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If you’ve been following this series in order, then by this point you’ve endured the construction process for ten chibi Foreign Company models out of an army that I have explicitly mentioned is only ten models strong. Given this, you might be wondering what exactly I’m purporting to fill a fourth installment with.<\/p>\n
A reasonable query!<\/p>\n
In short, this post is “everything else”. I tried to keep the writeups contained to just<\/em> the sculpting process for each model and some nice shots of them all painted up, but there were other elements to the project that didn’t really fit in the main installments. So for all of that stuff, we have this episode. \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n <\/p>\n If you haven’t seen the sculpting installments yet and that sounds interesting to you, feel free to jump back:<\/p>\n And if you don’t care about basing, scenic trays, or solid<\/em> 6 out of 10 painting advice and just want to see a gallery of all the nice final photos and videos in one spot, you’ll want to zip forward to:<\/p>\n If I somehow haven’t yet convinced you to leave, then I guess you might as well scroll down and weather another rambling essay about my insecurities.<\/p>\n *shrug*<\/em><\/p>\n Now, before I say anything even remotely<\/em> related to anything I just said I was going to talk about, I’d first like to go on a 2,000-word tangent to recount a mildly interesting story that only loosely<\/em> relates to this project.<\/p>\n Sound good? Great! \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n I haven’t done the analysis, but I bet that if you did a search of my blog articles to determine the complete sentence I’ve written the most times across all of my 105 articles, it would probably be:<\/p>\n I don’t consider myself to be much of a painter.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It’s not that I think my painting is bad<\/em>, exactly. It’s probably even above average at this point. it’s just that, I don’t consider it to be of a high enough level where I have much to say about it that would be different from the advice you would get elsewhere on the Internet. So for the most part, I usually skip the painting process in most of my articles, just as I did for this series.<\/p>\n With that said, if you rewind the clock a few years, my painting used<\/em> to be much, much worse. Up until 6ish years ago, I was very much a “layered paint straight out of the pot” painter, and my results were about what you would expect from that technique. But after painting that way for decades, I came to the realization that my general ineptitude at painting was having a negative impact on my development as a sculptor, and that prompted me to try to improve a bit.<\/p>\n See, when I sculpt a model, I’m able to look at the finished product and “see” what all of the forms are supposed to represent, because I’ve spent quite a lot of time staring at monocolour dudes made of clay or putty and my brain is used to processing them. Things like blank eyes don’t bother me– my brain fills in the missing iris and pupil that I know are implied and will be painted in later.<\/p>\n However, over time I found that other people usually weren’t as comfortable looking at a sculpture and considering it a finished work. Their brains, less accustomed to looking at single-coloured models, fretted more about what wasn’t there (i.e., the colours and the smaller details destined to be freehanded in)<\/em> than what was<\/em>, and I grew frustrated over time with how difficult it was to get useful feedback on my sculptures from random people I knew.<\/p>\n I didn’t have the same problem when I painted the models; that filled in the gap for most people, and allowed them to see what had been there before. So, I got in the habit of always painting my sculpts, even when I was really proud of the sculpting work and preferred to leave them bare, and even though my paint regularly destroyed<\/em> my work by obscuring detail work with thick applications of paint.<\/p>\n To cut the melodrama short, the solution for me was lessons. I know some dudes in Montr\u00e9al who have cultivated a solid miniature painting community, and regularly bring in professional painters to teach them new stuff. And one year, I decided to drive down and see if I could learn anything useful to help me stop doing so much damage to my own sculpting work.<\/p>\n Flower Knight by Meg Maples<\/em><\/p>\n The first class I went to was taught by Meg Maples, who at the time was a studio painter for Privateer Press. I blogged about that class here<\/a>. Meg’s class focuses on two-brush blending, which is a technique that I found challenging to pick up (and still need to concentrate to pull off)<\/em>, but to this day remains the method I reach for when I want to put out my absolute best work. I’ve never found another technique that blends quite so smoothly or layers on quite so vividly. The problem is, it’s just… hard<\/em>. There was a two-year period after the class where I practiced it on a regular basis, and it got a lot easier for me to execute; but it never quite got to the point where I could two-brush blend without actual concerted effort, and any time I tried it while I was tired or distracted, the results kind of fell apart. The technique is solid, and Meg is great at teaching it (seriously, go find one of her classes, she’s awesome)<\/em>, but ultimately I just didn’t have the discipline to maintain the skill over time.<\/p>\n Deanna by Elizabeth Beckley<\/em><\/p>\n A year or two later, the Montr\u00e9al crew brought in another pro painter to teach a class, and I once again trundled down to attend. This time around, the teacher was Elizabeth Beckley, who was most notable at the time for her work painting Chibi miniatures.<\/p>\n Yeah, that’s going to be relevant here. \ud83d\ude1b<\/p>\n At the time, I didn’t have a lot of interest in chibi work; I had only sculpted three chibi models in my life (including, thanks to a request through an intermediary, Elizabeth’s wedding cake toppers<\/a>)<\/em>, and I didn’t really intend at that point to ever do much more work in that style. However, the class was still very interesting to me because I was already at that point recognizing my own inadequacies at turning Meg’s two-brush technique into an everyday workflow, and I was hoping that another teacher could show me something a bit more my speed. And thankfully, that’s exactly what happened. \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n Now, I have been told that I have a tendency to give compliments that aren’t actually compliments. Like that time I told the kid at the burrito shop we used to eat at before D&D twice a month that his burritos used to be fairly bad but had improved a ton over the past year. I don’t care what my mortified fellow players say, that was totally an encouraging compliment!<\/p>\n Right, so, I mention that because every time I’ve shared my take-aways from Elizabeth’s class, people have interpreted my summary as a low-to-middling review. So, uh, please understand that when I say “Elizabeth basically only taught me one small thing, and everything else in her class was stuff I was already doing”, that is me describing the moment that I transformed as a painter<\/em>. Elizabeth didn’t “only teach me one thing” because her technique is bad or she’s a bad teacher– rather, it means that painting is actually really hard, and you can hodgepodge together a lot of really great advice from different places and do 90% of the process correctly, but that last 10% that you’re missing can still utterly<\/em> torpedo your results. And sometimes it takes a teacher who knows the process inside and out to look at what you’re doing and be able to say,<\/p>\n “That. That, right there. That’s what you’re doing wrong. Stop it.”<\/strong><\/p>\n So, yeah. Elizabeth’s class essentially taught glazing, which is the same thing as layering, but with much thinner paint. And I had already been layering! And mixing my own colours! But as I mentioned way at the start, I tended to layer with undiluted paint straight out of the pot, which made my highlights way too stark and my messy brushstrokes extremely visible. The single piece of advice I took away from Elizabeth was, “THIN YOUR GODDAMN PAINT”<\/strong>. And that alone moved me from destroying my sculpts with caked-on paint to actually being able to bring out the strengths of the sculpts in a way that both allowed others to properly see what I had done, and left me satisfied with my own work.<\/p>\n Chibi Marie-Claude, painted by Spud! \ud83d\ude42<\/em><\/p>\n So, Elizabeth’s class was a huge turning point for me as a painter, in spite of the fact that the explicit subject matter of the class wasn’t something I cared much about. BUT, the fact remains that I sat through an entire painting class with a professional painter of chibi miniatures, learning about the specific things that separate good chibi painting from the techniques used on more traditional models. And as it happens, my brain did a pretty good job of preserving most of the information somewhere in its convoluted and bat-infested filing system.<\/p>\n So when I was painting my chibi Foreign Company army, I kept flashing back to tips and techniques from Elizabeth’s class that were tremendously helpful in helping me make decisions about how to colour the models. Everything from the optimal degree of highlights (answer: “extreme!”) to the method for making great giant anime eyes really pop (answer: “glossy!”) came straight from someone whose job it is to know those things, and who was gracious enough to share them with a bunch of nerds in Qu\u00e9bec four years ago. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n And THAT, dear three readers who are even bothering to read this, is why I took you all on this very long journey through history. Because invariably, when people ask me for tips on making chibi models look good, I am going to confidently reply three things:<\/p>\n ^_^<\/p>\n So, funny story: I didn’t take any pictures of the painting process for this army.<\/p>\n Like, any. At all.<\/p>\n On purpose.<\/p>\n See, I finished sculpting the last model for this army on March 3rd, and the date that I was scheduled to drive down to Adepticon was March 26th. That gave me just over 3 weeks to paint 10 models. That may not sound like a lot to some people, but for reference: my last full army project, the pink Imperial Service<\/a> I painted for last year’s Adepticon, was the fastest I have ever painted a grouping of models for a single project. And that army was 7 models, and took me just over 3 months.<\/p>\n I am a very<\/em> slow painter, is what I’m saying.<\/p>\n So when I was staring down the barrel of painting my beloved bobbleheaded children, I knew that I was going to have to be smart about how I attacked the problem. First on the chopping block, I made some changes to the scope of my planned paintjob. My initial plan had been to hit the entire army with a soft coloured underlight from the front bottom left (similar to what I did last year on my speed-painted Combined Army demo army<\/a>, but much less garish)<\/em>. However, while I’m confident that the underlight would have looked good, it would have added hours to every model that I didn’t have, so I made my peace with dropping it.<\/p>\n The next adjustment I made was to shift my paint style. I had initially been planning to two-brush blend some elements of the army– notably the heads, for which I had been thinking that smooth blends were going to be really crucial. However, my previously-mentioned unease with the technique meant that I would invariably burn time struggling against my own clumsiness, so I made the pragmatic decision to switch to entirely glazing for the entire project.<\/p>\n ( Which, side note: I am now WAY better at than I was a month ago. I figured some things out on this army that I didn’t know before, and am kind of excited to try some of them out again on future models. \ud83d\ude00 )<\/em><\/p>\n Finally, and most pertinently to this article, I made the decision to not take any process photos. I have been methodically documenting my hobby life for so long that it now feels incredibly<\/em> strange to work on things and not take pictures of them. However, while taking pictures of my processes is deeply ingrained in me at this point, there’s no denying that it takes time and slows things down. The actual photos don’t take that long to shoot, but I often change the order that I paint certain sections so that the resulting sequence of photos will make more sense, even if it would have been faster to jump back and forth between a few tasks at the same time.<\/p>\n I couldn’t afford to get lost in that trap, so I made the call to not document my painting. Which, given my belief that I’m not a great person to be teaching about painting in the first place, wasn’t really sacrificing much, as I rarely share my painting process photos in my articles anyway.<\/p>\n So, yeah. Someone was going to ask, so there’s why the pictures don’t exist. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n BUT!<\/p>\n I do actually have one thing<\/em> that I thought was interesting to share, and it doesn’t require process photos to talk about. \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n This is my recipe card for this project. I mix all of my colours on a wet palette, so when I’m working on an army project where uniformity is going to be important, I like to record the stages and components of my various blends. I don’t record absolutely every colour patch; if a colour is only going to be used on a single model, like the purples and oranges I used on Laxmee, I typically don’t bother recording them. But anywhere I mix up a gradient that I like and expect to need elsewhere in the army, I record the steps on a sheet of cardstock to help me mix them again later.<\/p>\n So, that part isn’t all that unique; tons of painters do that, and if you aren’t already, you should probably start. \ud83d\ude42 However, this recipe card in particular lets me show something that the people at my local store are absolutely sick<\/em> of hearing me repeat.<\/p>\n “Pick a shadow colour, and blend LITERALLY EVERYTHING to that colour.”<\/strong><\/p>\n As I have been disclaiming for over twenty five hundred words now, I don’t think I’m a good painter. But ultimately what I mean by that statement is that I am not good at putting paint on models<\/em>. My best work can look quite nice, but I have absolutely no idea how to do pro-quality blends even in the best case, and the worst of my work when I’m really tired can look quite a lot like ass. Paint application takes patience, and I don’t always have that resource in abundance.<\/p>\n However, I do have one fairly uncommon skill among painters: I am exceptionally<\/em> good at colour selection. A number of converging interests that I pursued in my late teens and early twenties– digital painting, 3D modeling and rendering, and traditional acrylic painting– trained my brain to understand light and colour on a very fundamental level, and to this day I find it quite easy to determine which colours will be useful to portray specific desired lighting effects.<\/p>\n Okay, so that was vague. What am I talking about specifically?<\/p>\n Specifically<\/em>, I’m talking about how working in 3D modeling software like 3D Studio Max and Maya allowed me to play around with scene lights, and develop an appreciation for the impact that adding and removing specific types of lights from a scene had on the models. Unless you have access to tens of thousands of dollars of studio lighting equipment for some reason, it’s likely that you’ve never had the luxury of experimenting at length with a room in real life, to see what the impact is of having, say, a low red light washing over a scene that’s otherwise lit by powerful overhead white light, or what the scene looks like when you turn those white overheads way down and the dull glows of the previously subtle red light is now the primary defining illumination for the entire scene. And then, to switch back and forth between the two lighting levels to see what that red light is doing even when the main lights are ostensibly <\/em>drowning it out.<\/p>\n Playing with *cough* legitimatelyacquired *cough*<\/em> 3D software in my youth allowed me to run those experiments, and my development as a painter further into adulthood allowed me to boil all of my experiences into one incredibly useful painting strategy:<\/p>\n “Pick a shadow colour, and blend LITERALLY EVERYTHING to that colour.”<\/strong><\/p>\n See, the shadows on models aren’t actually an absence of light. They aren’t just “the places that the lights didn’t hit”, because “the lights” is a failure to understand how real-world lighting works. What shadows actually are, are areas where the strongest scene spotlights<\/em> have less impact<\/em>. But in the real world, the strongest scene spotlights– whether they be the sun, a nearby fire, or some artificial lighting like a streetlight– are almost never<\/em> the only light hitting a scene.<\/p>\n Here’s a street at night. You can see that the trees are green because they have artificial white streetlights illuminating them. However, in the edges of the scene where those lights drop off, note how things don’t, strictly speaking, turn black<\/em>— they turn dark blue<\/em>. Why? Because THAT’S THE COLOUR OF THE SKY. See that sky, there at the top? That’s almost black, but not quite black? Even though there is artificial light in the scene, that bright light is heavily localized and directional, and incapable of fully illuminating the entire scene. If you shut down all of the lights on that street, the scene would not turn black.<\/p>\n The entire scene would turn dark blue.<\/p>\n That, friends, is ambient light<\/strong>. Ambient light is light from a soft but huge<\/em> source– like a dim sky— <\/em>that floods your scene with a specific colour of very dim light by bouncing off of pretty much every surface onto every other surface from every angle. Ambient light is soft enough to be drowned by almost any other lights in your scene, so it won’t have much impact at all on what painters would think of as midtones and highlights. But your shadows are<\/em> that ambient light. Because shadows are the areas where your bright primary lights<\/em> didn’t strike the model; but anywhere those lights didn’t hit, there is still light. And that light is one specific colour, corresponding to (in most cases)<\/em> the sky.<\/p>\n Which means, when you’re painting naturalistic models, one of the very first decisions you make in the entire process should be: “What colour is my ambient light?” Because whatever you choose will be incorporated into literally every colour swatch you apply to literally every model in the project.<\/p>\n So in my case…<\/p>\n Check out the last line of each grouping. Notice any common themes? \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n Hi kids, meet Sombre Grey. Sombre Grey is the best paint that has ever been invented, because Sombre Grey is the absolute best shadow colour I have ever found in any paint range. At any given moment, I have anywhere from four to eight bottles of Sombre Grey in my paint kit, and not because I go through a lot of it (though I do)<\/em>. No, I keep a lot of it because, that whole diatribe I’ve just gone through about ambient light and coloured shadows? Yeah, I shout that speech at someone about every month or two in real life. This rarely happens because they’ve asked me about it; usually they’ve asked one of the ACTUAL skilled painters at our store for advice picking colours, and I come screeching out of the basement to hijack the conversation and talk about realistic blue shadow colours while they look around the room with a look of growing panic across their face, pleading with their eyes as they wonder why people they trusted are allowing this to happen.<\/p>\n And even at the end, they’re usually still pretty skeptical. So, I give them a bottle of Sombre Grey, and suggest they try shading an entire model down to it.<\/p>\n And I never hear back from them, because this is a human being I do not know who had no desire to speak with me in the first place<\/em>. But I’m confident that they all try it out and learn the wisdom of my words. ^_^<\/p>\n Hmm?<\/p>\n Oh, right. The army.<\/p>\n So, uh, ambient lighting and coloured shadows are a really useful tool for unifying a diverse army colour palette. When every model in an army has its own unique colour scheme with minimal costume colour overlap to tie one model in with its neighbours, it’s very easy to end up with a group of models that don’t look like they belong to the same army (the Justice League Problem, as no-one has ever called it)<\/em>. Binding the models together by aggressively sticking to a common shadow colour– sombre grey in my case– as well as ensuring that they’re all lit from an identical angle– upper left for these particular chibis– makes the models look like they’re all standing in the same environment under the same lighting conditions. Add in a common set of bases that are also shaded to the same paint colour as the models, and you create army coherence not through common costuming, but through a believable sense that they’re standing together in one place.<\/p>\n That’s why my chibi mercenaries look like they match each other even though they’re all dressed differently: I picked a lighting scheme and stuck with it. Even on light colours, even on skin, even on gold. Literally everywhere.<\/p>\n If you do that, your armies will look better.<\/p>\n Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Alrighty, so, as I covered in the writeups for Laxmee<\/a> and Valkyrie<\/a>, I needed to figure out a way to build the transparent eyewear that I drew on both models’ concept art.<\/p>\n Years back, I got some advice from a pro sculptor about how to render glasses. His advice boiled down to three generally accepted but somewhat frustrating options:<\/p>\n That last one is actually kind of interesting– he cited as his example the sculpture of Teddy Roosevelt on the bullshit y’all tore into the Black Mountains:<\/p>\n The sculptor here approached the problem in an interesting way– sculpting glasses that sit out a realistic distance from the face would be far too brittle, especially given that the main sculpting tool here was dynamite. \ud83d\ude1b So instead, they chose to place “hints” of the frame against the surface of the face, and let your brain fill in the details on its own.<\/p>\n This last approach doesn’t work perfectly for miniatures since it’s more appropriate for large scales and impressionist sculpting styles; people just look at miniatures too closely for a “hint” method like that to really work out. However, the advice has always stuck with me, and when I was trying to figure out how to make Valkyrie’s glasses in particular, it seemed to me to be a reasonable “backup position”; basically, I should aim to build the blonde lady a set of partial glasses frames with the intention of putting a transparent lens within them, but if I ran into a complete brick wall, I could always just leave the frames empty and rely on my viewers’ brains to do the rest of the work for me.<\/p>\n Satisfied with that potential compromise, I did quite a bit of experimentation to figure out exactly how I wanted to do this.<\/p>\n My first idea was to cut up blister plastic into the lens shapes I needed. This proved to be challenging for a few reasons– first of all, I found it very difficult to cut the plastic out precisely with a knife. Secondly, when I tested different glues to try to get the frames to stick to the plastic lenses, the only glue that seemed to attach the two securely was super glue. And unfortunately, super glue has a nasty tendency to fog up transparent materials, which ruined all of my tests.<\/p>\n The next thing I investigated was whether there was some sort of clear polymer liquid I could apply that would solidify into a lens under the right conditions. I was primarily thinking of two things here– clear nail polish, and two-part casting resin. In theory, both are liquids with a high surface tension (meaning, they’ll tighten themselves up into a smooth surface once applied, which is desirable when making lenses)<\/em> which cure into hard plastic. However, neither of the tests went well; the nail polish was really difficult to apply with a paintbrush, and the resin refused to sit still and kept leaking around my test models. Also, both were difficult to shape; they wanted to form into circular shapes, but both models have rectangular lenses.<\/p>\n Not willing to risk my models with such difficult-to-control materials, I kept looking.<\/p>\n My next idea was to try Water Effects. This is basically just thick acylic medium with no pigment and some flow-reducing addititives. You brush it onto a flat water surface, and then shape it into ripples, splashes, and waterfalls, and then it dries clear.<\/p>\n I thought this might be a good alternative to the last two liquids because it was so much more controllable; it sat still much better where I applied it, and because it’s basically just acrylic paint, you can quickly wipe it away with a spare wet brush if you go outside of your intended lines.<\/p>\n I applied some thin test patches to a spare palette to see how easy it was to flatten and smooth over; turns out, neither is particularly easy. :\/ The flow-reducing additives make the liquid remember all of the marks you made with your brushes, leaving the end result unfortunately quite bumpy.<\/p>\n However, there were other approaches that I thought might work out. Here, I’ve applied globs of Water Effects and then squished them down under a piece of blister plastic. This would more or less solve the surface texture problem, as the material would be forced flat by the plastic.<\/p>\n The main challenge I had with this was that (1) as you can see, this method sometimes traps unsightly air bubbles that are hard to remove, and (2) the puddle has almost no exposed surface into which to evaporate its liquid during the drying process, which left the areas in the center a bit cloudy even after a few days of drying.<\/p>\n Next, I tried a variation on the same concept; instead of applying the puddle straight onto the face and squishing down with a piece of plastic, I would lay the puddle down on a separate piece of flat plastic…<\/p>\n …and then cut the lenses out of the dried puddle to lift them onto the glasses. This attempt died pretty quickly; the material stuck too well to every surface I applied it to, and was essentially destroyed by my attempts to lift the lenses off.<\/p>\n At this point, I started to despair a bit over my prospects of making this work, and began pondering whether I possibly wanted to reverse course and just leave both models without their eyewear.<\/p>\n However, the model just looked so weird<\/em> to me at this point after three months of looking at the concept art’s hipster glasses. Which left me in a dilemma: I hate the model without glasses, but everything I’ve tried would ruin her face.<\/p>\n “Well, except the first thing with the blister plastic. If that goes wrong it would just ruin the lenses.”<\/p>\n …<\/p>\n “Ehhh, f*** it, it’s worth a shot.”<\/p>\n So in a moment of despair, I decided to implement a solution that had failed repeatedly in testing. ~_~<\/p>\n I did make one alteration to the process: instead of working in stiff blister foam, I cut the lenses out of a sandwich bag. These were obviously extremely flimsy, but I figured this probably wouldn’t matter given how closely they were going to sit to the face.<\/p>\n And much to my surprise… this time it worked! \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n I don’t know why they didn’t fog over; I didn’t do anything differently that I’m aware of. But when the glue dried, I had transparent frames hanging from the wire lenses, just as I had wanted. \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n (The shapes needed some cleanup; I went in with a pair of scissors afterward and leveled off the bottom of the lenses.)<\/em><\/p>\n They’re definitely flimsy, and I’m not convinced that they’ll stay on forever. However, they lasted long enough to let me take my pictures, and I figure that’s all they really owe me.<\/p>\n Laxmee’s goggle did end up with a spot of fog on the left side, so my fears were still pretty reasonable. However, in this case I was able to patch over the problem by painting a targeting reticule over the lens, which fit her look anyway.<\/p>\n Oh, and Laxmee’s goggle has less support than Valkyrie’s glasses, so in some of the photos taken from the other side you can see how the flimsy plastic actually bends away from the face due to gravity (shots from her left side obscure the problem, fortunately)<\/em>. I don’t know how to solve this problem and honestly I’m a bit terrified to even try, so I’ve made my peace with it.<\/p>\n So in the end, have I discovered a great way to make glasses for miniatures? I don’t think so. This solution ONLY worked because chibi models have enormous heads; on a normal 35mm model, it would be impossible to find wire thin enough to make the frames, and I’m positive that the plastic would fog over on such a small lens. This was a solution pretty unique to my specific project, and I would need to do a lot more experimentation if I decided that some future true-scale model desperately needed glasses.<\/p>\n I don’t own a phone, which means that I need to solve my photography needs differently from how most other people handle it. For about ten years, I’ve been doing that with this sturdy little bastard:<\/p>\n This is my crappy little $100 Olympus point-and-shoot, and it has taken tens of thousands of photos for me throughout my blogging career. I love this camera. <3 It has its quirks (finicky white balancing, and some stupid file naming practices that occasionally cause me to lose pictures -_- )<\/em>, but I’m so used to those idiosyncrasies that I mostly just work around them intuitively at this point.<\/p>\n The one thing this camera doesn’t do well is video; being almost ten years old, it has a pitiful maximum video resolution of like 320p, which isn’t going to cut it here in the future<\/em>. So whenever I shoot my model turnaround videos for this blog, I use a different device:<\/p>\n This is my work iPad, propped up on random housheold objects and doing its best<\/em>. I’ve been pretty satisfied with the results that the iPad turns out for the last few years, though it has some pretty severe limitations that make it a struggle sometimes to capture the video I want.<\/p>\n So, the iPad camera has turned out some decent results for me over the years, but lately I’ve been getting frustrated with its awkwardness, and started thinking about possible upgrades.<\/p>\n Fortunately, my department at work employs a talented videographer, and I poked her one day during the quarantine to share the issues I had been having with my video setup, and to inquire about possible solutions. These conversations were definitely<\/em> not conducted during the workday while we were both being paid. Obviously. That would be highly unprofessional.<\/p>\n …<\/p>\n …right.<\/p>\n So, my initial pitch to her was something along the lines of a GoPro, but she pointed out that GoPros are wide angle cameras designed to shoot action, and are pretty horrendous at close-up photography. If I wanted to shoot things up close, she said I was really going to have to look into a DSLR of some sort.<\/p>\n DSLR, for those who don’t know, stands for “Camera With A Thousand Buttons”.<\/p>\n My colleague researched some options for me, and I settled on this large hunk of black plastic that was only<\/em> three times my desired price range:<\/p>\n This is a Panasonic Lumix DC-FZ80. This was purchased at the height of the Pangolin Plague quarantine; I put four hundred Canadabucks into an envelope and mailed it to Jeff Bezos’ volcano lair, and two days later he sent one of his misshapen minions to drop it on my door step.<\/p>\n I’ve had the camera for about a week and am still at the early stages of my learning curve, but I have the following thoughts at this stage in my development as a Photographist:<\/p>\n Results from week 1 of DSLR Boot Camp:<\/p>\n\n
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First Side-Thing: Painting!<\/h2>\n
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Alright, Actually Painting Now<\/h2>\n
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<\/p>\nWait, What?<\/h2>\n
![](\"http:\/\/www.captainspud.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/painting_02.jpg\")
<\/p>\nOkay, But Seriously, Actually<\/em> Painting For Real This Time<\/h2>\n
![](\"http:\/\/www.captainspud.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/painting_03.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.captainspud.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/painting_ref_04-600x316.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.captainspud.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/painting_ref_05.jpg\")
<\/p>\nSpud if you don’t talk about painting your f***ing chibi models or move onto another subject I’m going to turn around and f***ing leave right now<\/h2>\n
![](\"http:\/\/www.captainspud.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/painting_04.jpg\")
<\/p>\nSecond Side-Thing: Glasses!<\/h2>\n
![](\"http:\/\/www.captainspud.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/laxmee_ref_01-600x666.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/www.captainspud.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/valkyrie_ref_01-600x685.jpg\")
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![](\"https:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/c\/cb\/MtRushmore_TR_close.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/www.captainspud.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/painting_05.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/www.captainspud.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/painting_06.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/www.captainspud.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/painting_07.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/www.captainspud.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/painting_08.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/www.captainspud.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/painting_09.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/www.captainspud.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/painting_11.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/www.captainspud.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/painting_13.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/www.captainspud.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/painting_12.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/www.captainspud.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/painting_14.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/www.captainspud.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/painting_15.jpg\")
<\/p>\nThird Side-Thing: Camera!<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.captainspud.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/painting_ref_06.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/www.captainspud.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/megclass_15.jpg\")
<\/p>\n\n
![](\"http:\/\/www.captainspud.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/painting_16.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/www.captainspud.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/painting_17.jpg\")
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![](\"http:\/\/www.captainspud.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/onyx_72.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.captainspud.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/painting_ref_07.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.captainspud.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/painting_ref_08.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.captainspud.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/painting_ref_09.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.captainspud.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/painting_ref_10-600x613.jpg\")
<\/p>\n