Tumty-tum

I had intended only to make the walkways that I had completed for the three-hundredth update, but the response was so positive and so noteworthy (five comments on an article on this blog is a lot! The number of new visitors and total visitors for the day is around half my highest level) that I have been hard at work on more bits and bobs. I must tease and tantalise you now, though, as I have no pictures to hand. The corridor piece has been annoying the hell out of me, as it has a few dreadful things on it, from the perspective of painting. If I put a few pipes on something, I want them to be in primary colours, dagnabit! If I have a faux-computer screen, I want some amusingly fluorescent green thingy in the style of the 1980s. I shall evoke them, but not duplicate them (as the colours will be inverted). We used to have Amstrad PCW8256s in this house, with a lovely Dot Matrix printer. Truth be told, I think we still do have them. But I have played neither chess nor snooker on them in a while. Our dead PCs (or PCWs) live in the attic, and may even be plotting together to take over Skynet and destroy civilisation. I'd be annoyed if someone had left me in an attic for a couple of decades. Dad doesn't like throwing stuff out. I found some videos in the other attic from 1996 the other day.

The pipes, to which I alluded a few sentences ago, before my small digression about dead attic-dwelling, humanity-hating computers, are in red, blue and yellow. The blue was perfectly simple and a comparative joy to paint. I took some Mordian Blue, mixed in a little water, and applied one coat to achieve perfection. The yellow and the red were much more annoying. Undercoats, repeated coats, and finally me giving up after seven coats or so - that's about what you should have running through your noggins about now. The yellow and red look tolerable, but not as pretty as the blue. I am going to dirty them up and see how they look thereafter. I am, surprisingly, given my moaning, quite happy with the yellow.

Painting sites are forever giving the advice that paints ought to be "the consistency of milk". Painters, if there is something that does not translate to vegans, it's that. I haven't drunk milk since I turned sixteen, so I have only the vaguest conception of what that means. I am very vaguely aware that milk is thicker than water (which is thicker than blood, I hear), but since I drink soya milk I am a bit stuck. How does my vastly superior (you may disagree in terms of taste, as did my ex, who declared it rubbery, but not in terms of kindness to cows!) drink compare with whatever everyone normal drinks? Dunno! There's a shocking lack of websites dedicated to comparing bovine lactation with stuff squeezed out of soya beans when considering viscosity for the purposes of vague correlations with diluted paint. It is almost as though vegans (a minority) and wargamers (a minority) don't intersect very often. Since that can't be the case, let's put the lack of analysis down to appalling indolence. Probably by me, really, how many vegan wargamers d'you know? If you do know any, and they're pretty and single, send 'em here! ;-)

Blathering aside, the yellow looks quite good, and the red is a bit of all right, too. The computer screens of the corridor are nice and bright, and those on the doors are pretty, too. My current plan is to whack everything with a gloss varnish, then apply some transfers to the screens, adding some sort of verisimilitude to the proceedings. Another coat of varnish, then a wash of rusty colours over most of the pieces will give a good look, I feel. Everybody loves rust. Not on the computer screens, of course! Anyway, two corridors are WIP, the first is PIP, and there are a total of four doors in various stages of completion. All doors have little inserts, and so can appear open or closed, which pleases me rather. I have even got a door with frosted glass panels (DVD case). Having thus tantalised you folks, I leave you with promises of pictures next time I post!