I'll pop some static grass on there in the morning.
These are (some of) the lovely Perry Miniatures War of the Roses infantry I picked up a wee while ago and, frankly, I’m ashamed of giving them such a slapdash paint job. They’re gorgeous sculpts and they deserve better!
Notable things? Um… The muddy base texture worked out pretty well. That was great thick lumps of filler/water/pva mix with some sand pressed in at the end.
Also, my clever idea for giving them a little bit of individual character was using three different skin colours. Probably not worth it, but it made me happy.
Next thing:
This was all No Quarter's idea.
This is a bit of an experiment. Who knows how it’ll turn out. Or I might do something else next instead.
Hello, reading several. I hope you’ve enjoyed not feeling obliged to skim my blog posts so they’ll mark as read in Reader! Sorry, but I’m about to start posting again.
Here’s are some examples of things wot I have dun that I might have written about on here if I’d been writing anything on here:
- I’ve painted a fair few individual miniatures, mostly as gifts. I have learned that two-brush blending is brill. When Tims get gift miniatures they make compliments that sound like insults then backtrack awkwardly, engendering chuckles.
- I’ve read a book or two. I can thoroughly recommend “The Hippopotamus” by Stephen Fry to just about anyone. Although I should mention it’s quite rude, so have a care before suggesting it to anyone upset by rude activities.
- I’ve lost some weight. I can now wear some trousers which, last August, I could not have put on without chancing public indecency if I walked fast or sat down.
- I’ve played some computer games. The Witcher 2 is amazing, in that I was amazed by how awful it is. Perhaps I’m naive and should not be amazed by this sort of thing, but sometimes I am.
- I’ve gained some fitness. Recently I did two pull-ups! Can you imagine? I hope you can. It isn’t a difficult thing to imagine.
Hello, one or two people who’ve subscribed to my RSS! It’s been a good long while since I last posted anything. The good news (from a certain point of view) is…. content backlog. So y’all can look forward to several posts in quick and exciting succession.
As a preview, here are the models I painted for various people over Christmas, all undercoated and awaiting a brush:
These guys would be great fun in the pub, I'm sure.
This wee fella turned up late, but who could hold it against him?
I seem to be stuck on a slightly-off split complement of green and yellow with red as an accent colour. In fact, one of the things I’ve enjoyed about painting my bretonnian knights is being forced into thinking up new schemes (although the green fella there has gold decorations, red leather, and a yellow horse, I’ve just noticed). Which rather leads me to my accidental deployment of an interesting technique:
The top-knots are GW “Dark Flesh” (red accent on a predominantly green and yeller model you see, it’s all connected) which I accidentally over-watered. On the white undercoat this had the quite pleasant effect of staining the colour strongly in the recesses with a pinkish tone to the highlights. a quick drybrush of Dark Flesh with a bit of white finished off the effect nicely. Minimum effort! Hurrah!
Dark Flesh (VGC “Dark Fleshtone”) is a very nice colour, by the way. It’s a mahogany-ish red-brown useful, to me, primarily as a naturalistic, organicy red. I’m not very sophisticated with colours, you see, so I’m only really capable of thinking of paints as being “bright” or “a bit brown”. Pre-mixed colours in the “a bit brown” range are therefore extremely handy.
I wouldn’t use it for flesh, though, unless I were painting some cartoonish native americans, maybe?
Anyway, here’s the gang all together:
Nigella, Nigel, Mr Stabs, Stern Terence, Bonk-stick Pete, and Crispin
In game terms, this is enough Eldar Warlocks to field a Seer Council, which is a unit best described as a “terrible idea”. I’ll lose some games in a very fun way, I should think.
It’s been a mixed little while for the fitness project, chums.
I got lazy for a bit, and missed some gym time. Then I got motivated and back into the gym. Then my memory failed me and I misremembered my weight for deadlifts five kilos too high. Deadlifts are not tolerant of overloading, especially after a fortnight off.
My back is very nearly better now and I will be back in the gym shortly. I think I’ll post about deadlifts next week.
The funny thing is, I’ve kept up the calorie counting and my weight is still trickling down. Hurrah for weight trickling down!
I’m quite proud of the white face on the horse. Also, the film around the transfers has dissolved far better than on the others. From this I have learned that microsol is best left overnight to do its work.
Sir Standard Bearer
Sir Standard Bearer has a dragon on his head holding a sword! Sir Standard Bearer has some gold and yellow on him, which is complementary to the purple and therefore draws the eye. I neglected to include anything for it to draw the eye to, which is a shame. So the model lacks a focal point despite my borderline cleverness.
Sir Musician
Despite some early troubles caused by a dodgy bottle of dark green paint, Sir Musician came out reasonably well. But please take my strong advice and never, ever, think “I’ll do some quick checks! That’ll spice him up a little for very little effort!” You are fooling yourself if you do, you foolish fool.
GW Catalogue Pose
And there they are: all my painted Bretonnian knights in their glory. One more knight and a leader and I’ve a legal army to field!
I’ve caught up on Primus and fixed pictures on m’blog – the latter with the help of friend Alex.
I’ve completed five more guys – the front rank! – for my Bretonnian Men-At-Arms:
Toot toot! March march!
The only slightly notable thing about them are the dolphins I’ve freehanded on the shields. They were very quick but I think they’ve come out okay! A bit of work and a fancier version should be fit for unit banners and my general’s heraldry.
That’s two whole regiments of tiny peasants complete. Next week: some tiny knights!
I also finished off the little War Dog:
Woof!
By my standards the colours are exquisitely blended. By the standards of a pro… not so much.
Or, “Why Squats?”. Or “This is quite long, sorry.”.
Me. At the gym. Yesterday.
In my initial post about Primus I list some specific goals. These were:
Lose at least 10 kilos, taking my weight under 110kg.
Squat my bodyweight and a half for five sets of five
Bicycle home from my sister and her husband’s flat without ending up a wheezing wreck
The first is a matter of taking a measured approach. At 110 kilos I will definitely still be overweight, but to a far lesser extent. If I can get that far I’ll have built good habits, and it will be time to assess whether I should continue along the same lines, or if I should change m’game up.
The third is just a nice landmark on the way to fitness. Fairly often I cycle the ten minutes downhill to visit, but dread the half-hour uphill journey back (note: these times are guesses). For various reasons it’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve tried the journey, but I’ve every confidence it’ll be a less painful experience next time.
The second, however, might seem like rather an arbitrary strength goal (and perhaps quite a high one). Allow me to explain.
About two years ago I had a nasty accident in a judo class and bothered a cruciate ligament in my right leg. At least, I hope it was the cruciate ligament or the pun in the post title ceases to work. The alternative is damage to the meniscus, which is far less a serious matter but also harder to pun on. Swings and roundabouts, I suppose.
I can’t recommend the experience to anyone. The closest thing to a positive is that the terrifying cracking sound made me think, at first, that I’d broken something – but I hadn’t! Not that I was doing a lot of thinking amidst all the screaming like a girl whenever anyone tried to touch my leg.
Like I say: not an experience I’d recommend.
Damage to any of the soft tissues that support one’s knee joint can be persistently troublesome. Once there’s been some time to heal one is generally okay unless one does something silly like walk uphill or slip on something and step awkwardly or really quite a lot of things one never notices oneself doing with a healthy knee. Short of surgery, which has a lengthly recovery time and doesn’t necessarily make things much better except in extreme cases – which I certainly am not - there are only really two treatments. Losing weight is the obvious one: rotational stress on your joints goes roughly by the square of your weight so a little loss (or gain) can make a big difference. The other is strengthening the surrounding muscles.
A ligament/meniscus/whatever it was I actually hurt, once damaged, is always weaker than it was to start with, so the muscles around the joint are recruited to help stabilise matters. Which means stronger muscles make for a more stable knee, which means working on exercises that build up quite a lot of strength in one’s legs is a Good Thing. Enter… the squat, as demonstrated by some nice people on YouTube who apparently work out in limbo, or another mystical dimension:
There really is no single exercise in the world that does more to strengthen the muscles in your legs. Cycling did wonders at first in building up a bit of extra strength and improving mobility, but hefting the weight of another person on my back then sitting down and standing back up again several times on a regular basis has taken up where that left off very acceptably. Squats also have the side benefit of working your core – so I’m not troubled by a bad back the way you might normally expect of a big fat fattie.
By squatting my bodyweight and a half I mean doing that with one and a half times my bodyweight on my back, not with half my bodyweight on my back – which a perfectly sensible interpretation you, Reader, might have made. There’s a strong consensus in strength training circles that more or less anyone who isn’t seriously overweight should be able to manage it with a few months of regular work. In fact, many people consider a squat of less than 1.5x bodyweight to be a fair indicator of beginner status (a beginner being defined as someone who is still making nice, easy gains and doesn’t yet need to switch to a complicated advanced program). So it is definitely an attainable goal.
Unfortunately this post would be incomplete without listing my current squat weight: On Thursday I completed five sets of five squats with 90 kilos on my back, at a bodyweight of 118 kilos. Obviously that puts me quite a way off the bodyweight-and-a-half marker, but I’m adding 5 kilos per week (2.5 per session, two sessions per week) and, I hope, still losing weight – so I’m getting there.
To be clear: even without lifting heavy things I am utterly untroubled in my daily life by my wonky knee. It’s only because I want to be able to climb (odd, twisty knee stresses) and do judo (odd, twisty knee stresses) that it comes up at all. Otherwise I could ignore it and bumble along my way without the faintest twinge until I got old enough to start complaining about my bad knee so other people have to lift things for me.
“Exploit Physical Enfeeblement For Sympathy And Gain” is plan B, by the way. I have been practising my ‘cow eyes’.
Somebody cleverer than I could probably have anticipated this, but I have discovered that reading is no fun at all when one feels a connected time pressure.
I’ll continue reading for pleasure at whatever rate suits me, and I’ll post my thoughts on here after reading – if only because I think it will be nice to have a record of my readings.
A moment of silence, please, for the passing of a silly idea.
That’s all I’ve managed, Secundus-wise, this week. The reason being: I’ve been trying to learn a clever miniature painting technique called two-brush blending. One brush plonks some paint on the model, the other is used to push and pull it around to create beautifully smooth gradients that would otherwise take a stupid number of individual layers. Proper artists do this sort of thing all the time, but they have the advantage of a longer, better documented technical history and *much* longer drying times in which to play with the paint.
Look what I did to a poor spare tank trying to get this business straight:
The wonky blending is more in evidence on the top, but I didn't think of that.
On the plus side, Project Primus continues apace. The scales are definitely reading lower, day on day. I even managed one whole chin-up yesterday, and I think my arms might stop hating me for it some time next week. Sometime next week, as well, I will attempt to explain the curiously specific goals of Project Primus.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to pack for a motorbike trip and decide what to wear. Sartorially speaking, biking in winter is something of a gamble. Not helped, I’ll admit, by my idiotic purchase of a pair of bike trousers which aren’t waterproof or warm without an extremely bulky thermal/waterproof lining. I will leave you to marvel at the notion of a british company imagining that it only rains when it is also cold.
