Sweating the small stuff in the small hours

 Hey folks, it's been a long long time since any of my promised fortnightly updates, but I haven't done anything hobby-wise that I felt was worth posting really.

I've decided that rather than stick to a fixed schedule, I'm just going to update as-and-when I want to, because trying to stick to a schedule when I know I either won't have the time or content is just going to make me a little stressed, which isn't something you want out of a hobby you are supposed to enjoy.  As an old colleague once told me, 'don't sweat the small stuff, and when you look at it, in the grand scheme of the universe everything is small stuff'.  

Recently, I've discovered that for whatever reason I tend to be pretty good in the very early mornings, we don't have curtains in our bedroom, so I've found that I've been getting up really early the past few days (around 5am-ish).  We do have blinds, but I'm the kind of person who can only sleep in levels of darkness that would give an owl a hard time seeing in.  This usually gives me a 90 minutes of time to kill before I get ready for work.

Lately I've been trying to get some hobby time in the evenings once my son has gone to bed, but by that time I'm usually so tired I don't have the concentration or focus needed for something like painting miniatures, so I've decided to make the most of this early rise and try and get an hour or so's hobby time in before I go to work.

I've been having real trouble painting up my Infinity miniatures, the details are really fine and I always end up either messing it up or finding myself unhappy with the colour scheme, so it gets chucked in the dettol and started again.  I think that my skills aren't really up to scratch, so I've decided to try and do some practice on a few of the Bones models from Reaper than I own before I tackle Infinity again, so I started small and over the past 2 mornings I painted up the 'Mocking Beast' miniature:

Reaper 'Mocking Beast'

It's only painted to a 'good enough' standard to get me warmed up, but I'm pretty pleased with it.  It needs a base, but that can come along next time I have some spare putty. I painted it using a mixture of several generations of GW paints (which revealed to me just how bad a state some of those paints are in) and army painter strong tone quickshade (a.k.a magic in a bottle).  There's nothing fancy there, just a basecoat, wash, then a single layer of highlighting.

So getting back to small stuff, I enjoyed painting this miniature as it was a small, simple exercise.  The most important thing is that it's 'finished', so it can go and take a proud place on the shelf.  For me, it's a little bit of victory that chips away at the larger goal.  I think the boost I got from painting a small miniature like this can go a long way spurring you on to tackle bigger and more complex goals.

Anyway, that's it from me this week, so don't go sweatin' the small stuff, and come back soon for the next thrilling installment!

Nothing says I love you, like a Humboldt Squid

Hey everybody, thanks for checking back on Clawing at the Walls!

So last week's post is a day late in the posting, no excuses, I'm just crap at keeping to schedules, but what the hey..

So, there have been some hobby updates, in the 2 hours-ish I had for hobby time last week, I did manage to put brush to pewter and made a start on my Sin-Eater Observant:

Early Stages

I'm just blocking in the colours at the moment, but I feel that if I document any progress, regardless of how small, it just might keep me going on this whole blog thing.  I guess it's the whole momentum thing, a tiny snowball can quickly become an avalanche providing it rolls for long enough.  The Sin-Eater Observants are one of my favourite units in Infinity.  In the fluff they are the guards of the Observance, men who have undergone painful and sadistic ritual torture just for the sin of being born male, fitted with neural implants that jack up their reaction speeds to inhuman levels.  They are reactive-turn beasts and are armed with some of the heaviest weaponry in the Bakunin Jurisdictional Command and the models are just bad-ass looking.

Usually the 'core' of any of my Infinity lists will include a Sin Eater with Mk12, which for me is the right balance between punch and price, so I wanted to prioritize painting him up as he's nearly always seeing table time.  Colours so far are GW Codex Grey on the trousers and some other areas, GW Mechanicus Standard Grey on the left shoulder, GW Ulthuan Grey on the rest of the longcoat, P3 Frostbite on the armour plates and GW Goblin Green on the ribbing.  Eventually both the armour and the longcoat will both be white, but I want to experiment using different basecoats to achieve a different white for each area (note, I'm a traditionalist in some regards, when I paint white I start with an off-white basecoat and work up using many many layers of very thin white, oh and I'm also a bit of a masochist).  His base is self-built using plasticard and some flexible resin power-cable from Zinge Industries, the yellow will eventually be hazard-striped.  I haven't quite decided what to do with the Mk12 itself yet, but despite all the naysayers I will probably use some metallic paint on it.

In other hobby news, I made a start on my HoTT Skaven army, but came unstuck when I tried to remove all the extra metal that gets stuck to the bottoms of miniatures of this scale, it's a byproduct of the casting process, but it's lumpy, uneven and adds a good 1mm of height to these already 'large for 10mm' miniatures, I tried sandpaper but it wasn't sturdy enough so I think I'm going to have to invest in a heavy duty file to get rid of the excess metal.

Outside of the hobby world, I came across this bad boy in a mother-and-baby store:

The Alleged Squid

Yep, that's right, it's a gigantic plushie (the tentacles are about 18" long plus a good 12" of body) of a Humboldt Squid.  I knew then and there I had to buy this for my son, because in my mind, nothing can express the overwhelming love I have for my little dude like a cuddly toy cephalopod apex predator!  needless to say, at 3 months old, a giant red floppy thing with eyes the size of golf balls completely flabbergasts him, but I'm planning ahead to when he's a toddler, and he can truly appreciate it and insists on dragging it everywhere by the tentacles.

Anyway, I appear to have finished my beer (Asahi super dry, for anyone that's interested) and I have work in the morning, so I'm going to sign off now.  Thanks for reading and tune in next week for another installment in the nerdy world of Leigen_Zero!