My Misadventures at Painting Continues... Plus a Tournament!

On Friday I decided to do some painting on my Statue of Liberty in hopes of having at least one model that looks almost finished for the tournament on Saturday (yesterday). I wasn't going for an accurate look got for the Statue, especially since I'm planning on painting the main body copper, in theory the color the Statue of Liberty was when France delivered it to the U.S. For the stone pedestal I was going for colors that would look good and that I own. One of those colors, Game Color's Bonewhite came in a bottle that was a decade old. I use Bonewhite when I want something to look whitish. I tend to use it fairly often but in low amounts. And that is what lead to my misadventure Friday.

I got the table ready for painting and tried to squeeze Bonewhite paint onto my palette. Nothing came out. I can hear liquid inside when I shake the bottle so I know it still has paint. A quick look at the nozzle tells me its clogged. I grab a toothpick and stabbed it in the nozzle. With the nozzle cleared, I tried squeezing paint onto my palette again. A very small dab came out which I decided wasn't enough for my needs. I start squeezing and again nothing came out. I had confirmation bias with the small amount of paint on my palette and thought the remaining paint must have congeal so I continued to squeeze. Had I realize having the paint congeal and in a liquid state that I could hear were mutually exclusive, I would have saved myself a lot of headache. Instead I continued to squeeze until the bottle exploded! I got paint all over the table and my clothes and me. My shirt was already ruined as I only wear it around the home so no lost there. My shorts on the other hand were fine shorts are now probably ruined. I had covered the table in newspaper so it escaped being coated in paint. Fortunately I didn't get any paint in my eyes (thought I did get it on an eyelid) and I didn't get any paint in the carpet. My palette did get the additional paint that I wanted, you could say it got a little too much!

I dip my finger into it Saturday morning thinking it had dried. It hadn't. I suppose that much paint takes longer to dry. I found the nozzle on the floor (amazingly without getting any paint on the floor) and what I should have figure out before became crystal clear what happen. The nozzle was clogged at both ends. The dab of paint must have been in the nozzle itself. The toothpick was too thick to properly clear the nozzle. You could say something like this ruined my desire to paint. However I knew all of my Bonewhite was now on that palette and I didn't have the option to use it another time. I painted what I had planned on using the Bonewhite for, though as an added insult I notice something about my Statue of Liberty. Both of my Monsterpocalypse buildings got a little paint on them. Neither building will take much to fix but I notice the Statue of Liberty had 3 places the place could of landed on. The one place it DIDN'T touch was the part I was going to paint!

All of this led to my second Monsterpocalypse tournament on Saturday. I'm no where near having my own playable force so I was planning on just using Tracy stuff though I did use some of my own models this time. The first tournament I was confident that could do well if not win. I lost every game to took last place. For this tournament got less practice in, I was playing Destroyers which I'm less familiar with and I throw together a force based on what I own and which few units I knew. Based on all that I figure I would get last again. It didn't surprise me that my force did not work well together. What did surprised me was that I went 2 wins, 1 lost in the tournament and got second place. Both tournaments had the same 4 players and both times everyone played everyone. After the tournament I realize with the exception of Tracy whom won every game he played, every match result in this tournament was the reserval of the first tournament's. Second place got the building prize because Tracy already had one so he let whom ever took second have it, which again was me. Overall this was a very weird weekend with a lot of highs and lows for me. I've lost half a bottle of paint and shorts but I've learn a little more about painting and the game Monsterpocalypse. I also got a little more painting done and walk away from the a tournament with a new building. I guess I should say this weekend was worth it!

Introduction to Flashback Storytime

I initially created the Chaos Magic blog so I would have a place to host the stories I wanted to write that were about my Warhammer Fantasy Armies. I didn't have any ideas at the time what that would look like nor how I could expand with other content while keeping with the initial core concept. Over the years that core concept needed to be expanded and/or change over and over again. I'm always struggling with what I wanted the identity of this blog to be. One idea I keep coming back to and then rejected it is to write a series of stories about various events of my life. I can categorize these events into two groups: one is about funny or somehow interesting stories about food with other being about funny or somehow interesting stories about my gaming life outside of wargames. I still can't bring myself to post the food related stories here, which is why I made a food related blog. I just haven't done anything with that blog yet and this blog needs a lot more consist content, which is why I keep thinking about it. For that matter, I've made a separate blog for the game related stuff (and Shadowrun Crossfire content) as well which I also haven't done anything with. In my mind, tabletop role-playing games (RPGs) felt fundamentally different from wargames and deserve their own blog. However, since the blog has evolved far beyond Warhammer Fantasy, it makes less sense to differentiate RPGs from wargames. I suppose there is a case that it made no sense to not include RPGs when the blog added Flames of War and Team Yankee material. In any event, I've change my mind on the matter and want to introduction a new series I will be starting on the blog called Flashback Storytime.

I have sat around the table with friends playing role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, Shadowrun and others for probably thousands of hours over the past 19 years. I probably have hundreds of hours playing fighting games in the arcade and I definite got more than a thousand hours playing fighting games on console systems. There is a way to look up how many game hours you have played in League of Legends but I'm afraid of how high that number would be. An average normal game last between 20 and 55 minutes though some games could last longer. My main account has over 2500 games on it and that doesn't include the many other game modes I've played nor my other accounts. All this says that I have a rich environment to pull from to retell interesting stories. Some of my stories happen many years ago and while I will try to be as accurate as I can remember, I might get details wrong. If there are parts of the stories I can't remember at all, I will be making stuff up to make sure the overall story works and is constant. I won't make up anything I know is false. I will just be trying to fill in holes in my memories of something that makes sense. For example I might write a story in which the real life event was at a different location but everything else was accurate. That is what I will be going for.

I am unsure how often I will publishing these stories, which I will call Flashback Storytime. At the very least I want to publish one this month and one next month. However with next month being National Write a Novel Month, I doubt I will get much done on the blog in November. With my former core concept of stories for my wargame armies not being relevant anytime soon, several Flashback Storytime stories will probably be coming soon. I just wanted to give an overview of what I wanted them to be before a started posting. I hope people will enjoy them. Until next time!

Learning From Building Mistakes

I finally got a little painting done for the first time in a while on a building for Monsterpocalypse. Its not much with far more that needs to be done on it. Yet I notice I already made a mistake on it. It is not an "oops, I screwed up" mistake but a "I just realize I'm making life harder on myself" process mistake. Here are some pictures of it.

The reason I primed the building black was because my white primer was low and while I had the opportunity to prime, I wanted to prime a group of models all at once. That group being 2 buildings and several Ubercorp units. Also thought black would be better for the Ubercorp units as I had an idea of how I was going to paint them. I had no plans for the buildings. Eventually I decided to paint this building brown with maybe a logo on top. And this is when I started painting. The problem is that I don't want the windows black. And I've learn from past mistakes that any washes on black does nothing! That means I have to paint each window by hand. If I had plan this out better, I would have primed the building white or at least a light color, if not whatever color I wanted for the windows. Had I done this, then after I painted the walls brown I would just needed to apply a wash to the entire building and I would be done. Instead, after I finished with the brown, I will have to paint in the windows which will take even longer than it will take me to paint the walls. After that I will still need to apply a wash before I would be done. Because of that, I will put it aside to work on other models. I'm not starting over with this building and I will go back and finish it. It just that I think I could make a lot more progress faster working on the other models. I still have a few days before the end of the month so I will hold off on further hobby updates. Until next time!