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 You Want to Buy a 3D Printer? - Part 2

In our last adventure I was dealing with a clog, after having taken apart the print head to replace the fan and try to figure out why it wasn't printing as it should.

I left it with the clog and me looking at taking more advanced measures.

I did continue.

The first thing I did was take a piece of piano wire, heat it up, and jam it down the filament path to try to gather up any filament boogers. This is kind of like a cold pull except that it will gather up a different kind of debris. Larger pieces will stick to the wire and be pulled out since it's smaller than the diameter of the tube. I got out some gunk so that looked promising.

Another run of cleaning filament dashed those hopes.

I did a couple more passes of piano wire - cleaning filament before deciding there wasn't anything that was going to get pulled out.

It was back to cold pulls, hoping that the adventure with piano wire had at least moved around whatever was clogging the nozzle.

Two cold pulls later and it was still not working. I was on the verge of taking it apart so I could get to the nozzle more directly.

Now when I do a cold pull I like to make sure I know what's going on. Typically you heat it up to 265, run the filament (or push it down) until it comes out the nozzle, then cool to around 180-190 and pull it back out. I tend to set the temperature for the cool down rather than try to catch it at the right time. I set it to 190 and it works.

This wasn't working.

The next time I set it to 185 when I was going to pull it back out. And I found a chunk of something in the end of the cleaning filament. This is good. This is what you want. Cleaning filament is undyed nylon so it's kind of a translucent cream and you can tell if it gathers up anything in the process.

THIS time the cleaning filament ran nice and clean. It was the thick, smooth extrusion that I needed.

The moral of the story here? That sometimes you have to just keep at it and you'll get it working again. A clog can always be fixed, even if that fix is putting on a new nozzle. This time I could use the standard methods (with the extra kick of piano wire) to clean it out and continue.

Why piano wire? Because it's hardened wire and can stand up to heating and abuse. This stuff is really tough. You need special nippers because it will chip regular ones. It's serious stuff and very handy if you're going to be using it for various things. But if not then I recommend skipping it because while the wire isn't expensive at the hobby store the nippers are.

Let's go onto another thing that happens - twisted filament.

Almost all the time if your filament gets twisted it's user error. You can never let the end of the filament go unsecured. If you do there's every chance it's going to slip under a winding and then you get twisted filament. That will bind up at some point and do something as simple as break or as nasty as pull the filament roll around and screw up your alignment.

There are rare times when you get twists on the roll and they aren't user error. I've had it happen. I've seen the pictures of it from other brands. We honestly don't know how it happens at the factory since it should never be able to happen but it does.

Untwisting filament is kind of an exercise in patience. You can't just unroll it to the twist, untangle it, and roll it back up. That darn twist will keep sliding behind what you're unrolling. There's plenty of instructions on how to do it but I'll simplify here.

Keeping a grip on the end of the filament you back roll it to loosen up the windings. You keep doing that until you've got a nice amount of filament loose, hopefully with your tangle in there somewhere, then slide the whole mess over the side of the spool. It is a mess at this point. And I have yet to do it where there aren't windings on the spool that didn't get pulled off so I need to repeat a couple of times until it's just one piece being unwound. It's not pretty.

Then there's the fun of winding it back onto the spool. Filament is wound while it's still hot and it keeps the curve of the spool. And it's springy. So it's all over the place as you're trying to figure out how to get through the twists and hopefully deal with the tangle. I know most filament is cheap enough that I could cut off the part I've pulled off the spool and I have done that when it kinks or just gets too frustrating. But I like a challenge. Sometimes.

Ok. Clog is cleared! Filament twist gone! Ready to print, right?

Nope. The broken filament in the print head means it won't let me load new filament.

This one worked with the easy fix. Heat it up to cleaning temps, let the filament ooze out and soften, run some cleaning filament until the old stuff is gone. Then lower the temperature and load the new filament.

Except it didn't seem to want to load.

Being patient fixed that one. The load process built into the firmware has it doing a ram (fast load) for a bit then slower as it builds the pressure on the nozzle. The motor wasn't moving filament on the ram. But it was moving on the slower one. So I kept saying the filament wasn't loaded (it wasn't) so the process would continue to push out at the slow speed. Eventually the leftover cleaning filament came out (that could have been part of the issue) and the new filament was in this neat little spiral before extruding clean.

While the spiral looks cool it's not cool. It means there's .. a clog. This time just letting the filament run cleaned it up and I've got the printer going again.

So there's a whole bunch of little annoyances that happen with far more frequency than any of us like. There's far worse ones but clogged filament is pretty much an expected thing no matter how clean you try to keep your nozzle.

I'll detail the next problem when it happens. Because one will happen.

Some Drawing

I will be the first one in a long line of people who say that my drawing skills are somewhat less than optimal. 2D has never been something I do very well. That doesn't stop me from trying. If anything working on a skill that is difficult makes the successes that much more important to me.

I'm signed up for a half day calligraphy workshop next month. That has little to nothing to do with the rest of this blog entry but it does tie in. My fascination with medieval manuscripts has been kicked into gear again by some of the accounts I follow on Twitter. Since those manuscripts are illuminated and decorated that means drawing.

Add in the interest in drawing RPG maps and it's inevitable that I would be pulling out the pencils and fighting my lack of innate talent.

I was cruising YouTube when I found a set of instructional videos on knotwork where it finally 'clicked' for me. I'd tried drawing that off and on for years but never really got the hang of it. I can grasp the theory behind it and even some of the design structure. I just couldn't (or wouldn't) get them on paper.

If you're interested this is the first of the series of videos that made sense to me. I started with his method of drawing grids but quickly moved to graph paper to cut out a level of complexity.

Here's some of the things I've done. There's failures in there, especially as I work with break lines. I tend to mess those up about twenty percent of the time. But it's better than it was!

You can see some of the progression as I keep trying different things. You can also see where I stopped filling in the negative space. 

Let's face it. These are easy designs. And I haven't worked towards the thinner lines yet or adding color. I'm working on the core concepts and until I'm happy with that I'm going to stay right where I am.

Break lines take more work both in placement and remembering not to get too close and/or cross them. I'm still working on that. I'm staying with graph paper until then.

After I'm comfortable with my ability to do slightly more complex designs then I'll probably move down to thinner lines. These are nice but not really practical when used in layouts. They're too chunky. Chunky helps with learning so I'm not complaining.

For those of you who do this regularly or can just doodle them out then I salute you. For me this is a real work of effort and concentration. I've got more pages I've been filling up with various sizes, shapes, and patterns as I practice. On every page there's a couple of failures and I refer back to them to find out what did wrong.

I know I can scan these and clean up things like lines I accidentally crossed. But that's not the point. I want to not cross those lines in the first place. The way to do that is understand the mistake.

Not too long ago the mistakes would have made me frustrated and upset. They would have given me pause about continuing. I've mellowed out about that in the last few years and can accept mistakes for what they are. Mistakes and learning opportunities.

The work I want to do in the future will only hit the scanner once it's complete. Nothing will be done to clean it up or change it. I like the little inconsistencies of hand drawn work. Looking at historical documents they're not perfect. That's part of their appeal.

In my opinion we're spoiled by perfection. Computers are a part of that. But somehow that looks 'dead' to me. The hand drawn works with all their little oddities make for a piece with life. It's more work and mistakes mean fixing or even starting over. Or changing the design. Hand drawn is certainly more demanding. That suits my personality very well.

I do plan on using these designs for freehand on miniatures and on terrain painting. The techniques will be adapted for those, of course. But the very first step is knowing I can be sitting in a boring meeting and do a fabulous corner doodle while someone is reading off the PowerPoint slides that were emailed to us days earlier. It's a personal thing and a way to keep myself amused.

As I said. Things that are difficult for me give me more satisfaction when I can do them. If it's something that is easy then the achievements are expected. These achievements are work.