 numerous techniques which can be used. Many of these, such as striping, glazing, or toothbrush blending, are time-consuming. Others, like pigment shading or zenithal highlighting, involve additional supplies beyond brushes and paint, 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. 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 over 45 minutes, because we have a mean old organizer with no sense of humor. It's sort of a general term. I also dabble in things like converting miniatures by changing them from what their sculptor intended, 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. More interesting than a flat, wide open field of green grass, as parts of the hobby, like plating mold lines, or picking the super glue out from under my fingernails after I assemble bits, 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 us exercise than the logical analytical hemisphere. I can use myself for hours getting the right wet blended color gradient for a rippling cloak, finding that perfect transition between the shadows and highlights of a muscular arm. Pretty terrible at freehanding woodgrain, but I do that too. Super important. People with hobbies are generally healthier. They're also at a much lower risk for depression and dementia. This hobby already depressed. Helps me forget that. 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 may be green or blue or red. Add some water to thin the paint. Drastically based on the brand of paint and even on the specific color. One 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. They'll get a feel for the right amount of water for a paint through some amount of trial and error. Also not super useful. For base coating, you might want somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 to 1 paint to water. Maybe close to 1 to 1 is 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 metal holes. We accomplish this by using undiluted paints straight from the bucket. Get onto the wall and all our sins are forgiven. A lot of details aren't even that large. It 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'm because it's a little bit boring to watch. I wouldn't do that to you. It's like a 3D coloring book. It can be fun. A miniature could totally be used in a game. That's just great. 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 pay off. 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. Chain you. Throw a black shade over the gray or metallic paint to really show off the wings. A blue shade to add depth and character to the area. Show these nice folks how shading works. Go ahead, I'll wait. Well, hello there folks. I needed more time. Okay, so we have here a nice little wall. It's got lots of texture in it. I'm very sorry for the audio quality by the way. It's on my fault. Got a lot of texture in it but it's not the easiest thing to see. So what we're going to do is I'm going to use this pre-washed brown ink, premixed brown ink. It's got a little bit of red in it. And just like with the paints, we're going to water it down a little bit. We're making a wash so we can make it pretty thin and get away with doing way more water and we can just go over in more detail later. I need to. So this sinks right down into these cracks. I'm not going to do this whole thing but that gives you a little bit more contrast in there between just the base coated. It's actually just primed and then the shaded area. That's all there is to it. It's a breathing. You guys should do this. Paint dries on 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. Approximately 60% of adults do not seek treatment. Mental illness affects our work and personal lives. Serious mental illness costs America almost $200 billion in lost earnings each year. 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. If you feel that you may have some illness to seek help, you should be able to feel comfortable going to friends or close co-workers 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. Act 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. People in support of our friends and peers. There are some much smarter people than me talking about this. People like Ed Finckler and Jenna Cooleyen. You can find a few of them on Mental Health Prompt. In Each Prompt this is a wonderful organization dedicated to get the conversation going to help people working in the tech industry affected by mental health issues. This way we can make a change. Meet the stigma around mental health by simply talking about it more. A little fun. Once the wash is dried we can move on to the simplest way to highlight an area. Dry brushing. Brushing we break our paint-thin 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 under 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. Give myself a cue that time. The paint has not dried on that yet. It's still pretty wet. So we're going to go ahead and just dry brush the original area and get the idea. It's a nice color and this brush already has some water on it which is basically all we're going to add. I'm going to use this dry brush. It's got much firmer bristles. Just pull some in. You can see this is starting to come off a little bit. Once there's almost none coming out just go right over this. And I can see it so I can promise you it's happening. But I know that you cannot so we'll go a little bit more drastically just to show the effect. This is much easier to do even than the shade. I was super impressed when I learned this. I hope you guys are impressed too. So the order of those two doing the shading and the dry brushing it sort of depends on the effect that you want. So if we were to dry brush over this then we would have that same brightness. And if we were less concerned about the brightness we wanted sort of a more muted thing as we might if we have for example a white dry brush. You can go over this and get some of that. Those very high points brought back down by using the wash it over top of that paint. And you can go back and forth and do multiple layers and whatever you want. It's tons of fun. Whatever feels right. Okay, one's more. So this is all stuff that I learned before I ever picked up a brush. A hobby with a co-worker as an excuse to spend more time with him. And to learn a new thing while there's 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. Generally about hobbies. Since I'm the one on stage I guess that means I get to do that. 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 know, 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. It 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. We 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. It 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 typically 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. I'm a 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 training in the back of your mind? 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. Step away from the computer, not sitting in front of a computer to be very effective at increasing my happiness. And in preventing and reversing professional burnout, balance is, to me, than always being familiar with the latest JavaScript framework. This whole thing for a long time, organized labor groups, for eight-hour work days, used the slogan eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for what we will. These are great for building relationships and for meeting new people. They usually involve some sort of an accomplishment. They're often my best models to people. I'd love to show them to you when we're done talking. Talk about the rare species they saw. Grease monkeys might want to share the real of the engine in the feeling of a smooth acceleration. In other words, like me, an excuse to talk to people who they wouldn't otherwise meet. A great way to recharge. Yes, even as introverts. We also need time alone with others and take my masterpieces back and put them into my showcase. Sites like Etsy are a great way to start selling custom weather work or knitting. Consider starting a hobby as we surround ourselves with so much as developers. An excuse to geek out with others and to prevent burnout if you're very, very lucky. It'll 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. I'm 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 he always bored me back then. To 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. As far as this is running a little bit short, feel free to hang out and watch me finish painting to come up and ask me questions as I paint. I'm happy to show you what I'm doing. And of course, I've got some of my best models up here and I absolutely love for you to come and take a look at them. Another lighting in here is not great. You are welcome to come on up and take a look. There's a bunch of painted and partially painted things up here and into them as I continue going. Absolutely. Thank you. I wonder if we can turn up the house lights. It might be easier to see these. I do it mostly for the so the question was do I play games or is it mostly for painting? I do it mostly because I enjoy the painting aspects. But almost all of these are from the same game called War Machine. The two guys are actually Terrents and they are this is a Wookie and this is a I forget what it's called but they're from the Star Wars game. Very nice. And I like that they might have cut me up. So the question was what do I use for sampling colors? Funny story. This guy is the first one of these that I've painted. Of these many copies of the same thing that I've got that I'm using here. This one was a test model for this color scheme and I threw it together in about an hour or maybe two just to see what it looked like doing here just because I had more time. But I wanted to test out the color scheme so this was just a cheap model that I had. I do have these colors and I was taking notes on my way through so this is all of the different colors that I was using for this original model and there's a few in here that I didn't cover. This is just like a moleskin that I happen to have laying around and then this is a little bit more interesting this is down the middle are all of the base coat colors that I used and the highlight and shade colors and I wrote down what the originals were so this is like my speaker notes for this talk and then all of the different inks that I'm using to wash them afterwards.