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I'm trying a new thing with this current guy: painting the eyes like a mini. I've been meandering down some mini painting tutorial rabbit holes for the purpose of not-so-mini painting these guys, and I didn't like the basic "just black around yellow eyes" this guy had for his eye sticker. I'm planning on using a so-light-it's-nearly-white pink as an accent color elsewhere, so I thought a slightly more concentrated pink would be interesting around the eyes and gave it a whirl.

First I did a basecoat of pink after priming, then a schoolbus-y yellow, then a very thinned coat of the bright yellow I had used to mix the schoolbus, focusing near the center of each eye, then pure white just along the edges.

At this point I realized what I really wanted was a sorta war painty under eye contrast mark, so I tried a little pure red underneath:

Putting this in the head revealed an issue tho: this guy already has a birdish, owlish face; the pink rims around the eyes turned him into a vulture.

This honestly is super cool, but my end goal is more bug less bird, so I pulled it apart and went over the remaining pink with black for the end result:

I think the pink all around was actually an important step to help the yellow and red shine without eighty million coats, so it was really fun to experience this developing. A big skill/technique aspect of this was also "just paint over it". I don't know why this simple thing has been eluding me, but it feels revolutionary in this. Too much white edging? Paint over the excess with yellow. Missed the eye and got the socket area yellow? Go back in with pink.

I think part of this blindspot has been caused by my highly targeted painting method on these guys, leaving much of the plastic bare and only painting small sections. This looks nice in a lot of ways, but as a dichotomy of paint vs plastic was preventing me from thinking more adventurously. I've been doing this to avoid having to work joint clearances to stop paint scraping, but it has its own drawbacks, of course--both in this too rigid frame of mind and in how masking is less effective: My first photos show the greenish hue of liquid masking; this stuff didn't help make a clean edge as I had hoped without an assist from an exacto blade to cut along the edges. Because I didn't prime everything, then put masking down around the eyes, removing the masking began to lift some of the primer/paint homogeneous unit from the plastic; I think this issue wouldn't occur if the masking was just lifting the paint bound to it, leaving the paint bound to the primer alone.

When painting only some sections of the plastic, the best method I've found for clean edges between painted/not painted remains a toothpick and/or a qtip with solvent. If I delve into fully painting one of these, I'll have two options: masking and repainting when I go outside of the intended space for a color.

I was reflecting this morning. Cohost had a small number of gunpla builders I didn't discover till like two months before it closed. I wasn't sure I was gonna really gonna do any more kits so I just tucked it away in my brain and then it was too late to really contribute to their tags much at all. I noted that they spent time showing WIPs and discussing what they were trying with their current build.

I set this up to note that this morning i was thinking, "man the gunpla posts i know how to find on the internet are all basically instagram posts--'look at this pretty thing I made' and less about the craft, let alone the journey." These are both things I value in my mental model of arts and crafts: 1) the craft of it--the techniques and materials used, why these work and work together, and how one laid out the steps to get to a particular result; 2) the journey--why this maker chose to use these techniques, what they tried before this to arrive at this result, how what they have read or researched recently informed their current work. Each made thing is an incredibly intimate network of inter-related thoughts and feelings, a cross section of knowledge and skills at a given moment, and this network-within-a-network is beautiful. I try--when I have the wherewithal to be articulate--to share my own journey and craft here, but I don't really know where to go to get a slice of other's process and progress.

Format matters for this. I'm realizing reddit, while ostensibly a forum, is not built in a way that encourages discussion over "wow pretty, go viral" (or "hehe funny, go viral"), especially in this current timestate of the internet^[1]. I stumbled across a lovely youtube channel when reading up on "what are good ingredients in an acrylic wash" and I'm like, "hell yea this guy fosters creativity and experimentation and you can see how much joy he gets from painting minis" but for me personally, watching a YT video is akin to getting forcibly shoved through a decade of purgatory within a seven minute timespan. It also doesn't exactly foster give and take or a collective of people coming to one place for something.

i think too that there's an element of immediacy people (incl me) expect now that makes building something new or even finding something to integrate into difficult: it feels like people expect to have an endless amount of "wow pretty"s to scroll thru to find the one they want to discuss more, to have the comfort of knowing they can grab their phone at any given moment and have a new novelty to eat with their eyes for 6 seconds. Craft is... not that. It takes time to prepare to do the thing, time to do the thing, time to take photos,^[2] time to clean up, time to write your thoughts and materials and techniques. It's a lot of effort to do, and with the internet's current edition so focused on the sale--the sale of things, the sale of clout, the sale of attention--it's extremely difficult to put forth that effort and not expect an immediate gratification from doing so. "I put in all this effort to show my work, but no one is sharing/upvoting/liking it, so my effort was wasted" is a hard thing to combat, especially when you see (or do) the lowest effort meme getting bounced around the entirety of the internet.

Low effort actions get low effort responses, and a like/share/upvote is low effort. High effort actions ask for a high effort responses. This can explain why a high-effort post gets little traction, especially when I consider the amount of trust a higher effort post requires. A like or share can be like a little joke, a hello, a wave, a mention of the weather... They invite familiarity and build up rapport. Meanwhile a high effort post is going for the jugular, and people aren't often ready for that.

My thought this morning originally was "I should stop scrolling the gunpla subredit since it's not exactly helping me build my craft anymore and posting there has unfair expectations" but i do feel like in writing this i have more to develop around this. Part of why it can't do it for me is the anonymity reddit has! I can't build rapport when usernames are pushed to the side, likes don't signal who they're from, and your post is lost in the glut of a million others. So can i keep looking for places that actually do have good discussion? Can I find a format that fosters this in this era of internet, or at least be OK with the compromises i'll inevitably have to make? Can i be okay being some rando in the comments until i build up enough rapport in a place to be recognized as part of a community? Can i be okay with some rando in my comments until they build up enough rapport for me to go "eyyyy it's ______"? Am I doing a good job of letting someone know I love seeing a comment^[3] from them?

I'm searching, looking, exploring as ever; my themes of thought these days are around community, craft, and cultivation

• meditations
• gunpla