Painting Horse Miniatures

Every opportunity for improvement is found in each horse.

Apply that idea to any miniature I paint, horse, pirate, or trooper and I have a winning attitude even if my aptitude suffers.

This is an essay on process painting 25mm metal or plastic horse figures for table top gaming purposes. The particular game will be a set of rules published by Studio Tomahawk, SAGA. The subjects of this essay are Saracen mounts for the Crescent and Cross expansion game.

Find Studio Tomahawk here: http://www.studio-tomahawk.com/. Choose français-anglais or some of both.

First Paint Step
After the horses are cleaned and air dried they go for a bit of primer. This group was spray primed with matte black and allowed to dry for about 24 hours.

Second Paint Step
To turn up the flow of the painting process I dry brushed a medium gray acrylic over the black primer if I anticipate a brown horse. I go to the burnt umber and again dry brush with a round #5. I stay loose with the brush held, for me, overly long from the ferrule closer to the brush end.

I am beginning to see the value in using larger brushes on miniatures at the base coat phase.

For a ‘gray horse’ I go again with a medium gray over the black primer. Then a wetted course of lighter layers of dun gray (low yellow 1% to 5% tan and the previous gray tone).

For a ‘chestnut horse’ I use a medium bright red over the black primer. The wetted course of lighter layers follow and are allowed to dry.

When I anticipate a ‘bay horse’ I experimented with a Payne’s gray dry brushing over the primer.

My plan for a ‘black horse’ included a shot of darkest blue (Payne’s gray mixed with phthalo blue red shade)dry brushed with a 1/4″ shader, of course, minding to leave some shadows.

The under painted miniatures dried for about an hour. This will vary depending on the local humidity and air temperature.

Third Paint Step
I followed the under painting with a acrylic medium wetted coat and avoided the nice shadows created earlier. This added a bit of emphasis on the higher regions of the horse, at least temporarily. In any event the shadows remained.

This is a trial run so I expect some errors. These so-called ‘mistakes’ will be noted and shot at sunrise, or at least banished temporarily to the re-paint shelf. Yes, I have an entire shelf dedicated to my lovely errors. The ‘no-vacancy’ sign is rarely lit.

I feel if I keep at this hobby, painting miniatures, I may one day get remarkable better at it. Being Good will probably have to be reserved for the Angels.

“On the Go” Painting Pallet

I paint exclusively with acrylic, or water-based paints and products. I do not like to waste my effort nor my time, but other benefits await the earnest designer, uhh, Grasshopper.

The On the Go Pallet

Problem
I needed a better pallet design because I’ve ramped up my painting schedule. More painting equals more waste and mess, but it need not. Sort of hard to avoid a mess when I am being creative, yet a creative person can eliminate a lot of bothers. I do not mind doing a bit of work in the present tense in order to reduce wasted effort later. I see that concept as a benefit to me.

Countermeasures
I had four goals that must fit this painting pallet design. First, the painting pallet had to be small and mobile. Next, it needed to be simple. Third, the process of using the painting pallet must reduce or eliminate paint going down the drain and collateral waste. Last, the design must make the painting process easier for me and the pallet must reduce the time I spent cleaning up or preparing to paint.

Process and Method
I have a piece of rectangular fiber board that has been painted white on one side and left dark on the other side. You can use anything sturdy enough for your needs that will fit inside a plastic bag as the foundation of your pallet ‘board’. I painted mine white to give a stronger contrast to my colors. The dark side is great for lighter shades, apologies to Darth Vader.

Second, place the fiber board goes inside a sandwich sized plastic zip bag, white side up, securely sealed. I use an economy type zip bags but any sort of recyclable clear plastic works. The zip feature helps keep the pallet board orderly and secure.
Last, add a folded paper towel as a clean pad for daubing wet brushes and clip it to the bagged fiber board pallet.

Benefits and Expected Results
1 All the pallet parts are made from ordinary materials and everything recycles or is reused.
2 Set up and Clean up are quick actions so I can better concentrate on finishing my painting schedule.
3 No dread to do a lot of work before I begin to paint.
4 The pallet is small and is easy to pack.
5 I use both sides of the plastic bag, pallet liner waste has gone to zero.
6 No paint goes down the drain. When the plastic is discarded I turn it inside out and recycle the bag.

Perhaps you can make your own. If you would like to share your creation please comment below.

Steampunk Stories: The Hide of a Different Beast

Are Steampunk stories so vastly different from other stories; are they truly the golden fleece, the Chupacabra, the hide of a different beast?

A reader can tell something about a book or a story if it has the label Sci-fi, Romance, Historical Fiction, or Non-fiction. Classifications help in ‘knowing’ rather than guessing about a book. The entire idea of libraries placing books in ‘subject’ order is the principle at work in its finest example, however, where does one place Steampunk?

How then, is Steampunk the Hide of a Different Beast as far as story is concerned. I shall make several explorations of this question. For now Steampunk can be a theme, a novel, a graphic novel, a work of art (including clothing and trinkets), created wholly for expression unto itself or it can be a matter of atmosphere, a story setting, a mind-set, or some stage decoration.

Steampunk stories can be ‘straight’ or ‘hyphenated’: straight, like just Steampunk in a glass or, it could be hyphenated, a ‘cocktail’, a mixture. That is as far as I will go with the comparative analogies. Is Steampunk a genre or ‘sub-genre’ of stories I will not say either way, which would be for the reader to enjoy being busy making up her or his own mind.

Steampunk stories and Post-modernist philosophy relish the blending aspect likened to blending or mixing genres or memes by shredding them and next putting all the pieces back together as a new whole Frankenstein-esque. Post-modernism is so prevalent we hardly notice the evidence of the ‘pieces-sewn-together’ aspect.

We might even expect the aspect of bits of yarn mixed with denim so to write. The mixing of a little Victorian setting to go along with a mysterious machine, a measuring device, an alethiometer , a difference engine as a stand in for a computer and a nano-imp communication device that is reminiscent of a cell phone. The ‘machines’ are powered by a tiny being who must be “fed”, or “dust” or “aether” or “anbaric current” included from the novel.

A popular phrase is applicable to mixtures post-modern fashion; this mixture is ‘mash-able’; ‘morphing’ the difference engine, the nano-imp, and the alethiometer as featured in novels. The question of what sort of energy is available is not so different from Sci-fi which uses ‘crystals’ for engine power or ‘generated’ space drives, or energy from the universe to do their work. Energy is a practical matter; after all it is ‘steam’ that makes Steampunk work as an ethos and as a story.

Interesting how the writers take antique words from various languages and combine them to describe devices in modern terms taking old mechanics to craft a new way to express the idea of energy or power in mystical terms that transports the reader out-of-the-present into the world of their own crafting.In the story The Golden Compass, Philip Pullman takes a few words to show the reader an alethiometer–

“It was very like a clock, or a compass, for there were hands pointing to places around the dial, but instead of the hours or the points of the compass there were several little pictures.”

Another point about Steampunk; it goes beyond ‘steam’ and mechanical power, fabrics died the shade of prunes, and ‘sootiness’, if you will, the stories dig into the loam of everyday wonder (I hesitate to write ‘magic’) as encountered by their characters in settings whether historical, Victorian, Edwardian, Georgian, contemporary, or future and the various stripes and ‘shades’ thereof. Technology plus wonder are created within the Steampunk story. Even though I recently hesitated to write ‘magic’ it is undeniable that the supernatural does figure massively in some Steampunk stories.

Steampunk borrows something new, recycles something old, adds a bit of a known epoch with sprinkles of the bizarre, and special technology, or fundamentally unique view of the world all the while getting deep in with epistemology and metaphysics, as writers do whenever they craft a story.

Print Examples for Steampunk Flavoring
Cherie Priest, Boneshaker
Alan Moore, graphic novels about The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
K. W. Jeter, Morlock Night (interesting use of Wells’ literary invention the Morlocks)
H. G. Wells, The Time Machine
James Blaylock, Homunculus
William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine
Michael Moorcock, Warlord of the Air, The Land Leviathan, and The Steel Tsar

If you want to know more or make a comment, do your best below.

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