Well, to say it’s been a while is an understatement.

I’m not even sure where to back up to at this point. Lol. So let’s just recap.

My last post, we were headed to reaper Con. At reapercon, I received my second giant monster gold trophy, a silver medal for that giant monster, and had an amazing time with my friends. There was the usual amount of laughter and excitement and nonsensical ramblings that we have come to expect from Reapercon. At that time, I was unable to do a whole lot of drinking because we were at the stage of pregnancy where you don’t tell anyone, but you can’t drink.
Since then, we’ve added to our miniature collection and now we have a Tiny Overlord and a Tinier Overlord.
Our original Tiny Overlord is now 4 ft tall and 5 years old so, If we’re going in d&d terms he’s a Small Overlord now. And the tiny one is now 10 months old.
If you have little ones you’ll understand that I haven’t had much time to paint or breathe or think, and if you don’t, let me just say that you have no idea how much free time you have until you have absolutely none. 😂 But they’re amazing and we love them and I wouldn’t change it for the world.
The place I normally sit at reapercon is affectionately called the Old Guys Table. We always have a great time and recently we decided to start doing discord chats every two weeks. I don’t always get to participate the whole time because of the aforementioned Overlords, but they’re always welcoming and we have an awesome time whenever I do get to join. Which has led me to actually getting to paint again. The Great Bearded One and I recently remodeled our shared office space and it’s opened up a whole new area for me to paint. So let’s talk painting.
My goal for reapercon this year, which is in September, is to get a hat trick of Gold Giant Monster trophies. I realize I have a giant target on my back now as everyone keeps saying that they’re going to get my trophy, lol. I have several options at this time, I’m looking at yog sothoth, Cerberus, a giant purple worm, and I have two half started Dagons. At least one of these will no doubt become my actual entry. However, even before reapercon last time I had gotten extremely less time to paint due to my work schedule, and I certainly haven’t had any more since having the second baby. So I decided today, on my day of vacation where my mom took both children and I have the whole day to myself to just sit down and paint something (at the time of posting, this was 5 days ago… 🤦‍♀️). I find that I get stuck trying to paint something to a competition quality and I’m reminded of the story of the pottery class. The story goes that a teacher divided the class into two groups. One group would be graded on the quality of work done and one group would be graded on the quantity of work done. The group with the quality spent to the entire semester working on one piece to see if they could make the best quality, but the group for quantity obviously made lots of things. At the end of the semester it was found that the group with quantity ended up turning out better quality as well because they literally ground out their skill. So, with that in mind, I decided to just paint something. I turn on a timer to give myself a little bit of impetus to get it done and found that it took me about an hour to an hour and a half to get this little guy done. I wasn’t going for anything crazy, I wasn’t going for competition quality, I was just trying to get back into the groove of painting. And I’m pretty happy with him. I see places where I could improve, and I see things that I need to do differently.

I also find that I get stuck in the same color schemes and I need to break out of that a little bit. My second goal for this year is to really really really figure out what I’m doing with metallics. I need to either figure out how to do NMM which has evaded me up to this point, or I need to decide that I just use true metallics and do shades and whatever else. I’ve avoided miniatures with any kind of metal for years due to my inability to paint it and I need to just get over it. I even paid for a whole class series on it, and haven’t watched it. 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️So that’s my goal. I’m going to try to paint something every week and complete it. I have a gigantic stack of things that are half-painted and I need to just start finishing some things. If I can finish miniatures then I feel like I can get to the point where I can actually paint something for the competition in August / September.
For those of you that have been faithful readers I appreciate your patience and understanding that my content has never been super reliable. Lol. I have made tons of crocheted things since I can set them down and they don’t take any real artistic bug to get me going. So I’ve made blankets and scarves and hats and all kinds of little amigurumi for my overlords. If I can get the gumption up I’ll post more pictures of those next time. For now, I’m happy to just be back, and I hope to be posting more frequently.
I hope you’re all doing well!

-marinealRose