, and presenting a poster the following day - and then flying home on the Wednesday evening.

I'm starting to wade through the paperwork for my Ethics Application, as I need approval before going any further with the research part of my project. Most of it should be pretty straightforward (while I'm dealing with people, I'm not trying to exploit them for anything) but there are many, many pages of forms to fill out. Most of it will feed into my Methods and Methodology chapter though, so it's still a useful exercise to do.


In non-work news, Sunday was our first wedding anniversary :) aeliel and I spent most of the day lounging around the house, and cooking or eating lots of good food. We've also started unpacking wedding presents that have been in storage for the last year, so it's like receiving them all over again, and actually getting to enjoy the gifts properly this time.

Some time soon we'll have a housewarming (once we have furniture for people to sit on, and fewer boxes full of stuff). Ye been warned!

I recently finished a figure for the sci-fi game Infinity, and entered it into the Little Wars painting contest where it made the finals, but didn't place.

The figure is about 50mm tall. Compared to the other Infinity models, it's quite a large mech - most of the human figures are sculpted in "true 25mm" scale. I originally painted it in very cold colours, and then decided to go back and use much warmer whites and browns to contrast with the turquoise. I think this works much better with the warm colours on the base: rusty metal and yellowing grass.

Some old Eldar transfers were used to add some more detail on the flat surfaces, and I used a torn piece of sponge to put rust and paint chips onto the figure. The real trick is making the details small enough, so that a relatively small figure ends up looking like it could be huge...

I also played around with ink and varnish on the ammunition feed (which was tricky to pin in place, as it's barely wider than my smallest drillbit). Some of them were a bit strange (yellow ink is very highly pigmented...) but it's fun trying out some new techniques :-)