Kari,
It’s a funny thing. I guess at this stage in the game, “going slow” meant that I didn’t paint it all in one go. Instead, I broke it down into the feet, legs, midsection and the top. But yeah. That still went quickly. Almost ridiculously quickly.
Here’s what happened.
From the time I was a kid, whether I was drawing or painting or sculpting, I always had the ability to fixate on projects that I really, really liked. The flip side of that is, I could never really get into projects that I thought were boring... I remember the Art teacher I had all four years of High school. Mrs. Sue Lewis. One of the only teachers I ever had whom I remember fondly. Anyway, Mrs. Lewis was maby just a bit over-indulgent with me
She’d be speaking at the beginning of class, going over what we’d be doing that day, and she’d always follow the lesson plan up with “And Kenny, you just go ahead and feel free to do whatever you’d like, today.” And I always did. And always enjoyed myself. I’d pick a subject or an idea that I could really get into, and a medium, and I was off to the races. And in every case, if the project enthralled me, it would very quickly take on a life of its own and, well, “just happen” as quickly or as slowly as “it wanted”. And by and large, I didn’t really have a semblance of a say in it.
So with this project here. From that first conversation I had with Bruce where the idea happened, Is think about it every day. And sometimes at night, if I was having a bad spell of insomnia, I’d think about it. I’d talk myself through how Inwanted to do the paint, how I wanted to mix the colors, and so forth. In a sense, I’d already painted this thing a hundred times in my mind before I sat down to paint it. Heh, it’s part of the reason I haven’t finished my Panzer. The Panzer was a “hey try this and see if you like it” thing, and I built everything except for getting the wheels and tracks on there, painted it, broke out the oils on it for the first time, found that I enjoyed working with them, and then BOOM!- a voice in my head said “Good. Now that you know you can do it, it’s time to pull the trigger on the Afrika Korps AT-ST.”
And I got after it. And true to form, it took on a life of its own.
Only this time I did have a semblance of control over the process. I broke the painting and subsequent chipping down into sections. And I’m glad for that. Because printing this thing was a challenge. The operating idea was “Paint it well but make it look like a hastily-applied field job” and that isn’t easy. But it worked. And I think because I was thinking about it so much and going over it and over it in my head so much, and was so fixated on it, I was able to still execute it relatively quickly and exactly as per my wishes, even with breaking it down into sections.
But yeah, that’s my process in a nutshell, with these things.
