 Well, hello there folks. Welcome to another episode of The Joy of Miniature Painting. I'm Caleb Thompson, and I'll be your host for the evening. I have pre-recorded this talk. This is allowing me to focus on the live painting performance. As it turns out, I am terrible at multitasking. I would have to pause whenever speaking. And I don't think I'd get everything covered that I want to. Caleb, sit up straight. I paint. Whenever I tell people that, they understandably assume I mean on a canvas. I paint miniatures. Tonight, we'll be painting Reinhold, Gobber Speculator. He's a happy little miniature used in the tabletop game War Machine. We want happy paintings. Happy paintings. If you want sad things, watch the news. In miniature painting, there are numerous techniques which can be used. Many of these, such as striping, glazing, or tube brush blending, are time consuming. Others, like pigment shading or zenithal highlighting, involve additional supplies beyond brushes and paint. If you've done any painting on canvas or elsewhere, you may recognize some of these terms. They're really not unique to miniature painting. They're just techniques we've appropriated. In the interest of time, and because I would like to be able to complete something today, I'll be going over just a few tools in a painter's utility belt. Dry brushing, washing, and base coating. I can't go over 45 minutes, because we have a menal organizer with no sense of humor. Painting is sort of a general term. I also dabble in things like converting miniatures by changing them from what their sculptor intended, changing a pose or swapping body parts, in basing them by giving them interesting surroundings that help bring the models to life, by showing them running over rocks on a bridge or crouching behind a fallen pillar, and in building terrain to make the battleground more interesting than a flat, wide-open field of green grass. There are less glamorous parts of the hobby, like cleaning mold lines, or picking the superglue out from under my fingernails after I assemble bits. But most of my time is spent painting. That's good, because it's the most exciting to me. Painting is my hobby. It gives me an outlet from work that I find more satisfying than lying on the couch and watching Netflix. It lets me step away from the technical and interpersonal demands of my job. It uses the creative, imaginative half of my brain that gets less exercised than the logical analytical hemisphere. I can lose myself for hours getting the right wet blended color gradient for a rippling cloak, or finding that perfect transition between the shadows and highlights of a muscular arm. I'm pretty terrible at freehanding wood grain, but I do that too. Having a hobby is super important. People with hobbies are generally healthier. They're also at a much lower risk for depression and dementia. I came into this hobby already depressed. Painting helps me forget that. As all miniature painters soon learn, there are a few super easy ways to take a flat and boring piece and give it vibrancy and visual interest. The very first step of painting a model is to base coat it. This is the step where you throw down the base color of each section. Paint a leather belt in a mid brown. Stone is gray. Cloth might be green or blue or red. When applying the paint, we usually want to add some amount of water to thin the paint. The amount can change drastically based on the brand of paint and even on the specific color. A common description of the desired result when thinning is that the paint should have the consistency of skim milk. Just a little bit thicker than water. That's not super useful. From what I've been able to gather, when people say that, they're mostly regurgitating something that they've been told. But a painter does get a feel for the right amount of water for a paint through some amount of trial and error. For base coating, you might want somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 to 1 paint to water. Other painting may be closer to 1 to 1 as desired. Why are we thinning down the paints that we paid so much money for? Doing so prevents them from clogging small details on the model's sculpt. And it allows for a much smoother coat. Think about it this way. When we paint the walls of our houses, we want to fill in tack and nail holes. We accomplish this by using undiluted paint straight from the bucket. Roll it right onto the wall and all our sins are forgiven. In a miniature, a lot of details aren't even that large. Thinning the paint helps keep from losing those details. In my experience, not thinning your paint sufficiently, especially during the base coat step, is the only thing you can't come back from by staying calm and thinking about how to fix something. This is why you see real life me painting a miniature with some paint already on it. I base-coated ahead of time because it's a little bit boring to watch. I wouldn't do that to you. Don't worry, it's like a 3D coloring book. It can be fun. A base-coated miniature could totally be used in a game. Any way you want it to be, that's just right. But there are some tricks you can use to get a better looking model without much more work. And it really makes all that time spent base-coating. The first is shading. This is the process of relatively brightening some colors in your model by darkening the parts where the light doesn't shine as much. The simplest way to shade is to use a premixed wash liberally over an area of the model. Highly textured areas work really well for this. Chainmail? Throw black shade over the gray or metallic paint. Hair? Use brown or even a blue shade to add depth and character to the area. Caleb, show these nice folks how shading works. Go ahead, I'll wait. This talk has changed a little bit, as you might have guessed. This model is now shaded. It started pretty white. It started pretty white. You wouldn't have been able to see any of the details in here, especially like in here. This is a very textured belt, and you can start to pick some of that out. Now, this piece back here is actually pretty clear if you're sitting where I'm sitting, but not where you are. Anyways, the idea is that I basically just watered down the black paint really well and slopped it all over the whole model, and it sunk into all of these cracks and crevices, and it's pretty dark now, and storm troopers as we know are very white and clean, but you do still need to see those shadows to set that up. So, I'm going to bring back the whites now while I keep talking. While the paint dries on that, I'd like to talk about something more serious. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, one of the most important aspects of this model is that I'd like to talk about something more serious. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, one in four adults in America experiences mental illness. These can include schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, and others. Yet, approximately 60% of adults do not seek treatment. Mental illness affects our work and personal lives. A serious mental illness costs America almost $200 billion in lost earnings each year. I want you to look around the room. I'd like to talk about something more serious. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, one in four adults in America experiences mental illness. These can include schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, and others. Yet, approximately 60% of adults do not seek treatment. Mental illness affects our work and personal lives. A serious mental illness costs America almost $200 billion in lost earnings each year. I want you to look around the room. One in four of us is probably suffering from some sort of mental health issue. And yet, there's a stigma around mental health issues. We're afraid that if we admit to being sick, others will judge us for it. We're afraid to seek treatment for it for fear that others will find out. And sometimes we even create false limits for ourselves, because we are unsure whether we will be able to succeed. I encourage you, if you feel that you may have some illness, to seek help. You should be able to feel comfortable going to friends or close coworkers to discuss things like this. Certainly, feel free to come and talk to me. Sometimes just talking through these things helps out a lot. Then again, sometimes we need a little bit more help from a professional. We shouldn't be afraid to do that either. This is your bravery test. How we interact with each other is really important. We need to be sensitive to each other's situations, cognizant that we may not know all there is to know about them. We need to be available and supportive of our friends and peers. There are some much smarter people than me talking about this. People like Ed Finckler and Jenna Cullian. You can find a few of them on mentalhealthprompt, mhprompt.org. This is a wonderful organization dedicated to get the conversation going to help people working in the tech industry affected by mental health issues. And that's the biggest way we can make a change. We can beat the stigma around mental health by simply talking about it more. Alright, let's have a little fun. Once the wash is dried, we can move on to the simplest way to highlight an area. Dry brushing. With dry brushing, we break our paint-thinning rule. Usually done with a brush with firmer bristles and without a point, dry brushing takes undiluted or only slightly diluted paint and applies it very lightly over an area. This is accomplished by taking the lighter-colored paint onto the brush, then wiping most of it off onto a rag or a paper towel or the back of your hand. This is the hardest part of this method. If you can do this, you can do anything. Once there's almost no paint left, we can lightly run the brush over a textured area to leave the paint mostly on the highest areas with the sharpest corners. Shwoop! You have to make those little noises or it just doesn't work. These are the opposite of the dark areas that the wash settled into and they leave us with a really cool progression of light to dark paint. I didn't give myself a prompt on that one, but I do want to show you a little bit about how dry brushing works. We're going to see how this works because both of my brushes are very wet. Sort of closely, the light reflects just right. You can see some of the texture in here. But we're going to see if we can bring it out a little bit more so that it looks like these two areas that have been dry brushed. I'm going to take some white paint, grab a little bit of that and wipe most of it off here. Then just on the back of my hand, I'm going to keep going until there's not a lot coming off. Then right over these areas, I'm going to real gently run the brush over. It's too heavy. I really want almost nothing coming off. So, these brushes are pretty wet but I'm still getting a decent effect. Like I said, you can come back from quite a bit of this if you know how to do it. So, I've covered up a lot of the flat areas with white that I didn't want covered. I'm just going to go back over them with the black and I'll end up still having a pretty good edging going without having lost too much of the original color. The nice thing is that you can go back and forth over these quite a bit until you've got just the effect that you want. Careful demonstration and I'm sorry. So, this is all stuff that I learned before I ever picked up a brush. I got into the hobby with a co-worker as an excuse to spend more time with him and to learn a new thing. We went out and bought $100 worth of miniatures and supplies but we were too afraid to start. We watched YouTube tutorials together for days. The secret to doing anything is believing that you can do it. Anything that you believe you can do strongly enough, you can do. Anything. As long as you believe. There's a little bit more generally about hobbies. Since I'm the one on stage, I guess that means I get to do that. I promised I'd talk about how hobbies can prevent burnout. In the original title of this talk, Painting Miniatures to Stay Fresh, the concept of Stay Fresh was more about not getting tired of what you're doing than acknowledging how cool you are. And you are. Yep, you. Burnout is a form of psychological stress and vital exhaustion. While the American Psychiatric Association does not consider it a disorder, it is recognized by the World Health Organization. For our purposes, we can say that it is a mental health disorder. Burnout manifests as being tired and without energy, feeling demoralized and increased irritability. According to the MacArthur Foundation, it's been suggested that it can be a result of resources for adapting to stress being broken down. You may have heard the metaphor of a battery representing the certain amount of mental energy available to us each day. As we use this energy to solve a problem or interact with each other, that reserve is depleted and we need to find some way to recharge it. It's different for everyone. Burnout can be considered similarly. We have a certain amount of battery for dealing with the stresses presented to us by our work, by writing code, and just by sitting in front of a computer. We all recharge differently, but for many people, doing something very different than what they're burned out on is what's most effective. People with Type A behavior patterns are more likely to be affected by burnout according to the World Health Organization's International Statistical Classifications of Diseases. Type A personality is characterized by high ambition, desire for achievement, impatience, competitiveness, and a sense of urgency. Some or all of these traits are present in many of us, and I certainly recognize some of these in myself. Doing something creative and challenging that has nothing to do with computers helps to break up the concepts of work and play. Do you ever go home and still have some work problem churning in the back of your mind? I don't know about you, but it's not uncommon for me to untangle that sort of thing as soon as I stop thinking about it consciously. Hobbies like painting are a great way to be focused on one task and unconsciously working through other things. You wouldn't believe how helpful it is to just step away. I know this is somewhat uncouth advice in a culture that pushes developers to always be ahead of the curve, but step away from the computer. I have found not sitting in front of a computer to be very effective at increasing my happiness and in preventing and reversing professional burnout. A healthy work-life balance is, to me, far more important than always being familiar with the latest JavaScript framework. A new way to work through work is to be prepared to get to a better and more efficient job. I've been working through these months with a number of my friends and they've all been working on a lot of these. I've worked with them since I was a little kid, and I've worked with them since I was a little kid. I've worked with them for a long time, and after I got back from work, I've worked with them for a long time. far more important than always being familiar with the latest JavaScript framework. We've known about this sort of thing for a long time. In the 1880s, organized labor groups petitioning for 8-hour work days used the slogan 8 hours for work, 8 hours for sleep, 8 hours for what we will. Hobbies are great for building relationships and for meeting new people. They usually involve some sort of an accomplishment. With painting I want to show off my best models to people. By the way they're up here and I'd love to show them to you when we're done talking. Bird watchers want to brag about the rare species they saw. Grease monkeys might want to share the roar of the engine in the feeling of a smooth acceleration. Hobbies give introverts like me an excuse to talk to people who they wouldn't otherwise meet. They're also a great way to recharge. We all want to be around people, yes even us introverts. But we also need time alone. I can paint with others around or alone at home. I can paint at home and then show off to my friends later. Or I can paint with others and take my masterpieces back and put them into my showcase. Some hobbies even let us make money. Hobbies like Etsy are a great way to start selling custom leather work or knitting. If you don't have one already consider starting a hobby. Write poetry. Join an improv club. Learn to work wood. Paint. Whatever you do get away from the glowing boxes we surround ourselves with so much as developers. It will give you time alone, an excuse to geek out with others and accomplishments to share. It will help you to meet new people and to prevent burnout at work. If you're very, very lucky it will even make you happier. I'm about to wrap up here. I'd like to thank my employer, Thoughtbot, for both allowing me to come and chat with y'all and for enabling me to do so by covering my costs. Thoughtbot is a fantastic place to work and they do a lot to help prevent occupational stresses. If you're interested in working with us please do come talk to me about that. We're a design and development consultancy and if you have a product that could use an expert hand I'd love to chat about that as well. I also co-organize Keep Ruby Weird, a Ruby conference up in Austin. We'll be back in October of next year and I hope to see y'all there. For more on mental health, conferences and painting follow me on Twitter at Caleb Thompson. Before I go I'd like to give a big thank you to Bob Ross. Back when I was growing up he'd be on PBS. My parents would watch him sometimes. He always bored me back then. But in preparing for this talk I watched a lot of The Joy of Painting. And he's just a very happy, calming gentleman. If you ever watched any of The Joy of Painting you may have noticed that there are quite a few Bob Ross quotes in this talk. And of course I'm dressed up as him right now. So thank you Bob. From all of us here I'd like to wish you happy painting and we'll see you next time.