Hey y’all!!

I hope you’re doing well! I hope you had a great holiday season celebrating (safely) with those you love. We had a great time, and our house is now overflowing with toys. Having a 3 year old’s birthday 2 weeks before Christmas is brutal. 🙂

Anyways, I have done A Thing at my painting desk. I decided to swatch my paints because I saw Jessica Bathory do it and I thought, “that looks cool, I should do that. Shouldn’t take too long.” o.O boy was I wrong. Once I counted and categorized everything, my totals are thus:

Reaper: 362
Vallejo: 15
GW: 92
Minitaire: 84
for a total of : 553 paints, with 478 individual colors after removing duplicates.

Wow. I mean, I knew I had a lot, but that was more than I thought. lol

Now that it’s done, it looks cool, and I managed to fit almost all of my paints in the paint rack. But it was a chore. At some points I was DEFINITELY not having fun. I almost just gave up, but I persevered, and I like it so far.

End result first, then onto the bitching!

So, it’s super cool and fun. I went ahead and did the swatches in any color combination, but ordered the paints by SKU. Its a different way than I’ve ever done, so I’m interested to see if I like it better that way. I have always grouped my paints by color, but I was running out of room. Now that I’m not worried about the paint groups mixing, I can fit a lot more in the same space.

This was from about halfway through. I didn’t think to take a before picture, but you can see the chaos and all the little paint dots on my quick palette. 🙂 I borrowed a vortex mixer from work to give all my paints a little shake before I put them back away, that was kind of fun. I also decided to move most of my Minitaire paints to the storage box. To say I use my airbrush infrequently would imply that I use it much more than I do, so they don’t get a lot of love. I know that I could just use them to paint, but I am just not as comfortable with them as I am with Reaper, so … I did keep all the ghost tints out though, they’re pretty awesomely pigmented tints just like the Reaper clears.

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This was another night of swatching. I would label the nail stick, paint the nail, and then highlight the paint on the list, ad nauseum. The picture on the right is my excess paint storage box. Duplicates, unused GW or Minitaire paints, and extra nails/ dropper bottles go here. This box is heavy.

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Some advice if you decide to hurt yourself like me… If I had it to do over again, I would buy the opaque nails rather than the clear ones. Metallics didn’t show up well without an undercoat, and I had to paint white under the sku on the swatch so I could read it. At first I tried writing the sku on each little area, but it was really difficult. It was much easier to just write all three at the top and then go.

That’s how I did it! I’m sure hoping this helps. I also kept one small paint rack on my desk for my additives, black and white, primers, and paints I’m currently using. My goal is that I put them away before I fill the rack. We shall see… Onto the painting!

For January’s Reaper Challenge League… challenge? I’m painting the new Bones USA model!!! I can’t tell you how excited I am that Reaper is finally moving this production to my home state of Texas. I am so excited that I bought 2… I’m doing this mini as a Duo with my buddy Jeff, aka Max Styles at http://www.maxstylespainting.com, you should go check him out!!

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I wasn’t sure what I was wanting to do yet, so I just decided to go with both of them and see what happened. I’m too ADD for one model anyways. lol. I’m gonna keep working on them the next few days, hopefully I’ll make some progress since there’s a deadline. I do better with some sort of motivation to finish something. Otherwise I just add it to one of my giant Boxes of Shame.

Y’all be careful out there. Wear your mask, wash your hands, get your immunization.

-marinealRose