29 Jul 2008
I’ve been having a good time with Last Night on Earth, but poking around on BoardGameGeek I’ve always been a little jealous of those swank miniatures that some people have painted. I’ve also noticed that it’s very possible to confuse the heroes while playing, so the painted figured do serve some functional value. So I decided to take up an arts and crafts project to paint the pieces from my game.
I’ve never painted anything like these soft plastic miniatures before, so I posted a query to the BGG crowd for tips. And I’m so glad I did, because those people were ridiculously helpful. Armed with pages of discussion on optimal painting techniques I headed to Michael’s to get my materials.
Supply list:
- Apple Barrel 24 color acrylic paint set - $4.99
- Apple Barrel white, 2oz - $0.79
- Apple Barrel black, 20z - $0.79
- Delta Ceramcoat matte interior varnish - $2.29
- Loew-Cornell set of four sable brushes - $6.99
- Elmer’s adhesive putty - $1.99
- Solo bathroom cups (package of 80) - $2.39
Total: $21.88 (including tax)
The first step was to wash the minis. Apparently they have some residual stuff on them from the mold, and if you don’t wash them the paint will have problems sticking. So I washed all the minis and left them to dry for a couple hours.
The next step was to prime them. I started with the zombies, because you’ve gotta screw up pretty fierce to make zombies look bad. Two coats of black paint later, my zombies were looking like freaky little tar monsters.
Someone from the boards had the excellent suggestion of using sticky tack to affix the figures to something so I didn’t have to actually touch the figure while painting. Thus the plastic cups. There are two colors of zombies, green and brown, and since I needed to preserve that in my final output I marked the cups with either a “G” or “B”.
With all the prep complete it was time to break out the color. I wanted to preserve the original skin tone difference between the two sets of zombies, so I mixed two not-quite-human skin colors. After the skin was painted on zombies I was able to go nuts applying various clothing colors to them, making full use of the 24 colors in my palette. Lastly I finished off the bases, starting with a dark-green base (to match the game board) and then accenting them with either a light green or brown to bring back the two zombie team colors.
The final step was to apply a coat of matte varnish to make sure that the paint won’t wear down as the figures get handled during gameplay.
You can see more photos of the final result here. Personally, I’m extremely happy with how they turned out. Now that I’ve cut my teeth on the zombies, the next step is to tackle the heroes. There’s more detail to worry about with the heroes, but the core steps should be the same. I’ll post photos when I’m done.
29 Jul 2008
I worry sometimes that I’m too negative. If I scan back through what I’ve written on this blog, I see more negative statements than positive statements. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with criticism, but when that’s all you’ve got to say it’s pretty darn depressing. Saying the glass is half empty is fine, but focusing on the fact that it’s one eighth empty is taking it a bit far. I don’t want to be that person.
Sometimes the most succinct way to describe something is in the ways that it differs from something similar. If you had to illustrate everything from scratch every time, building up from the base to the small details, it would take forever. It’s far easier to talk about things in relation to other things. This is a fundamental optimization of communication. But hidden in these comparisons are value statements. You say what something is, and you say what it is not. And in saying what it is not, you are often describing what it should be. And in pondering too often what things are not, it is too easy to lose sight of what they are.
This is a common problem. No one really talks about the ways in which the world’s religions and denominations are similar; we focus on (and wage wars over) the miniscule ways that they are different. We don’t talk about similarity because similarity is understood. There’s nothing more to say. Everybody likes ice cream; everybody likes bacon. It’s far more interesting to talk about ways in which we are different. But there’s a difference between knowing how you are different from something and defining yourself by how you are different.
I don’t think of myself as a negative person, and I don’t think that I’m overly negative in my interactions with other people. I enjoy a good argument, but that’s not the basis for how I relate to others. So is this disproportionate negativity just an anomaly of my writing?
I definitely know that I struggle with it constantly in blogging. Far more topics flit through my head than I have the time to put to words. So there’s an ongoing selection process for deciding what topics to write about. The topics I write about are the ones that I have the most to say about. I’ve talked before about how this leads to me writing about games. But it turns out it’s also a factor in contributing to an overall negative tone.
Concrete example: You’ll notice I never wrote about Iron Man. Why? Iron Man was freaking awesome. Thoroughly enjoyable. I’d recommend it to almost anyone. But everyone knows that Iron Man was awesome. I didn’t feel the need to tell anyone. It was just understood.
I also haven’t written anything about The Orange Box, which was one of my favorite games from last year. Portal is gaming perfection, Team Fortress is refinement of a classic, and Episode Two ends with one of the most epic gaming sequences I’ve experienced in a long time. It’s not like I decided to not write about it. It’s still totally on my list. But I’ve subconsciously preferred so many topics over it. What’s wrong with me?
I think it’s a natural tendency, and one I’ll probably always struggle with. Constant Vigilance, I guess. But at least I’m aware of it. I began this blog as an effort to help my memory, and in respect of that I think it’s important to keep my personal time capsule from becoming a depressing log of spiraling negativity.
28 Jul 2008
I have no recollection of how Paprika ended up in my queue. Maybe someone else recommended it to me, maybe it popped up on a Netflix related list. Regardless, going into the movie I really had no idea what exactly to expect. I knew from the sleeve that it was an anime, and that’s about it.
Paprika is a story about dream therapy. Not any sort of traditional dream therapy, but rather an invention that allows a therapist to enter your dreams and help you work through reoccurring dreams and nightmares. Unfortunately the device falls into the wrong hands, and a sort of dream terrorist emerges. Victims of his nightmares go insane and start throwing themselves out of windows and such. It starts strong, but the plot gets fuzzy real quick. There’s some detective work going on to track down the culprit, but it’s not told particularly well and I quickly became lost. I mean, I got the gist of it, but it wasn’t exactly crisp.
Thankfully the visuals are amazing. The dreams are appropriately vibrant and surreal. The parade of insanity is creepy, but I especially liked the first patient’s reoccurring dream sequence with everything from film noir to a circus to shrinking hallways. The waking scenes also are really well done, with a realistic style that sharply contrasts the insanity going on in people’s heads.
But overall I was left disappointed. It was definitely pretty, but I felt like the premise was squandered. Basically the plot was two stars, and the visuals were four. So it really would depend on your mood how much you’d enjoy it. When I sat down to watch it I guess I was in the mood for plot, because in the end the movie didn’t quite do it for me.
