Transcript
Frustration, failure, punishment, embarrassment, these are a few of my favorite things. These are also all potential symptoms of the famous FFT. First BARKing Time.
So let me tell you a little story, a tale as old as time.
A man walks into a workshop. He sits at a table cluttered with the tools of his trade. He takes a deep breath and cracks his knuckles. For he is to attempt this day that which he’s only seen others do. Did he study these other artists’ techniques? Did he pour over the examples of his betters? Did he prepare and plan for this singular new exercise? Did he pause to consider his own fundamental lack of understanding?
Nay! He is simply deciding to leap without looking! The best kind of leap.
Alas, the laughter from the crowd haunts him still.
Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes your host tests his resolve – or perhaps rather tests his capacity for embarrassment. And he thanks his patrons for supporting this exercise in inanity.
So when I happened to glance into the Pile of Opportunity: Primed and Ready Edition display case back when I was putting Les Chasseurs de Cauchemars away and grabbing that dragonborn to paint up – well, to be honest, I had initially grabbed this miniature to paint up in a leisurely way. And thanks to how this went, I ended up grabbing that dragonborn and that one became the subject of the video at the beginning of the month.
Yeah, this pair of videos got real squirrelly. As you’ll see soon, the dragonborn would have made a much better model for today’s exercise and this model would have been fine for the earlier video.
Have I talked enough nonsense at you yet?
All right, so I’m always thinking about how I want to improve my painting, and about techniques I want to learn or get better at and how every miniature presents on opportunity. The other side of the Desire coin is Action. If we always leave this coin face up and never flip it over to the action side, well, you get it. Wishing for something never generates results. Actions always generate results. Of some kind, right?
So I told myself – it’s time. You’re gonna try out Non Metallic Metal.
Now, quite a few of you, dear viewers, have expressed a mild appreciation for how I tend to show my mistakes and learning process in my videos. This video might be taking that sentimentality a bit too far, just a warning. Dear viewer discretion is advised.
We’ve all seen examples of non-metallic metal in miniature painting. Do I think it’s super cool? Yes I do. Do I think it’s necessary outside of highly competitive painting competitions or display pieces? No. So why do I want to try it? See question number one.
So I started out painting the figure’s face and actually doing a little shading on it and darkening the eyes, etc. At this point I’m still thinking about color scheme, ‘cause I have no idea going in as per usual. I thought I’d do her cloak up in red and I’ve never tried out this Sigvald Burgundy Contrast paint so to see what’s it like, I painted the whole cloak in it thinking I’d highlight it up to red. This Contrast color turned out to be really nice, I dig it.
And then some Basilicanum Gray for her actual clothing under the armor, I just kinda wanted that stuff to go dark and let the cloak and her hair and armor be the brighter parts of the model. A mud brown for the leather bits, which of course I’ll wash down later and some wildwood for her boots, for a little bit of a darker leather look. Then out of habit I went in with a black contrast paint to base coat all the armor. This was probably not the way to go for doing non-metallic metal, but we’ll talk more about that in a bit.
I put some red down on the leather wrappings on the haft of the warhammer still thinking I was going to take that cloak up to red, but you’ll see how that panned out later too. I highlighted the leather in preparation for the dark brown wash, again this is pretty typical leather process, I’d like to get better at leather but this has become such an easy few steps that it’s hard for me to think outside my own box. I threw this wash onto the hammer haft as well, cause I was not liking the red against that purple or burgundy cloak color.
Choosing hair color is another constant stumbling block for me but I thought I’d try out a realistic blonde, so foregoing my usual noob choice of yellow, I went with a sandy tone. I’ve done this once before on a miniature and it turned out really nice. The only issue I have is the lack of contrast between her skin tone and the hair color, but hey, one thing at a time, I’ll try to consciously get better at painting faces sometime in the future.
I’m not sure why I went with a gray on the hammer, but I thought I’d be able to glaze in some depth to it later with some darker blue-ish tones.
So now I came to the whole point for this miniature, this non-metallic metal thing. And here’s where we can discuss a number of things.
One, how watching hours of youtube painting examples and tutorials is a substitute for exactly zero hours of actual painting practice.
Two, there are typically additional concepts incorporated into any given specific technique, like for non-metallic metal (or NMM as we in the hobby call it), we need a grasp of how light interacts with materials and objects. At least on some kind of basic level.
Three, painting of any kind, even most digital painting and illustration, is partially a physical skill and getting good at anything physical requires physical practice.
So I obviously have no idea what I’m doing here. The first thing that occurred to me was that this was a terrible miniature selection to try learning nonmetallic metal with. It doesn’t even have a sword, which is typically a long flat surface that makes for, arguably, the best object to paint NMM with. But no, I’ve chosen a figure without a sword and lots of intricate armor that’s full of small details and filigree. You can see that my planning ahead or actual thought process is microscopic at best.
One major issue is that I can’t visualize what this piece of armor should look like as real steel. I know that the general format for non-metallic metal is all about high contrast – small bright highlights graduated into very dark shadow, roughly speaking. I also know – keyword, academically – that highlights and shadows are about describing 3D volumes.
These armor pieces have so many ridges, I have no idea where highlights should go. Let’s be honest: if they’d been perfectly smooth slabs of metal, I’d still have no idea where to place highlights. In the end, because I’m working off this black base coat, I’m not even painting non-metallic metal, I’m much more painting this as if it were black enameled armor (you know, as if the miniature were wearing black armor).
So maybe I should have base-coated the armor in a steel gray as opposed to the black, but honestly I have no idea. I might try that in a future attempt.
Another thing I’ve been noticing is that I’m personally getting worse at painting tiny details. Getting older is fun, ain’t it? This is partially due to aging eyesight but it’s also partially due to what I guess is a reduction or degradation of fine motor skills. I mean, I was never gonna be a surgeon, right, but still. I’m noticing it. I’m actually looking forward to painting up some kind of larger scale miniature just because of this.
Of course I’m simply may not harbor any great talent in the miniature painting realm, and rather I might harbor a great talent for making excuses. Which do you think is more likely?
My feeling at this point in the process was total frustration. Maybe a dose of existential defeat hung around the fringes of my fragile ego. I flirted pretty heavily with the idea of just putting a color down on the armor and calling it “fantasy colored armor”. But something made me push through the aggravation, the gnashing of teeth and the wailing of the damned.
Oh, there was wailing, trust me. I could play you some of the scratch track audio recorded by the painting camera, but my capacity for embarrassment has as about the same limit as youtube does for profanity.
The thing that gave me just enough resolve to hammer through was the notion of “content”.
Yes, I was sick to my stomach as well. Never say social media isn’t good for anything.
So this is an example of utter failure. And exploiting public humiliation for views.
But it’s also an example of the first step in any journey. A necessary, predictable, appropriate human reaction to the first step in learning something new.
Remember – to get somewhere you gotta start walking, even if it’s in the wrong direction. I’m just practicing what I preach, dammit. Or at least I’m ordering one of these right now and I’m gonna wear it! You’ll see.
Everyone’s got a different baseline of talent or baseline of skill – attribute score, if you will – in all different kinds of endeavors. But just like in a role playing game, just because you have a lower attribute score doesn’t mean you can’t succeed at an attempt to accomplish something using that low-scoring attribute. My first attempt at taking photos and shooting video were much better than this nonsense of a first attempt at non-metallic metal. That just means one thing comes easier to me than the other, but so what? We’ve all drawn that crappy first stick figure, or missed the ball when trying golf for the first time.
What? Yeah, I did that, I missed a lot of times and I’ve never tried golf again.
But whatever, right? If you wanna learn how to do something, you either try and quit or you go Lieutenant Dan – you call this a storm! Come and get me! – And you dare yourself to just jump off the cliff again and again until you grow those wings. Me and my ridiculously convoluted metaphors. Either way, it’s your choice. Be happy with it. I don’t wanna play golf, but I do wanna paint some damn non-metallic metal someday.
Even though today is obviously not that day. So here’s the finished model, and I don’t know what to say about it. But I’ve got it documented now and it’ll be useful at some point for comparative purposes, in some way. I’ll watch some more tutorials on the non-metallic metal process and look at some more examples and I’ll try this again, but I think I’ll almost certainly pick figure with a sword to try it on next.
So, dare yourself to learn something new, initial results be damned! And then, understand that that feeling of frustration and nightmares is completely natural and a part of the learning process.
See ya!