The Color Brown

The color brown is an interesting thing since it's not actually a color on its own. You won't find it on any color wheel and the art stores have the various shades in their own offset from the real colors. Brown is a muted orange. Yes, it's orange. Go figure.

Let that sink in for a bit. Brown isn't a color. Take a look at these two color range images and see if you can spot the overlaps. Once you see it you can't unsee it. You can thank me later.

I've been doing some color mixing and browns are part of that. You'd think it was easy - grab some form of raw and/or burnt umber, maybe add a color, done. Nope. It doesn't quite get that simple. Well, most of the time it is but only if you want a warm brown. Once you get into shades of brown it gets more complicated. Because brown doesn't exist on its own.

What brought about this post was me having made a mistake in my painting and needing to correct it without messing it up worse. In short I'd used an orange heavy brown where I shouldn't have done. The painting is too far along for me to want to strip and start over, especially since I've done that once before with these.

It turns out I hadn't actually mixed the type of brown I wanted. Or maybe I did and grabbed the wrong bottle. Of course I haven't labeled the bottles even now. The end result is a lot of places painted far more orange of a shade than I would like.

So the solution seems easy. Make a brown wash and fix it right up. Not so fast. That orange isn't going away. Putting a brown over it is a tricky business because then I'll have an orange undercoat and brown doing whatever it's doing on top of that. The wrong shade and tone of brown over that orange could easily make things worse instead of better.

I have a book on mixing colors for watercolor, acrylic, and oil paints. I've been referring to it as part of this overall project and I'm pleased to note that there haven't been many big surprises. I'm decent on my color theory. Maybe not great but for the projects so far I've had a handle on it.

But this one has been a stumper. I've continued painting while trying to figure out how best to fix this mistake I made with minimum effort. More will be made clear as to why the fix is slightly more difficult than it might seem. Bear with me.

Tonight I had a revelation. I was talking brown with someone else and it got me thinking of how easy and how difficult it is to make a brown using other colors. Pretty much take any three colors, mix them, and you'll get brown. It might not be a pretty brown but you'll get brown. More importantly you'll get shades of brown. Unless you've used a purple brown you really don't see what this means. Yes. I have purple brown paint. It's useful.

As I said earlier brown is just an orange kind of shade. I'm trying to take an orange heavy color and brown it down. The fog cleared a little and I realized what I need to do is take that same shade and add some color to it to make it more brown. It took far longer for me to reach that conclusion than it should have but I was sulking.

So what color do you add to orange to make it more brown? Orange is really just red and yellow so blue seems the obvious answer. Since it's the obvious answer I did some research in my handy book of color mixing to find out I was right in that it wasn't the answer. According to the book I need to add some mauve. Instead of blue I need a blue shading to red. In my mind that's going to make the end result rather red heavy (orange is red and yellow and I'm looking at adding blue and red) but it's worth a shot.

Tomorrow is the test. I'll use the same base color and add just a touch of blue. Blue is a very intense color and anything with a heavy yellow mix is not. Again, color theory. I won't get into yellows here but I will probably have a rant on them in the near future. Therefore anything I add needs to be done with a light touch. If the blue doesn't quite work out then a touch of red. I can play with this all I like since it only take a few drops to find out if it will work or not.

I don't have to make much note of what I'm doing here. I'll be mixing up a completely new brown to take the place of the mistake in the future. Of course I will take notes in case I really like the resulting brown so I can duplicate it, starting with the orange type color as the base. I always take notes now. So when I say I won't make much note of it I think I mean that I'm not going to make a chemistry experiment level kind of notetaking. More of a reference. I think. I don't know. I'll write something down at least.

I'm very curious to see if my knowledge of color theory will hold up in practice. It's easy to say that something should work and to see it in a book. It's quite another to look at it on the palette and then the mini to confirm it worked. I'll take the hit of painting these areas twice because it was my mistake in the first place.

And what happened in the first place? I used the color I had mixed up for rust as the brown. It's a lovely color for rust. It's not a lovely color for leather.

I'll end this on a more humorous note. 

Competition painters and people who are more into the whole color theory aspect of painting miniatures can get hung up on browns. Really hung up. One whole drawer of my paints are nothing but browns. Brown is a serious color, even if it isn't a color.

Way back when I got here I would hang out and paint at a local game store, which has sadly been closed for many years. Someone I considered a friend would be there painting as well. He was as into color theory as I am. He has to be. He competes. I just do it because I'm that picky. But we were on the same page when it came to picking colors.

Whenever we would start talking about browns the other people from the group would say "They're talking about brown again" and tune us out. They didn't have nearly the same level of interest as we did. That got shortened to "The brown discussion" when it would come up at the paint table. I remember those days fondly because we would spend a lot of time finding exactly the right brown for the color palette. Even then I was pretty good at picking the right family of browns for the project at hand, if I do say so myself.

So, Um, What's Going On?

If you follow me on Twitter (hi!) or are a Facebook friend (hi!) then you know the real life stuff that's going on with me. If you don't know me from either of those places then all you need to know is that real life stuff is going on with me.

I've been quiet here because I haven't felt I would have much to say about gaming, which is the primary focus on this blog lately.

The game hasn't been going well. I think it's a combination of an ill-matched group, an ill-matched GM and group, and moving the game online. The only thing out of those three that could possibly be changed is the online part but it wouldn't fix the other two.

The ill-matched group has some odd dynamics since it's morphed so many times. There's now a husband and wife team, their friend (at least I think he's their friend, he may be the friend of the guy who abruptly left), and one person who's stuck through from the beginning. Their characters haven't meshed into a party - they're four people hanging out and doing stuff but they're not a PARTY in that they're forming interpersonal relationships. Not the players, the characters. Which is also the players but not really.

Only one player gave me enough backstory to work any of it into the game. The others gave me a little along the lines of "I'm trying to find my father but not really" and "I want to learn more magic before I go home". That's not enough for me to find a way to work them into a story. It's separate people with separate goals.

Here's where I get to vent a little. I want them to enjoy the game. I want them to try to put together larger pictures from what they gather as they adventure. I want everyone to have fun. But this group just can't see clues. I wondered if I was being too subtle so I literally attacked them with NPCs that should have spurred them into trying to figure out why they were being followed. Nope. As soon as the encounter was over they barely talked about it even though the NPCs got away. When they were attacked again, same result. How much more obvious do I have to be that there's something going on?

This is why I think the group and I aren't a match. My GM style doesn't mesh with their play style. That's not saying either one is bad. That's saying they don't work well as a game. It means no one is having as much fun as they could and should.

This leads into why my short lived "How I Roll" suddenly ended. I couldn't come up with enough things to continue it. That was an offshoot of me doing game prep and how things worked in my game. Since I no longer get any pleasure from game prep and the things that go on in my game aren't worth mentioning it ended that set of posts. Maybe in the future I'll pick it up again, maybe not. I don't know how much people liked it.

Ending a game is a difficult decision. I've done it in the past when I knew I wasn't giving them the game they deserved. I never heard from any of the players again after it ended so I know I made the right choice. That hurt, by the way. No one even thanked me for that game or the one before (most of the group was from the previous game that ended due to players moving away).

Ending a game in these times is an even more difficult decision. Everyone needs an escape. Gaming is a wonderful escape. But when it becomes something I dread rather than look forward to with anticipation then I know there's problems. Big problems.

I've tried to fix it by asking players what they wanted out of the game and got non-committal answers that didn't help me at all. They were along the lines of what I already said. Mostly they want to play and this is a game they have. It's not that they want to play MY game. It's that they want to play A game. At least that's the feeling I'm getting.

I could run a series of loosely collected pre-generated adventures to keep the game going. No one seems to be looking for a long term story arc. But that would put me in the position of reading Powerpoint slides. That's not what I want to do. Sure, it's easy to prep. Print off a map, print off the adventure, run them through it. I have plenty of those that I use for inspiration. But if that's all they want then there's a lot of other GMs to do that. I want to get engrossed in the story they weave. I'm there to support that and they're not storytellers.

This is me talking myself into ending the game, if you couldn't tell.

I am looking at Fantasy Grounds and running regular one shot adventures for people who just want to show up, grab a pre-generated character, and play for a few hours with no long term consequences. There's so much league play these days where every result is a permanent result I want to think that there's people out there who want carefree play too.

That would let me have some fun with adventures and also play with no long term consequences. Sure it might seem little different than what I said I didn't like about my current game but it's different. It's meant to last a few hours then end forever. One shots as opposed to a string of encounters.

I have a few days left before I need to make a decision. Wednesday before the game is my traditional time to contact the group and remind them we're playing. That's a way for people to say if they can't play as well. I canceled the last game due to the stuff from the first paragraph and one player would have had to cancel anyway due to their real life stuff. So we're already several weeks out from the last session.

What will I do for a creative outlet?

I can work on learning Fantasy Grounds since I like learning things and seeing how to make games there.

I can work on my hobbies.

But I know that my full creativity is blocked at the moment. It's been blocked for a while. The world changed. We're all excused for having bad mental reactions to what's going on. For me it means that I don't think I can run games right now. I can't give myself over to the fun of figuring out imaginary challenges to overcome when we're all dealing with real life challenges. That's not fun.

Anyway. I wanted to let you know that I've been feeling guilty about not posting an update. I'm still around and I hope to be posting about other things that I can do. They probably won't involve gaming as much. I have many other hobbies and interests that I enjoy sharing. Maybe switching to those will put me in a better place to be creative in general.

Some Days...

Honestly some days I feel like I'm too stupid to 3D print.

I'm currently printing some upgrade parts for my printer. One of my printers. If I like it I'll print them for the other printer. They'll also work on the upgrades (hopefully) so they're not a waste of time and filament.

Since these parts are near where the molten plastic comes out they need to be a type that withstands high temperatures. You really should use one that's got a higher melting point than what you print with most of the time. That's common sense. People try to fudge it and pretty much always end up with sagging parts. That's not good.

So I pulled out the barely used roll of this stuff and started.

A quick run of the numbers. Skip this if numbers aren't your thing. Even worse they're in metric but I'll be nice and put the conversions in here too. 3D printers are pretty much all metric which is just fine for most of the world.

PLA - My main go-to plastic. Nozzle temp 220C (430F), bed temp 60C (140F).
PET-G - More flexible than PLA and handles higher temps better. Nozzle temp 240C (465F), bed temp 80C (175F).
ABS - The common high-temp plastic. Nozzle temp 255C (490F), bed temp 100C (212F).

The piece that wraps around the nozzle and blows air on the parts to cool them has to be printed out of at least ABS if not one with a higher nozzle temperature. Looking at the numbers you can see why. ABS has it's issues - it stinks, it doesn't like ANY kind of draft, and it prints hot. Literally you can boil water on the print bed when using this stuff. But sometimes it's what you use.

Fun fact. PLA will warp in a hot car. PET-G won't. Many is the person who has found out the hard way about leaving PLA pieces in their cars.

Anyway.

There's a glitch in the standard profile for ABS that ups the bed temperature to 110C after the first layer. It's not a glitch so much as a way to try keep the darn stuff from warping. However for some reason as soon as my printer bed goes over 100C it gets cranky the safety measures say it's too hot and shuts down the print. Sigh. And those are the temps that are in the vendor provided profiles.

It's common for bed temperatures to change after the first layer. Typically they drop by 5C but in this case it went up. Oh well.

I updated the profiles not to bump the bed temperature and went on my merry printing way. Except that it turns out I didn't redo all my files that I had created using the old profile.

This morning I was printing a small piece to check that it was getting smooshed onto the print bed enough without getting too smooshed. Fractions of millimeters count here. If it's too smooshed it leaves a ridge called an elephant's foot. Not only does it look bad it has an impact when you're doing things like printing parts for your printer. If it's not smooshed enough your bottom layers can look bad and the print can come loose from the print bed. So you dial that one in.

I forgot to redo that test piece with the change to the bed temperature. Bzzt. Print shuts down.

Grumble, grumble, mutter, mutter. Redo the part and copy it to the print server. Fine.

From what did get printed I decided what was in place would work. I knew this piece was done right since I did it this morning. What the heck. I have lots of this stuff and if they have a ridge I can fix it and print another set, right?

What I did was choose something with a very similar name but created for PLA. Obviously it isn't going to print well at all if you're using the wrong temperatures. Sigh. Luckily I caught it early since I was watching to make sure the temperature didn't bump up and wondered why the bed temperature was so low. Then I looked at the file name - they have the type of plastic in them.

Sigh.

Cleaned it up. Decided to print the test piece since I was starting over. Very slight elephant's foot so I'll be playing with that to get it better.

It will all work out but so many mistakes right at the beginning of my day makes me tired. You can only adjust the first layer height while it's printing the first layer (of course) so that's time sensitive and easy to miss on a small piece. But it's fine if you catch it at the right time.

These are my test pieces. They're meant to make sure that you're extruding the right amount of plastic. If they fit together nicely then you're fine. If they're loose you're not extruding enough. If they don't fit you're extruding too much. There's a modifier in the software that makes the files where you can adjust that. The green ones are PET-G and the color of all the parts for my upgraded printer. The black ones are ABS and the color for the fan shroud.

And another piece of eye candy is a good first layer. That's actually called "First Layer Pron" but spelled correctly (I changed it here to make sure any filters wouldn't catch it and consider this an adult content blog). Seeing a good first layer is always a wonderful thing, if you're a 3D printer.

Miniature Storage

Bwahahhaa! I have deboned the bag of t-shirts a friend gave me!

Wait - no calling the local PD for a wellness check on me. Hear me out.

A friend was moving and per my request gave me a bag full of old cotton t-shirts he wasn't going to wear any more and/or didn't want to move. I have a use for those kinds of shirts.

But before I get into that here's the end result.

Shirt carcasses on the left, shirt bones on the right.

Seriously. No wellness check.

What I did was cut out all the seams and hems from the shirts. That leaves me large amounts of plain t-shirt fabric, if you use the side that doesn't have a design on it. Why would I need large amounts of plain t-shirt fabric?

This! This is why!

Those are foam transport trays for miniatures. The vast majority of minis I paint are army miniatures and don't go on display. I store them in the transport trays so if I ever get the chance to play I can grab the necessary trays, put them in a transport case, and off I go. Yes. I will label the edges of the trays so I know what's in them.

These things are great but almost everyone forgets something. The foam is a mild abrasive. The sticky-out bits of minis can and do get the paint worn off them from being moved around in transport trays. Sad but true. The very thing that's supposed to protect them is doing them harm....

Still no wellness check needed.

What I do is use pieces of the t-shirt fabric to protect the minis. It's more work when taking them out of the trays and putting them back but in the long run it means far less work repairing the paint jobs on them. When you have seventeen armies that can add up.

If you're going to do this yourself make sure you're using 100% cotton shirts. Polyester may feel soft but it's not. Go for the cotton.

The well washed ones work best because they're nice and soft. That's why we always keep them around far past their lifespan. Here's a use for them that will keep them in the game, as it were.

For those who aren't as familiar with deboning t-shirts here's how I do it. All cuts are done next to seams so I won't put that in the instructions.

1. Cut one sleeve up to the shoulder
2. Cut the sleeve off the shirt completely
3. Cut the seam off the sleeve
4. Cut the hem off the sleeve
5. Repeat on any remaining sleeves (there should only be one more but I don't judge)
6. Cut from the shoulder seam to the neck
7. Cut around the neck to the other shoulder seam
8. Cut down the shoulder seam to the remaining sleeve seam
9. Cut around the sleeve seam back to the shoulder seam
10. Cut around the neck back to the original shoulder seam
11. Cut around the sleeve seam
12. Cut the hem off the shirt body

Here's the fun bit. At least I consider it fun because it's a bit of a challenge and if you have a lot of shirts to cut up you can get into the routine.

Steps 1 through 5 can be done and leave one bone for each sleeve.
Steps 6 through 11 can be done to leave one bone from the body.
Step 12 will always be a separate one since there's no seams from top to bottom.

You don't have to try to keep them as single pieces. That's my thing. As long as you get rid of ALL the seams you'll have nothing but nice, smooth, soft fabric to swaddle your troops.

Even if you don't have a lot of minis or fancy transport trays this is a way to safely store your special minis. Wrap them up and put them in a plastic shoebox. The shirt fabric will pad them and keep them from rubbing on each other and as long as you don't jam too many in there it will also keep swords unbent.

Yes. It works for transporting a single mini to a game as well. Drop it in a sandwich bag and you're golden.

Remember - 100% cotton is the way to go!

I can't help myself

I had to go to the hobby store to return one last thing from Christmas.  I also knew I was getting a piece of fabric to make pillow covers.

Ooo.  And glitter was half off and I have a couple of projects that will use glitter.  Yes, glitter.  Don't look at me like that.  They're going to be cool.

And Christmas merchandise was 90% off so I picked up a couple of velvet poinsetta stems.  Because it was cheaper than velvet ribbon.

So of course I spent more than I had in return money.  Who's surprised by that?

But I was actually good in that the only 'extra' things were the two poinsetta stems and they were pocket change.

I shouldn't be allowed in hobby stores.

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