On the Horizon

There is much on the horizon.

Although I have a couple of things that could hit the bench, I took a break this week and not once did I flip on my desk lamp.  It feels like there's a big surge on the horizon, but instead of feeling stressed about it, I'm kind of intentionally holding back and feeling pretty good about it.

• Kingdom Death Wave 2 tracking information hit Asia and Europe overnight.  I'm sure U.S. will follow shortly.  
• Miniature Monthly Boot Camp is next weekend.  I got the reminder from our hotel yesterday and it started feeling very real.  More on this below.  
• Figures, bits, and bases two separate projects I have in mind for Gencon contests have arrived.  Pretty excited about these.  I may actually pop some blister packs open this afternoon and get started with model prep.
• And good news from the War Store.  The Scibor bases that I ordered back in December (December!!) are (maybe?) finally moving again.  Scibor is a Polish company that makes some outstandingly cool conversion bits and bases.  I bought a selection through The War Store.  The War Store has been great, and responsive when I inquire, but my box of loot got stuck in customs in Belgium.  It's been so long that I really don't remember what I had planned for all of them, but do know that I intended to marry them to the KDM Wave 2 content as an upgrade over the stock bases.  

Stock Image (not my paint) of the type of Scibor bases I have inbound. Very excited to finally have these in hand.

So, let's talk about Boot Camp and my painting journey.

We often think of the learning curve as a smooth progression from A to B to C.  But in practice it's really not.  There are periods of rapid acceleration, there are plateaus, and with perishable skills like painting there are steps backwards.

I consider myself a beginner painter, maybe dabbling towards intermediate.  I started on this path when I bought my first box of Shadows of Brimstone, and walked off the Gencon show floor with no intention of actually painting anything.  A few days later, I changed course and set out with really no goal other than to give a monochrome basecoat (via a rattle can) and then wash/shade the miniatures.  And my first models were really that simple:  basecoat, wash, dry brush.  Two or three colors total, including the wash.

This was a time of rapid learning.  Learning the brands, learning the techniques, getting comfortable with basic assembly.  Big jump in the learning curve.

As these things tend to go, it's a slippery slope of expanding scope.  I get a little more comfortable with the brush, and my SoB heroes - not masterworks by any stretch - included a half dozen colors and a couple of custom-mixed colors.  My time invested really wasn't that much more, but the results were far more pleasing.

Fast forward 18 months or so.  In the weeks before Kingdom Death arrived, I had bumped up against the limits of that technique.  I was happy with my Trederra pieces, with more subtle shading, better color selection, and better brush control, but I was still far from a place that would win any awards.

I also knew that I was DONE with rattle can priming after some misfortune with some expensive resins that I still haven't had the heart to try to strip and salvage.

Simple technique, at its limits.

Thus began the era of Airbrushing.

Once again, I started modestly. I needed a solution to apply primer.  The slippery slope appears again: well, doing some shading would be okay I guess.  Now, 4 months later, I'm more comfortable with the Badger and am not looking back.

But I also know that I'm bumping up against the limits of the technique I developed for the KDM Core Box.  The Phoenix, Watcher, and especially the Antelope suffered from the way I was doing things.  I am so very happy with them, but I also know that they could have been better.  And I'll say I learned a metric buttload during the KDM project (big jump in my learning curve).

It feels like these skills are starting to fit together like puzzle pieces.  Model prep. Filling.  Color selection.  Light sourcing.  KDM did a lot to bring these skills along.  But looking back at the pieces, I know that it's time to learn more about washes (shading by hand) and maybe even wet blending.

Progression and learning on many different techniques at once.

And so, as we were sifting back through the prior episodes of Miniature Monthly, we decided to sign up for their Boot Camp and get some hands-on experience with a couple of masters.  It's not cheap, but it should be a fun, unique experience.  And it's exactly what I need to progress a step or two more.

So, I started this post to talk about all the figures on the horizon.  But it's really about learning. There's a lot of learning on the horizon.