Family Painting Night

So, quite a few of the folks in my blogging circles have recently jumped into fatherhood (see, e.g., this guy).  Congrats to all of them!  That's had me thinking a bit about the long journey of raising kids in a complicated world.

My first experience painting minis was in my late teens, as a camp counselor, helping run a "quiet time" activity for kids on hot days.  Of course, it was the days before iPhones and iPads and everything, so the idea of picking up a small metal figure and painting it for an hour didn't seem as discordant with the times as it does now.  But the idea of using the focus of painting a tiny object to induce a Zen-like state of relaxation stayed with me.

Well, last night was one of those magical times when I spent a quiet evening with the kids, enjoying the geeky things in life, in group "painting therapy".  My wife was sounds asleep, still recovering from her recent illness, and the kids were bugging me to "do something."  So . . .

Attention to detail . . . 

My little lady painted up Eowyn from GW's Lord of the Rings range.  This is a beautiful sculpt, maybe the finest of the entire LotR range.  I think she's doing justice to it so far, if I may say so myself!

A wonderful scuplt, painting WIP.  Wonder if we'll ever see anything this sublime from GW again.

On the other side of the Tiny Basement workshop, my older boy set about painting up 5 Reaper Bones sci-fi army-guy figures, using an assembly-line painting style.  I find the Bones series a mixed bag - larger figures are a good value, smaller ones aren't anything special, though.  They're not all bad, but the faces are particularly poorly formed.

My boy spent a long time deciding on a color scheme for these guys.  He almost went with an Aliens Space Marine green style, but opted for a more Space Navy style of Grey and Blue with some Green trim.  We'll likely use them in our homebrew super-light FPS arena game.

Stand up fight or Bug Hunt?  Ready for either!

Someday, these kids will be too busy, or too embarassed, to hang with their old dad painting up minis, so I'm enjoying it while it lasts.

For those of you with newborns, have a bit of patience, they won't be ready for painting minis for quite a while.  I made the mistake when they were young of handing them GW minis, a fine detail brush and a $4 paint pot and expected that they'd not (a) drop the mini while it was dripping in wet paint, (b) destroy the brush and (c) pour the entire pot of paint onto themselves.  And they would, and then I'd hover over them like a worried mother hen.  There's a reason the boxes say "This is NOT a Toy!"

But you can dress them up in beat up-clothes, spread out lots of newspaper, and just give them some wooden trucks or boats or anything, and some crappy brushes and cheap craft paint, and let them paint by your side.  And when they're ready, they can help with basecoating minis, or let them paint cheap-o little green men soldiers.

If I had to do it again, I'd just have stayed out of their way and let them enjoy themselves!

Of course, Dads should also take care to not wear nice things whilst painting.  One of my favorite shirts just went from "office work shirt" to "house work shirt" thanks to an ink wash incident!

Thanks for stopping by!

Lord of the Rings Miniatures - The Fellowship Returns

These old plastic hobbits aren't of very good quality, especially in comparison to the more detailed metal versions below.  I can see why so many hobbyists were metal snobs, though the sculpts companies are now doing in plastic is quite amazing.

After a nice spring break away from the hobby table, I returned home to my piles of unpainted minis calling for attention.

I have a long term goal of replicating a small piece of the battle of Helm's Deep.  I've built a rough approximation of the redoubt out of foam and bought the fellowship and a few bad guys.

More recently I procured a pile of Uruk Hai and, facing a long cycle of batch paintings, I realized I better paint up the more famous faces before I tired of painting within the lines.

After a few nights, here's where the first group of minis stand:

These two came pre-painted, but not well.  I probably should have stripped them, but have so many other projects, I just tried to touch them up as best as possible.  

This is a great sculpt, but it took three tries to get the face to resemble Gollum.  Still not happy, but done nonetheless.

My favorites of the bunch, these metal minis really captured the likeness of Elijah Woods and Sean Astin.  Very fun to paint up, despite their small stature.  

Merry and Pippen weren't at Helms Deep, but I may pretend otherwise, just so these two can get some action.

These two are plastic sculpts, though the poor detail is less noticeable on these larger minis, as opposed to the hobbits.

Metal on the left, plastic on the right.  

Metal Gandalf, looking quite grey.

We just finished watching the last Hobbit movie last night.  While I sort-of enjoyed the Hobbit series overall, the last one fell far short of the standard set by the series as a whole (though I did enjoy seeing the Laketown architecture, in all its Mordhiem-ish glory).

I'm hoping to rekindle some of the magic from the original LOTR films, of which the Two Towers was my favorite.  They were a remarkable achievement in filmmaking, and it's a shame to see their pop culture impact fading.