Shot 1

The wackiness of scheduling a vaccination is a topic for another day (and one that I will never write about), but I drove 45 minutes into the city this morning to a CVS pharmacy on the Temple University campus and got my 1st of 2 shots of the Pfizer vaccine.

The process was simple, once you get past the fact that I needed to be on the CVS website at 1:00am when they open the new batch of appointments to schedule myself, and needed to go 30-some miles away past at least a dozen other CVS locations to get to the CVS location in North Philadelphia that had an available appointment.

Anyway, I did the right thing and got my shot. Three weeks from today, I go back to North Philadelphia to get my second shot.

As of now, I have some minor discomfort in the arm that got the shot. It's a sweet sweet pain.

What I learned from Dad

It would take way more than one post to elaborate on the above, but, in lieu of that, I'll confine myself to one answer and the root causes of that answer...

Be involved in what your kids are involved in.

Brother Dave was a very good baseball player in little league; a slick fielding shortstop (he could actually catch the ball) and a pitcher who could reliably get the ball over the plate (a rare thing in little league).

So what did Dad do? He coached little league baseball. For several years.

Dave and I were involved in band and orchestra in junior high school (back when there was a "junior high school" and not "middle school"), and on into high school.

So what did Dad do? He got involved in the parents' organization and helped with Hoagie Day fundraisers in junior high, and Spaghetti Dinner fundraisers in high school, and was on the parents' board of directors for these organizations. Looking back, I realize how much of his time he invested in what Dave and I were doing. Coaching baseball. Coaching soccer. Band and orchestra Boards. Teaching us to fish. Hiking in the woods with us and our friends. All of it.

I was aware enough to recognize this at the time, but now, having kids of my own, I feel like I can truly appreciate it.

Grace, and Julia before her, were involved in the Drama Club and all of the musicals. Amparo has given huge amounts of her time to this.

Grace has been very involved in Band, and I have given time to this as a parents' Board member.

What would Dad have done? He would have done what I have done, and what Amp has done. Given his time and attention to his kids' interests.

So I might have my faults, but I have at least learned something over the years.

And years down the road, hopefully Julia and Grace will be able to look back and recognize that their Mom and Dad cared, and that the time we spent wasn't for us...it was for them.

Completed D&D Monsters

A little bit of additional detail work has completed the three new monster miniatures posted previously.

Bone Naga, Giant Snake and Cloaker (Dragonborn for scale)

Next on the painting table are a few more D&D blister packs: Grick and Grick Alpha, Grell and Basilisk, Black Dragon Wyrmling and Blue Dragon Wyrmling. And the Roper from the last post...

I hope to have at least some of these done by the end of the weekend.

Painting Some Recent D&D Miniatures

While the most recent oil painting effort first layer dries for a few days, I have been inspired to go back to painting some Dungeons and Dragons miniatures that I have picked up recently at Games Keep in West Chester, and Showcase Comics in Swarthmore. I have gone to Games Keep a few times in recent months with the express purpose of spending some money to support them, and I went to Showcase Comics yesterday for this first time in over a year for the same purpose. No harm in buying a bunch of stuff that you want but don't really need if it helps the stores that you value and want to still be around when the pandemic ends. Or at least moves into a different phase...

Of the [unspecified] number of packs of pre-primed ready to paint WizKids miniatures I picked up, I decided to start with the 4 shown below: a Cloaker (the manta ray thing), a giant constrictor snake, a Bone Naga, and a Roper (the tentacled stalagmite thing). All are recent releases and are classic D&D monsters, and all would be useful adds to my "painted by me" collection. I know that I have a couple of pre-painted Ropers, and an older pre-painted Cloaker, as well as a host of snakes of all shapes and sizes, but these models are all very nice and will be on the easier end of the painting scale. Not having done any miniature painting in a a bunch of months, I'd like to get back into it with something that can be done effectively and quickly so as to give me the positive feedback to continue with some more.

Dungeons and Dragons minis

The Bone Naga is not that far from done. The Cloaker has some partial base coating only, as does the Giant Constrictor Snake. The Roper has only been glued to his base and had some mold lines scraped and cleaned up. The dragonborn sorcerer is included for scale. These are all big monsters.

As a side note, you can see where I have added Liquitex brand flexible modeling paste to the bases of the snake and the Cloaker to blend the molded figure base into the base itself. It's always good to do this BEFORE painting anything, if you have the patience (and memory) to do so. The Bone Naga is almost done and then the base will still need to be dealt with. I need to fix the Roper base before painting to avoid the same problem I will have with the Bone Naga.

 More to come.

Playing with Greens

So I've bought too many paint colors (shocking), and that's just the recent binge of Charvin Fine Oils. I wanted to do something easy tonight, as it's been a long week and I'm not sure I have the brainpower left to think too much.

I decided to play around with a simple panoramic landscape across some sunlit fields to the trees and hills beyond. The main goal would be to work with a few of the greens I have purchased to get used to them.

First step as usual was to do a sketch in thinned burnt sienna, on a 6 by 12 inch canvas panel.

Panoramic Sketch

I used a limited palette of colors, and got a first layer of paint down in about 30 minutes. I am happy with the background and the atmospheric perspective of the different layers of hills, receding more to a grayish blue-green the further back you go. I'm also pretty happy with the mid-ground and foreground fields. They will need a minimal amount of touching up, but I think they are more or less done. The trees in the mid-ground are the area that needs some additional work. I need to work with the greens in the different clumps of trees to make sure that they give a proper feel for those that are closer and those that are further away. This is much-needed practice on value and color saturation. The sky will also need some cleanup in places where the burnt sienna sketch muddied the lower sky.

Stage 1 (yellowish artificial light photo)

Per my prior post on painting in layers, I have every intention that this will just be the first stage, and after this has a few days to dry, I will go back and look at this with a fresh eye, adding and changing as needed.

The limited number of colors I chose to work with are shown below. Excluding the ever-present titanium white and burnt sienna, there are 6 additional colors: cerulean blue hue, sap green, celadon green deep, cinnabar green light, burnt umber and french yellow primary. I wanted to see what I could do with a standard dark green and then a darker olive and a lighter olive. Yes, you can mix all this, but....you'd have to be better than I am at mixing colors. So far.

8 Charvin Fine Oils colors

I am absolutely loving these 150ml tubes of Charvin paint. I love the kinda-thick but still creamy texture of the paint, and the larger tubes make me less hesitant to put out bigger blobs of paint on my palette. That being said, the small amounts of paint used on this 6 by 12 panel are such that I could probably paint 100 paintings of this size with these tubes. I might run low on the titanium white, but then again I might not.

I also had my first experience with using Mimik Hog bristle brushes on this painting, and loved them as well. Firm enough, but still flexible and with good bounce (for lack of a better term). They held the paint and moved it very well. I think I might have a new favorite brush.

Lastly, I made a few final tweaks to the Farm Road painting from a couple weeks back, after it was dry. This consisted of adding wire to the fence line and cleaning up the area around the tree trunk. As I look at it, the prominent tree still needs some work, as it looks too flat now.

Farm Road, final touch ups

A little more painting, a little more progress.