[Cackles evilly, rubs hands] We GOT 'im!!....This reminds me of when I started lining cars with the black Sharpy, then I started detailing interiors, and here I am. It always happens in this hobby.
My friend Prof. Fate was fond of saying "this hobby was invented by 16-year-old boys" (who, according to him, had invented stick & tissue model airplanes four years earlier, three decades previous!!) - and there's an element of that particularly in the guys who build & paint. It also ties in with another Fate codgerism, "I'm never so in control of my life as when I'm at my workbench - nor so completely responsible for what I produce."
I think the real blessing in modeling is how it's not tied to our Real Lives; we can quite literally hew our own path here, wherever we want & at our own pace. That's a gift in this constricted world.
I wanna get into some particulars with this (especially now that some of us're actually into the discussion of particulars), but I gotta wait 'til I've tooled up to paint again - a few days.Did you practice a lot like Noose suggested before you lettered a car, or did you just start right away ? What kind of materials and tools do you keep around to fix mistakes ?
But, "Did I practice" -
I'm a Southpaw, and it's been a lifelong battle just to get a cursive script others can read. Best thing I ever did was to stumble on a Calligraphy workbook written by the wondrous graphic artist David Lance Goines - you can still get it - that finally trained me about shaping the letters so that they work. So, practice - yah, by accident and necessity I got a skill. Actually went pro for a while, doing wedding docs & such.
I think you'll know how much practice you need once you try a few strokes on a test piece. You'll know when you're confident enough to do the real thing.
Another thing: there's "practice" and then there's "exercise." Like any learned motion (including, as I'm learning the very hard way, driving a slot car), you can know the motions you need to get the brush down & around & up, but it's much later that that knowledge becomes second nature. The brain learns first, the natural unthought motion in the hand is, well, up to the hand. One day you'll notice you're not having such a hard time, and you'll smile at the surprise.
"Start right away" -
Probably.
There's one thing you want to do right away, and that's to get it into your sense that nothing is Precious. There's no one-time thing in your hobby, no Monument you're doing where one wrong chip and David's flawed forever; you can have fun screwing up and moving on. Boatbuilder Pete Culler said, "There will be lumps, and what of it? Build it now. The water won't know, and you'll build one much less lumpy later on."
Another way to say is, don't get too attached to it. Nothing's Precious, least of all something you're fully accepting will likely bash into a wall. Fate: "THEY ARE ALL DOOMED."
All this gobblygook adds up to, get confident that you can paint what you want once you begin it. Yah, practice your skills off the workpiece, and then that workpiece will also be practice for the next.
& so on.
I'm actually starting a little notepad of things I wanna address about this learning-to-paint thing, so I remember once I start to type 'em out. Thanks, Mike, for asking the right questions.
As I say repeatedly here, I'm by no means any expert on this, and I beg the real painters to chime in; but by my noobie-ness I might be ideally poised express all the little fiddly bits I discover, all the things the real painters know, do, and have forgotten they learned.
Duf
