Tools for Painting Miniatures

I post a lot about painting, but choosing and collecting the tools behind the craft can be just as interesting.  Here is a run-down of the tools that make my miniatures look less dull. For those looking for help building miniatures, I'll do a separate post about assembly tools and decals.

Brushes

Brushes are the vehicle for all your artistic endeavor with miniatures.  They can also be really expensive! Most guides focus on what to do (and not do) with your brushes, so let me focus on how to buy them.

For starting painters, don't worry about having all the right brushes, and especially don't buy the expensive ones! Take your starter kit brushes, maybe a bigger one for dry brushing, and learn on them. Learn to draw the brush away from the point instead of stubbing it into corners. Learn to load up the brush less than halfway. Above all, wash it thoroughly and prevent paint from drying in the ferrule. You will screw it up eventually, and your beloved companion will split, and then you can bury them. Keep a few of these starter brushes around for applying washes. Here's a picture of some of my first brushes that have bent and split over time due to abuse. Time to retire them from detail work.

Time for retirement, old friends

Keep your old crappy watercolor brushes for applying shades and washes

You will hit your stride with the next set of brushes. Having graduated from the $10 twelve-pack of watercolor brushes, the world splits into synthetic and sable. Synthetic are just that: plastic bristles.  And they wear over time mush faster than natural hair. Citadel just released their latest STC set, but The Army Painter brush set is probably the best value for your money. It comes with enough variety that you can learn what brushes are your favorite (and some editions come with a free sable brush, neat!).  If you already have strong opinions or lack options at your local store, you may be able to find quality synthetics like this Princeton Velvetouch Round 2 for a reasonable price at art stores that aren't expressly for nerds. Expect to pay about $6-8 per brush. And don't stress about getting the tiniest of brushes for the detail. The important part of detail work is holding a point and not how big the brush is! Even with better synthetics, you will gradually see bent tips as you use the brush.  This is how synthetics wear, and it is totally normal. If you treat them right, your first synthetic should last a squad or 10 figures. You will know your brush skills are maturing when a fresh brush lasts a whole army.

My standard kit

Curling bristles are normal, and they can get into tight corners!

 

Standard drybrush kit

Finally we come to the joyous pinnacle of your painting kit, the sable hair brushes. Yes, these brushes are made with actual animal hair.  And they are superior in almost every way to synthetics, but their price also puts them out of reach for most people.  They hold their shape better when loaded up with paint, and their hairs hold more paint so you can cover more area without going back to the palette. You probably only need one sable brush to start.  Grow your collection slowly, and they will last you forever. A note that the Kolinsky Sable is endangered in Siberia and import is difficult at best. So you're probably not getting real Kolinsky sable for under $25 a brush. Here again, Army Painter wins for having the right brushes for hobbyists. I inherited my Regiment brush, and it is still going strong after a decade of use by my father. By the time you're ready for your next sable brush, you will have enough experience to know if you want to go all-in on the Winsor & Newtons.

A few notes on storage: Try to keep the plastic tip covers for all your brushes.  It's the easiest way to protect them from accidental damage in transit.  If you find your collection growing and cannot bear to part with your new friends, make or buy a brush case in hard plastic (if you don't need to travel and know they will always be sitting up) or fabric like the one pictured below.  I threw it together from duck cloth in about an hour on a sewing machine with basic measurements. Your local art supply or fabric store has something similar for sale.

Citadel Colours App

Available for both iOS and Android, The Citadel Colour app helps me create and remember my color schemes.  I can create projects, track my color inventory, and keep a shopping list of paints for the next time I hit the local game store.  It comes loaded with a diverse palette, but it only offers the Citadel range from Games Workshop. If you use dropper bottles from Vallejo or the new Two Thin Coats range from Duncan Rhodes, you're out of luck. It also doesn't have cloud storage, so switching phones means transferring your inventory, projects, and history as well (my scheme images come from doing CYA in case I lose my phone). Notwithstanding, it has worked to keep me organized.  I would love to know if there were some non-GW options available out there to cover the various paint brands I might use.

  

Storage for Paint

I paint at both my house and my SO's, so this 48-bottle nail polish organizer is perfect for carrying almost my entire collection of paint pots or droppers when I'm being indecisive.  The important part of storage is being able to see the shade without having to look at the label.  Having a clear storage system that can corral a large collection while keeping them visible is ideal. Injection-molded two-sided plastic carrying cases for nail polish go by many brand names on Amazon, and they'll all run you about twenty-five bucks. I haven't found a better mobile solution than this, but I would also suggest similar nail polish storage for a workbench installation.  Both tiered shelves and wall-mount nail polish racks are going to be way more affordable, and see-through, than any miniature-specific laser cut racks you might find at your local game store.

Painting Handle

Whether you buy the Citadel handle or print your own, These little contraptions keep your mitts off the details until they are sufficiently primed sealed.  This is doubly important with Contrast Paints as it can almost be rubbed off like chalk when applied in thin coats and handled with your bare hands. You can even temporarily glue a base to a larger miniature like a vehicle so it can be mounted on the painting handle. Get one.  It's worth it.

 

The Wet Palette

I have used ceramic tiles and even tried Citadel's Palette Paper, but I will never go back now that I've started using a wet palette. The idea is simple: parchment floated atop a spongey pad allows water to pass from the wet pad, through the parchment, and into the paint. The paint doesn't bleed down into the pad, and instead stays hydrated as it dries from the top down. This flow retains water in your paint longer so it remains workable. But it also keeps your blends around longer without drying out, and it speeds up the "always thin your paints" advice that was key to so many of us making the leap from gloopy to gorgeous. Simply put, a wet palette will make getting paint onto models easier. Even if you have your doubts, you should give it a shot. And I'm going to show you how to do that as cheaply as possible. 

This is one area where I have not graduated to a professional solution because I'm so satisfied with how my DIY palette is working. The key is getting a truly air tight container like this now-discontinued Snapware. All it needs is a shallow depth into which you can lay something absorbent (like paper towels) and top that with a layer of parchment. The shallow depth allows you to have a low angle of attack with your brush.  You want this when rolling your brush or mixing paint around. The one I bought is deep, but the two-well insert can be removed with one well used as a wet palette and another used to hold the wiping cloth. The deep well is handy for transporting the paint itself.

On sale, it was cheapest of my options

All layers visible (palette, folded paper towel pad, and parchment)

All soaked up; you can see the water beading on the surface

If you don't want to DIY it, there is a $10 wet palette on Amazon right now that couldn't be any worse than what you're painting on. The Army Painter palette is possibly the most widely known.  It comes with a pad, sheets of their "special paper" that looks and feels like parchment, and brush storage.

Note: Since first publishing this, I obtained the Red Grass Games palette and have been loving it. Whatever you choose, get to it! It will change how you paint forever.

Photos

Susan Sontag once wrote, “Today everything exists to end in a photograph.” And the pandemic has only heightened the importance of good pictures to show your friends why you can't come out hiking on a Sunday morning.

My main photo rig is a photo tent lined with white polyester and a selection of backdrops that drape down the back in a long curve to remove seams from the finished picture.  In the past, I have built photo tents out of PVC and cotton, or vellum pasted to a rough frame of furring strips.  What really matters is the next part: I point as much direct light as possible at the walls of the tent in the hopes that it will diffuse through and evenly light my miniature from all possible angles.

For the camera, I will use a smartphone camera in a pinch, but I prefer a DLSR with a macro lens.  This combo gives ultra-detailed shots for individual minis. Remove the macro for group shots, and make sure you are lining everyone up in your depth of field. There are packs of lenses available for smartphones too.  They work, and they are a whole lot cheaper than a new DSLR just so you can take pretty pictures of your knick knacks, but you do you!

"Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!

Oddments

Stop struggling with a yellow overhead light.  Get a portable or installable full-spectrum lamp or bulb like an Ott Light or LED strip.  If you haven't received your baby book update since Middle School, your grandmother's scrapbooking light is probably up for grabs! They are cheaper now than ever before, so buy one of your own rather than stealing hers. I combine the LED strip pictured below with a Costco-bought Ott Lite that even has wireless charging built in.

Applying technical paints like snow and muck is 10x easier with a sculpting tool.  These also work with green stuff, so get a big pack of them and find just the right tool for those nooks and crannies. Moving around muck is also a good use for those small brushes you can no longer use but cannot bear to throw away.

Paint cups wit ribbed bottoms can be hell on your bristles, so go easy, Bob Ross. The wide bottom on the Citadel pot can help keep it from spilling pink paint onto the carpet of your room.  Do that too much and your partner/landlord might get stabby.

Even if you aren't painting regularly on a tile anymore, a ceramic well palette can help mix larger batches of Contrast or Washes. Cover the palette with saran wrap and it will retain water like a wet palette. 

The Aviary: Huckleberry

The Aviary, Pg 404

One of the cocktails hailing from The Office, a speakeasy basement bar underneath The Aviary, this seemed simple to assemble with only one bit of complicated machinery: a sous vide.  Also, the presentation alone was intoxicating: a frothy head atop a mauve concoction? Sign me up!

I was able to obtain a chinois at a Goodwill.  The strainer and pestle separates juice from pulp and seeds.  However, the main ingredient is a clove tincture (fancy word for Everclear infused with clove). This required a sous vide as written.  As long as I've heard about them, I have never pulled the trigger on this low temperature wonder-machine (I don't have an instant pot either).  I figured it was time to lay that to rest.

There are plenty of DIY sous vide videos on the internet.  I settled on one that recommended a rice cooker combined with an industrial 110V AC temperature controller instead of a brewer's setup.  The most important part of this setup is the type of heated pot you use.  I couldn't use my crock pot, for example, because it had a digital control.  Every time the power cut off and then back on, it would not return to heating the pot.  My manual-switch rice cooker worked like a charm, however.  Then, for $20 in parts from the hardware store and $20 for the temperature controller on Amazon, I had a safe contraption through which to control my rice cooker and keep a pot of water within 2 degrees of a specific temperature for any length of time (perhaps "safe" is relative; use wire nuts and an electrical box when playing with mains, kids; the picture below shows iteration one with no cover).

The clove tincture was dead simple but extremely smelly.  $1 in bulk cloves and some Everclear got me a half dropper full of the cloviest drops the ever passed your nose. A word of warning: toasting the cloves is a horrendously smokey business.  Do this with a hood on full blast or outside.  We had to open all the windows and run for coffee.  I already had a vacuum sealer so I dumped the toasted cloves into a bag, poured on the alcohol, and dunked it into the rice cooker for an hour.  I decanted the result into an amber bottle with dropper and savored the aroma (which wasn't hard; it was everywhere).

The rest of the recipe was fairly simple.  Huckleberries don't come into season until August, so we went with blackberries from Mexico.  The syrup came together easy with a few gradually finer strainings.  6oz made 166g of juice.  Amaro Averna from Total Wine, Bombay Gin on sale, and Angostura bitters I already had on hand completed the boozy bits.  A quick trip through a shaker came out with a pink foamy pour that gradually separated into mauve and foam.  The bitters and pepper hit our nose, and the herbal hit of the drink completes it.  It's just sweet enough with off-season blackberries to be pleasant without being overpowering.  As we drank, we noticed the colors change and aromas deepen.  Very fun and dynamic drink.

A second round (can't waste syrup, after all) made with vodka toned down the herbal nature.  This will probably be the version I make for myself unless the guests are already gin drinkers.  Too close to 'too much' pine.  A friend suggested ditching the clove and replacing it by painting the glass with Chartreuse.  Either way, this seems to be a reliable cocktail to just have on hand.  Freezing berry syrup during their season in 2oz portions and the huge amount of clove tincture I have left over means it will be quick to assemble with a fun story to tell while we shake it up.

The Aviary: Knickerbocker

The Aviary, Pg 249

One part of a tiki flight, I was recommended to try this this based on the raspberries.

While the recipe as written requires a pacojet, I don't have $5000 just to get deliciously drunk.  I tried an ice cream maker to make the slush instead with fantastic results.  The instructions say to freeze the mix and rum separately and process together, but a spin in the ice cream maker brought it to just enough slush for a small batch.

The real winner here is the recommended rum.  My first "drink until you hurl" experience was with coconut rum, and I've avoided the spirit ever since.  The Zaya Gran Reserva aged rum has really caught me by the nose, however.  It has just enough molasses to be delicious, and the aging has mellowed it considerably compared to its frat-boy cousin.  I'll definitely be stocking this as a rum of choice (unless the book turns up something even better).

Postman Masterclass Pt. 2

During my second Postman meetup as part of the Las Vegas Test Automation group, we were able to cover some of the more advanced features of Postman. It's a valuable tool for testing RESTful services (stronger opinions on that also exist), and they are piling on features so fast that it is hard to keep track. If you're a business trying to add automation, Postman is easily the lowest barrier to entry to doing so. And with a few tweaks (or another year of updates) it could probably solve most of your API testing.

The meetup covered the Documentation, Mock Server and Monitor functionality. These are pieces that can fit in your dev organization to smoothe adoption, unroadblock, and add automation with very little overhead. Particularly, the Mock servers they offer can break the dependency on third party integrations quite handily. This keeps Agile sprints moving in the face of outside roadblocks. The Monitors seem like a half-measure. They gave a GUI for setting up external monitors of your APIs, but you still need Jenkins and their Newman node package to do it within your dev env. The big caveat with each of these is that they are most powerful when bought in conjunction with the Postman Enterprise license.  Still, at $20 a head, it's far and away the least expensive offering on the market.

Since the meetup, I've found a few workarounds for the features I wish it had that aren't immediately accessible from the GUI. As we know in testing in general, there is no one-size fits all solution.  And the new features are nice, but they don't offer some of the basics I rely on to make my job easier.  Here is my ever-expanding list of add-ons and hidden things you might not know about.  Feel free to comment or message me with more:

Postman has data generation in requests through Dynamic Variables, but they're severely limited in functionality. Luckily, someone dockerized npm faker into a restful service. This is super easy to slip stream into your Postman Collections to create rich and real-enough test data. Just stand it up, query, save the results to global variables, and reuse them in your tests.

The integrated JavaScript libraries in the Postman Sandbox are worth a fresh look. The bulk of my work uses lodash, crypto libraries, and tools for validating and parsing JSON. This turns your simple requests to data validation and schema tracking wonders. 

• Have a Swagger definition you don't trust? Throw it in the tv4 schema validator. 
• Have a deep tree of objects you need to be able to navigate RESTfully? Slice and dice with lodash, pick objects at random, and throw it up into a monitor. Running it every ten minutes should get you down onto the nooks and crannies.

This article on bringing the big list of naughty strings (https://ambertests.com/2018/05/29/testing-with-naughty-strings-in-postman/amp/) is another fantastic way to fold in interesting data to otherwise static tests. The key is to ensure you investigate failures. To get the most value, you need good logs, and you need to pay attention to your results in your Monitors.

If you have even moderate coding skills among your testers, they can work magic on a Postman budget. If you were used to adding your own libraries in the Chrome App, beware: the move to a packaged app means you no longer have the flexibility to add that needed library on your own (faker, please?).

More to come as I hear of them.

Hardback Review

Received my Hardback copy that I Kickstarted. Having played Paperback once or twice, the thought of an evolved version piqued my interest. Here's an initial take after an unboxing and one game: I loved this playthrough, and I'm looking forward to the next one!

Press your luck - In most deck builders, your hand is your turn. A bad draw leads to an unsatisfying nothing turn. Not so with Hardback. Use ink and remover to turn a bad draw into a high dollar buy. I like that drawing cards (a coveted power in Dominion and Star Realms) is a core mechanic rather than in the soup of card benefits.

The power of not buying - In most deck builders, you need to buy something by the end of your turn. Use it or lose it. Adopting this in Hardback can lead to filling your deck with trash letters (L. Ron Hubbard syndrome) and a perennial lack of money. Instead, go for quality by NOT buying cards and instead buying ink. This allows you to play ACROSS turns by saving up ink, drawing all your cents next turn, and dropping it on that sweet consonant or Perennial Classic with great benefits. Once we realized this, play went a lot faster as we could buy high cost cards. We just had to wait and plot and plan.

A Game About Words - Our first game was with 3 people: one experienced gamer, one apathetic adult, and one ADHD preteen. I was worried that, like Scrabble, the word part of the game would turn players off. Instead, it provided fun stories and interesting interactions. You can turn any card into a wild and lose its benefits, so using all your cards can help you, but not as much as the above pressing your luck. I played two words that mean 'toilet' while my tongue-tied son bought "reveal adjacent wild" cards so he could focus on getting points.

Surprisingly and Pleasingly Interactive - There are no attack cards as a benefit in the standard game, but that doesn't mean it's not interactive. When in doubt, Just give up: Ghost Writer let's you play open-hand and rely on other players. They even get ink as a benefit! For a genre rife with negative player interactions ruining games (no-attack Dominion is a staple at our house), this is a refreshing way to add positive interactions. The Perennial Classic mechanic is similarly combative but not adversarial, and the Jail benefit and ability to reset the offer row can elicit a groan or two while you foil your opponents' plans.

OMG The Design There are puns everywhere, the cards are complex but not cluttered, the cardstock is pleasing to hold, and the use of meeples rather than tokens makes it chunkier than the small box lets on. Leaving room in the box for more cards might hint at expansions, but it comes with plenty of alternative ways to play. I can't wait to break out the player powers and co-op mode.

I know Paperback was hard to get for a while. If you have a chance and need a deck builder with less combat and more pithy reveals, get Hardback.

Link to Reddit discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/7tlini/hardback_first_impressions

Review: Women in Tech

I finished reading @tarah's book Women in Tech. What better way to celebrate its paperback release than with a quick review.

Five years ago, I found my life turned inside out. People asked me deeply personal questions and questioned my basic competence. In the center of the maelstrom, I found comfort in a book with stories of people like me who were successful in spite of the difficulty. The stories were also paired with advice on how others has survived, thrived, and moved past the traumatic events.

In my case, my spouse had come out and I was coming to grips with my future as a straight half of a mixed orientation marriage. The book that helped me through that was The Other Side of the Closet: The Coming-Out Crisis for Straight Spouses and Families. Just knowing that I was not alone had a powerful influence. Therapy had helped; family could be supportive; friends might be weird. Those stories gave me the strength to say, "This too shall pass." 

For me, Women in Tech knocks it out of the park in a similar fashion. Concise, varied, authoritative women have lined up to share their experience making it in tech. Some faced abuse while others encountered discrimination. In the end, most felt the creeping fear of being an imposter (poignant in light of the abuse hurled at Equifax's Music Major CISO). For marginalized groups, simply knowing you're not alone can be enough strength for the day-to-day challenges.

The practical advice made it particularly useful for me. Coming to tech by way of tech support, I had no tutelage in interviewing, technical CV's, and salary negotiation. To this end, I've rewritten my resumé, registered a domain for this humble blog, and continue to try to organize a testing meetup in this desert town of mine. I don't know if each step individually will bear fruit, but together they make me feel less vulnerable to a manager's whim. I have a presence online and a skill to sell independent of any one job.

Broadly, Women in Tech has helped me understand the journey many of my co-workers have made. A fantastic tester with 20 years of experience that is comfortable in OpenVMS still expresses a lack of confidence in interpreting 'man words'. A skilled project manager guided countless projects from C-suite dream to customer reality while being a betimes single mom.  Being so broadly defined, tech needs diverse voices at all levels, and it particularly needs women and their contributions supported wherever possible.

There are plenty of gems in the book that I can't begin to address. My heart broke when the advice had to find a balance between optimism and reality. Having my spouse, an engineer by trade, transition made me want to learn more about the trans-in-tech experience. The constant refrain of Impostor's Syndrome makes me want to look for research papers. It is clear that Tarah has captured experiences with a depth and variety unavailable elsewhere.

I wouldn't be a hacker if I didn't mention the brain testing crypto puzzles at the heading of each chapter. Themed on famous women in tech, the learning curve is steep. I am currently stuck and, as the book makes perfectly clear, progress can only be made with help from all sides.