I’m getting back into a hobby that I picked up in college. Actually, I suppose it’s a sub-hobby, since it’s attached to an existing superset of hobbies that I’ve had since high school. Or would it be a hobby extension? Never mind. It doesn’t matter how you wind up drawing your particular personal Venn diagram of hobbyism, the point is that I’ve started painting minis again. I may post a couple pics at some point…
Long time readers may remember my mini-rant about model scale. There hasn’t been any progress on the whole kitbashed model railroading & gaming table idea yet. Basically, it’s a weekend project at the very least, and too big a project to work on while there’s things like plumbing and gardening to do around the house before winter hits. But painting a couple little figures is something I can probably get away with…
Plus, if I keep up my current track record, I’ll be keeping myself sufficiently injured that I won’t be able to work on any of those other big projects!
Sunday night I decided to start work on a couple of minis that we had picked up back at Origins. One of them is for a character for a campaign that Dirge is working on. The odd thing about this character is that, because of some otherworldly ancestry, he’s sprouted wings. Big feathery angelic-looking wings. Not the sort of thing you find on most little metal figurines.
Fortunately, one of the companies at Origins had brought two or three of every single model they made. So after a bit of wandering through their display in the dealer room, I tracked down two likely looking metal models that I could combine. First was this rather ordinary looking human Bard. A decent model, especially the lute on his back, which could easily be removed to make room for the wings from this Angel.
So, Sunday night, I got to work with a nice sharp X-acto knife, slowly paring away slivers of soft metal, smoothing a plane on the back of the guy and the front of the wings. And about half a second after thinking to myself, “You know, this is a really sharp knife! I should change my grip.” the knife slipped and I cut a nice gash along the side of my middle finger.
Fortunately, I had just shifted my grip, so the cut is just annoying instead of crippling. But it’s very annoying. It’s right along the side of the joint, so it’ll open up if I bend my finger too much. I’ve got it bandaged and taped to restrict mobility, which will help it heal, but that also means that my left hand looks like it’s been prosthetically enhanced to improve my ability to flip people off. Quite handy for driving in Ann Arbor. Not too good for business meetings. Or working around the house.
And it makes typing a pain, so of course this is the longest entry I’ve written in a while. Life is a fun-filled pack of strange contradictions sometimes, eh?