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Benefits of Working at Home

For about the past few years, I've been working from home. It's a long story of corporate shenanigans which resulted in me surviving a second buyout of my employer by another company but my physical office dropping out from under me. The point is that I'm physically isolated from my colleagues in an office in my house full of...well, any stuff I would want to have with me.

On a mostly but not entirely unrelated note, I've long vaguely toyed with the idea of painting miniatures. It'd be nice for other hobbies I'm involved with. On the other hand, it requires at least a little hand-eye coordination, and I'm not good with that. What finally made me decide to do something about it was finding OpenForge, 3d-printable architecture and terrain for gaming. I like architecture.

What made these come together is...y'know how some people doodle in the margins during long, boring meetings? I realized that I had the opportunity to "doodle" as extravagantly as I liked. In nearly all my meetings, I'm on the other side of a voice connection. I could do little bits of painting, a few minutes at a time here and there, and nobody would know. They wouldn't even know if I weren't wearing pants (though, as a point of pride, I do). At any rate, bouts of fifteen minutes to a half hour are about right. I can do a little painting on some small objects, set them aside for this or that coat to dry, and come back to them at leisure later.

So, then, I've been printing and painting pieces for this mausoleum design to experiment with miniature painting techniques. These pieces mostly have a brownish base coat, a variety of other earth tones applied with bits of sponge, a dark wash, and a final treatment with a faint touch of ligher color here and there. The green bits are, of course, copper patina.


I particularly like how the door came out. Those hasps are treated with rusted iron paint.


 The inside is much the same, plus a little bit of moss-textured paint.


This has been fun so far, and I'm intending to finish it, but I'm not sure I can actually use it. My gaming system of choice uses hexagons, not squares, and I'm not sure how I'd fit an overlay on it.


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