Economic Anxiety

Creative work is valued at exactly what people will pay for it, that is, little to nothing. This is painfully obvious when you hang around on the vast online communities centered around creativity. People have devoted their lives to creation, to mastery of an art, that quite frankly I could never achieve, and yet, every second post is a link of a Ko-Fi page, or a Paypal account begging for just enough money to make rent this month, it is heart breaking.

From my own perspective, it took me years to reach the mid-to-high tabletop standard when it comes to miniature painting. That includes investment in materials, brushes, paints, lighting rigs, airbrushes, mediums, and a whole plethora of tooling and material that I can't even remember at the moment. Going through it all may be a good idea for a future YouTube video, but I digress. That investment almost certainly has run into the many thousands of dollars, not to mention the time and labour of putting paint on plastic. Granted many other creative fields don't necessarily have the same entry cost as minis, but labour is labour all the same. Yet when an artist on the internet produces there is a presumption of no to pitifully low cost to access by the consumer, at least in this historical moment. All the while cost of living creeps up due to the ongoing consolidation of wealth by the returning rentier classes. The starving artist is well and truly back, probably never went away.

I don't need to do this hobby to live, a fact of reality for which I am truly grateful. However, for others, is there a way out of this situation for creative people forced to live in this reality? Probably not in the short term, because the only way to live on a low wage seems to be working long hours on multiple jobs. In the long term, who knows what the world is going to look like, though given current trends things aren't probably going to improve. Art and creativity will more and more be available to those that don't depend on their labour to survive, the sons and daughters of the wealthy that have the time and resources to engage in long term creative labour, to take the unpaid internships that allow them the build the networks required to get their art, whatever it may be, noticed. All the while everyone else gets forgotten, drowned out in a sea of content hobbyist, their passions crushed by the monotony of day to day living and surviving. Assuming the boiling seas don't rise up to claim us all, rich and poor alike, first.

Take a guess as to what my mood has been like lately.

What I have Painted

To start with, and with ScaleACT 2018 looming ahead I've dusted off a collection of old scale model kits and will build them to see if I can hit the necessary level of quality for entry into the show. To start with I pulled out the crappiest kit of the set, an old Hawker Tempest by Revell that I'm sure is based on tooling that may well be older than I am.

First off, the build didn't some out nicely, and my stubby hands made a mess of the hull by covering it with finger print impressions due to mishandling and glue over spills. The painting was a pain in and required way too many layers, finally I started on the enamel wash and forgot to put the transfers on first, thus causing me to abandon the kit as I felt saving it would be too much effort.

Next up were a few Colonial Vipers that I purchased some years ago, yet never go around to finishing as 40k and wargaming was taking up all of my time. First up, I messed up the build right off the bat by mixing up parts, not noticing it until the glue had set and finally also forgot to do the transfers before the enamel wash. Unlike the Tempest I felt the airbrush work was good enough to attempt to save the kit. So I cleaned up most of the wash, applied the transfers, then re-applied the wash. The end result was perfectly good and I feel up to standard for ScaleACT, so that'll be one entry.

I've just finished up a new batch of post apocalypse cars for Gaslands, the great little game that keeps on giving. They turned out pretty well, despite some initial misgivings with attempting to freehand designs, camouflage and even tasteless car art. This batch should provide me with more than enough hulls for the upcoming Gaslands bash at next year's Cancon, and odds are I'll have finished another couple of batches before it finally arrives.

The Clockwork Highway-woman, from Twisted Miniatures turned out fairly well. I'm not quite sure if it is a competition level piece yet, but we'll find out once I enter it in the Crystal Dragon at Cancon I suppose. I'm particularly happy with the way the tan greatcoat and the base turned out.

Yvraine and Ycarne, the last two models of the second triumvirate are done and in retrospect they turned out very well for a high tabletop level. Yvraine was painted separate from her base using more traditional techniques, apart from the black leather, which is a base blue, shaded down to near black with spot highlights applied for show. The sword is another favorite of mine, an off-white with verdigris glazed into the hilt and the entire thing highlighted with stark white for effect, her kitty also turned out pretty well. Ycarne on the other hand was an utter pain to paint, relying heavily on dry brushing and washes to get colour transitions happening. This was definitely one of those models that looked like garbage right up to the point it was finished, at that point it came into its own. Unfortunately the sculpt of this model meant that painting it as sub assemblies wasn't really an option, hopefully I won't paint any more models like this for some time.

What I am Painting

I've made a start on a good Tamiya Universal Carrier. Assembly is done, as is priming, now all that remains is the first airbrushing pass, which will probably not happen until the weekend at latest, possibly later as the coming Sunday is my usual gaming session and Saturdays are filled with chores and work.

I picked these two up on a whim because I do enjoy painting non-combat miniatures as well. They are from the WizKids lined of pre-primed D&D miniatures, they are made out of the same material as the Reaper Bones miniatures and as such they have some pretty nasty mold lines that don't clean up well. So these two ladies will end up as some painting practice, then I'll move on with my hobby.

What is Upcoming

I see red in my future, specifically hordes of brave heroes of the Soviet Union standing ready to smash capitalism and imperialism in the name of the international proletariat. In short, I'm planning an expansion for my Team Yankee Soviets, unfortunately my order has been held up due to lack of stock, so I can't fully finish this project in time for Cancon. In other news I'm planning to take these comrades for a spin in the two day Team Yankee tourney, hence the need to expand them.

I've also pulled some more random things off my current schedule to commence some of the preparation work. First and simplest are some chaos spawn, mostly as adds for my Chaos Space Marines.

I'm also planning to start on another Crystal Dragon competitive project for the squads category. Specifically, I have a copy of Steelheart's Champions and I have some ideas for painting their armour using VGC Verdigris to give them an ethereal look. I've already tested on a free Stormcast and I like the scheme, however I'll go for true metallics for the weapons rather than NMM.

That is pretty much it for me, still grinding onward, diminishing my pile of plastic a few pieces at a time.

It's Been a Long Road

As I put down my paintbrush, step back from the desk and admire the last figure, I feel a sense of loss. This list, this schedule, has been my life for just under a year. Everything on it is something I've either applied paint to, or have given up on, the failures marked off in angry red rather than somber black.

Fortunately this time around the failures were minimal, and not entirely my fault. A kit that had parts missing to the point of uselessness and some badly miscast metal infantry that I didn't have to willpower to try and save, so off to the discard pile with them.

Plenty of additional extras, unrecorded and unplanned also made their way onto this list, most notably my first Necromunda gang, an Escher outfit that I have named ''The Nightshade Crew" they have served me well so far in the local campaign and my enthusiasm for getting them on the table was the cause for them to jump the queue. The other major unplanned project were my first batch of Gaslands cars, after I was very taken with this new and quirky little system, as well as the novel source of table top miniatures. Other than that a few random minis got in the rotation, but mostly as a palette cleanser between projects.

The Final Tallies

28mm Infantry Figures - 237 (give or take due to poor record keeping on my part)
Monsters, Robots and Large Characters - 7
Vehicles and Bikes - 13
Gaslands Cars & 15mm vehicles - 10
Terrain and Objectives - 7

Where To From Here

It was always my intention to have four main 40k armies. Now that I have them I can see my 40k throughput slowing down to Kill Team sized projects and occasional small expansions or single models for display pieces. I've also got the Kill Team Terrain to paint up, which will be a fairly expansive project, but that is what the airbrush is for. The army sized projects in my new schedule will be a triumphant return to Flames of War for me, as I seek to paint new Commonwealth armies to a much higher standard than I could years ago when getting into it, and with the good plastic kits no less. This will also be a time for me to dive deep into my lead pile and start on things that have been languishing down there for a while. I've got a whole load of display miniatures as well as a few pieces of ephemera that I want to get painted. I'm also going to paint up some D&D monsters and heroes, mostly because I'm planning to get into a Song of Blades and Heroes. The biggest projects however are Gaslands, as I've got a lot of toys that need rebuilding and painting, as well as my remaining Necromunda gangs, Orlock, Van Saar and Goliath respectively. For weirder projects I'm planning to build a 6mm Team Yankee army, which I'm still acquiring minis for, and repainting my old Battlefleet Gothic. However, to start with, and since ScaleACT is happening very soon I'm going to make a start with some old scale model kits that I'll enter if I feel they are good enough.

Ever Onward

This new list looms ahead, hour after hour of entirely self inflicted labour for no real purpose other than the fleeting satisfaction of a job well done as items get checked off. Fortunately the particulars are far less demanding this time around, fewer armies and those that are exist are easier to speed paint due to my recent experimentation with techniques for batching 15mm models quickly. The big departure from my last sequence is that there are more projects that require quality rather than a mere tabletop standard. The downside to army painting is that I've failed to adequately grow my skill as a painter, so now is the time to regroup and give it another shot. The Crystal Dragon looms ahead in 2019 and while I already have one project ready for it, I fear it is not yet up to standard. Instead I'll see what I can do to lift my painting to the next level. On the subject of conventions, Cancon, the event that hosts the Crystal Dragon, appears to have several tournaments that I'm interested in, most notably, a two day Team Yankee affair and a one day Gaslands bash, so the miniatures I requires for these events will be bumped up the priority stack. Anyway, hopefully I'll post another one of these in late 2019, with an every shrinking pile of unpainted plastic, see you then.