The art of overcomplexifying everything

I decided to write this text because, let's be straight, I'm getting bored at the fact that I struggle to keep things simple, compact and short, and I never seem to finish anything (read: blog texts). I will now list some things I am or have and which affect my blogging.

The cat is from Kave, then croc, penguin and laptop came from Lahjakas, the easel was also bought, and I don't know the history of that flowerpot which serves as a seat. The rest is made by me.

I am a perfectionist. Posting a blogtext takes forever, because I don't want to publish them before they're the quality I want.

I am autistic. I got the Asperger's syndrome diagnosed when I was 13, I guess it was 2008. I think that due to my autism I have a habit to think everything the complex and more logical and scientific way that people who don't have this. I analyze, I ponder, I draw images and maps in my head, I think how this and this correlates with that and why and how and what started it. And more often than not it goes out of hand. 

I've made this kind of bridles into functioning 1:9 scale miniatures. I call them fightmore.

I have ADD. It basically means that I struggle to focus on boring things - like applying millions of layers of one color so that the transparent becomes a new color layer. Of course there's also much more than that. But patience, while normally can be achieved by stubbornness, just doesn't come that way for an ADD person. It's like AD/HD but without the... H. 

I am depressed. I think it was diagnosed a couple years ago, or before the pandemic went crazy globally. There have been easier and worse phases, and this disorder is one of the biggest explanations to my current struggle to make art. It's annoying, but I can't do much for it. Do you know what it feels like, when you read about mental issues for ages, and then randomly find out that you do suffer from them as well? It's an absurd experience, but ah so useful what comes to accuracy in pessimistic storywriting.

I have zero patience (depending on thing). Check the ADD paragraph. But this is exactly why I haven't been that much into hair-by-hair coloring on model horses, haven't done much dapples ever and overall don't care that much about really complex colors. I also don't add as much detail to anything as I wish I could. It just isn't possible. 

Drawing on paper is a different story then. I can hone and detail a doodle for hours and not lose my interest towards working on it.

I can make simple things sound overly complex. Check my animal doll tutorial. Or snaffle bit tutorial. None of those are complex, but I make them sounds like that. Apologies, but that's very unlikely to change ever.

I overthink and overanalyze, count "what if"s. This is why I struggle with opinion texts and rants. I love the idea of those, and writing them, but I haven't actually published that much of them. Should I? How many readers are going to throw their computers (or smartphones - hooray!) into a wall if I let them read my harsh and blunt opinion texts? (Didn't you just read my secret opinion about smartphones...?) I want to figure this thing out especially, because I and Kave want to post them more than anything. We want to bring up conversation topics, and sugar-coating is not an option.

I don't double check, I double-double-double-triple check. This means that I'm going to through-read a text at least twice before I publish it. It's not that fun really, and I struggle to through-read with thought,  except when I should focus on everything else. 

You didn't expect this photo. Haha!

I have zero idea what I am doing, more than I just have an idea about what it can be about. This applies to everything. I also believe it is why I have no idea if I've written enough; when to say the text is finished and ready for publishing. How do you everyone else know that?

I hate the fact that I can't lay interest on more than a few narrow topics at once, on one phase. A phase means a time which I can't tell the length of. When an autistic person has a special interest, it often dominates their attention and life for a certain phase, which can last from hours to decades. My oldest passion have been dinosaurs - I've hobbied them my entire life. And my passion to horses started when I was about seven, then it lasted to 2011 or so and eventually modified into the less crazy level (doesn't mean I could not be a horse crazy still...). Examples of short or occasionally repeating interest phases could be this and that animal group (like once pinnipeds - for a few hours) or something else biology-related. 

The childhood me could have freaked our due to excitement if saw this - or learned that they can have dinos like this once they grow up.

Speaking of passions and special interests, one of mine are rats. This isn't a surprise to everyone, I guess? Unless you're a first time reader? I've been crazy about rats since 2007 when we got real ones, and that also is why and when I started drawing them (and got really serious about that in 2011). And because I'm a model horse dork, I also naturally became a model rat dork. I think we're a rare breed. 

Long story short, I struggled to find a nice way to make tiny rats until 2014, when I learned what silk clay and foam clay are, and figured out a logical simplified sculpting technique. Making my own rats has been a big thing to me personally, because I'm really picky about realism, and rat models aren't very common - let alone accurately sculpted ones. After figuring out how to make thumb rats I was able to gain a massive rat collection. Only a minority of my rats are factory made or sculpted by someone else.

Most of these are by myself, but seven thumbies (behind the rainbow ones) and the tiny dragon are by Kave. And that black rat on top of the taller container is by an IRL friend.

Lately I've also been really much into genetics, especially color genetics. I've been inventing totally unreal colors and their genetics for my fictional rats (not only clay rats, but also characters). This got kicked even further when I recently started to do teamwork with my Swedish hobby friend Decors, who I probably brainwashed into making clay rats. (Ooops.) I love pondering these and playing with ideas and writing standards. 

But, suddenly I had a problem in my hands: I had way too many colors to identify, name and describe, yet I should figure out how they are related to each other, how one can breed them, what kind of modifiers exist and all that. And more. I like complex things and science, but this sudden flood of new things to think and write is just too much. It's overwhelming me. Yet I struggle to read certain genetics terms, while I can understand the colors and map their tracks in my mind just fine. I can't explain this in any way, it's so abstract but also so logical to me personally. I understand recessive, dominant, heterozygous and homozygous. But I can't get what a locus is. I also don't remember much about epigenesis, what I read about years ago... 

Don, a rex coated reddish brown "halves-l" buck.

Ulla, a red flame doe.

Horse colors are more or less easy to understand, I think. At least most basics and dilutions, since I've read about them for so long already. Actually, I'm using some horse color genetics as a base to correctly model some of these entirely fictional rat color genetics I am cooking up here. 

I really don't know why my brain can't grasp some things, no matter how much I try. I'm a visual person, so maybe that has something to do with how I learn genetics as well. (When I think how the cream gene in horses does work, I always combine and repeat visual images of the actual colors in my mind, instead of trying to write it. And when I read about these things, I visualize them in my mind meanwhile.)

So, have I now written enough? How should I determine that? 

I know I'm not the only one who plays with their own works before sending it away... And don't worry, I made a braided rope to match the halter after taking this photo.

 

I'm terrible at writing end words for a blogtext. Argh.

I did it!

I figured out that I really don't enjoy repeating my painting sessions in mind and in form of text, so I will simplify it greatly (which usually leads to an ironically large amount of text). This means that I'm not giving much of a word about details in the progress my NaMoPaiMo horse went through. 

First of all, I failed my attempt to try to blog about this weekly. I just can't do that, it's proven true now. Another problem is the "update" Blogger did some time ago, I just give up blogging or at least uploading photos on pages and articles which already have some. Nothing in this thing makes sense, and to be honest, no one wanted it to happen. A table computer user with keyboard is still a thing, me being one. 

Anyway. Here's the progress in one single post!

I started with three horses from some Breyer stablemate painting kit: an arabian, a mustang and the peruvian paso, the latter being my official victim. The mustang served as a test piece for techniques and the arab was just a filler. The test piece was to make sure everything went okay, because I didn't want any serious setbacks, and because he helped me to avoid wasting paint and also was a good secondary canvas when I waited the official horse to dry between layers.

First layers were difficult, when it comes to the paso and mustang, because their base color was going to be something between yellow and orange (eventually going red). The arab was nice to work on, and I basically just layered black gesso on him so long that he of course became solid black. 

First actual color... I nearly wrecked my nerves when I had to layer this endlessly, it was so diluted.

Second color, again several layers to make it actually visible.

The mustang got the same treatment.

First color and second color. Both were so liquid that they were more like watercolor than acrylic in consistency. (I used a palette knife to put water into each; a small plastic spoon could serve as well.)

I ended up using a wide row of more or less small brushes, which most likely are artist quality. I also tested the brush which came in the Breyer kit, just to see if it's worth use in this kind of work. Yes, somehow. But it also left clearly rougher brush stroke texture when compared to my better synthetics, which I found interesting; this happened even when the paint was thinned enough. 

I can't photograph properly sometimes, or then my camera doesn't like brushes. (He's old anyway and could use some repair.)

For basic body color I used a flat brush with rounded edges. These can be made at home by trimming the corners off from a rectangular flat brush, so, no need to exactly hunt for one. (I always moist the brush before trimming and use the scissors 'against' the bristles, which makes it more controllable.)

Because I'm me, and I like white faces on horses, and black combines well with sabino or splashed white, the arab was the first one to look worth recording. I had more fun with him than my actual victim, which was kind of worrying, wasn't it?

He should be getting a white face, hence the lack of layers there.

I never threw off the package plastic which my palette came with, and it serves as a lid which protects the colors from drying too fast. This is how I stored the paints between use:

I do who knows how many kinds of crafts, and it can be seen literally by looking at my worktable. Not sorry.

Once I also sketched down the white markings for my NaMoPaiMo horse. I'm a visual artist who has drawn their entire life and have studied art too, so one could assume this could have been easy. No. I'm incredibly bad at drawing or painting from reference photos or even objects under my nose, and even more so when I should draw something certain like a breed of horse or an individual or a position. It always fails, so I didn't care if I did justice for the actual mold or not what comes to my ugly sketches. And by the way, before sketching I read a lot about white markings and especially sabinos and Googled a lot of photos. The final markings were roughly sketched from several images I saw, but eventually turned out very different (which is positive).

The notes are in Finnish. And I HAD to smooth out the darkenings just because...

I definitely blocked the basic areas for markings already on this stage. It's the ugly stage you can see here - and it lasted long!

The mustang got some leg color blending attempts after I read painting articles from the Braymere Custom Saddlery blog. Despite that, I had zero idea what I was doing. (And I've read some of those older articles several times over the years, just because they've interested me!)

Finally got rid of the ugly bright yellow. It looked similar to what onions smell like... I connect smells, colors and tastes and other sensory things. Nothing to worry about, just neuro stuff. 

An orange on legs.

I like orange. The horse could almost have been left this pale, but since NaMoPaiMo colors are commitments, and I committed for a red chestnut, then it had to be red and not orange.

This was when I got a box from Lahjakas, one Finnish dealer who sells more Breyers than any other store in the entire country. A good excuse to not paint. 

One of the models that box contained.

NaMoPaiMo horses went forward. Enough said. Although I could also mention that the next color was the first actual red, and I thought it could show in the final result. Also added more layering to the white markings to make sure they don't disappear.

Then I suddenly had three shades of red and orange to use. This was the step when I was down to layering shadings and tones on, or in my sense, counter-shading and darkening. I mostly blended the colors by using wet-on-wet technique or something similar, and more or less ignored the hair growth direction for the sake of practicality. The brush I used for this was a small one with flat hairs and corners trimmed off, so it was rounded. Let me say that it's one of my favorite brushes, I always use it for blending!

Orange, reddish orange and red...

One of my favorite brushes, the blending king. And yes, he's totally nice to use despite how broken he looks.

I also used some of this to add pangare to the arab, in the logic that he could become a brown. (Which as a horse color name doesn't make any sense, in my opinion. In Finnish we call that black bay.) He reached the most magnificent ugly stage I've ever seen, maybe. This is why he isn't finished. Yet.

Then came another box, this time from USA, in fact from Jennifer Buxton! She had a birthday giveaway in her blog, and I won for my surprise (I happen to be a pessimist...). Second excellent excuse to procrastinate with painting - I am very pleased with this box. Among the Nazruddin I got little extras, from which one was a booklet about white patterns by Lesli Kathman. It felt absurd to be able to just read English on paper without the need to translate more than a few words here and there! Everything arrived safe, and Nazruddin found his place among my herd. Will take some photos at some point.

A booklet! A sticker! And an exploded worktable!

Back to the topic. 

My paso went further, and had at least three shades of red on, white markings briefly blocked and... That was it. 

I did not bother to record more steps after that, because I started to need to hurry. But the further I write, the more steps I remember and want to mention. Too bad I don't have anything to illustrate these.

One of those things were the mane and tail. I did the body color and skin first and most of the white markings, then gessoed the mane and tail. Then I mixed the light yellowish color for mane and tail, thinned it down and applied in several layers. The narrow areas I did with tiny pointy brushes and usually let the color slip over to the body surface. This was okay because I then later fixed these slips with the body colors, which I kept useable just because of this. Once the yellow was as I wanted, I mixed a lot of water to the orange which I used for counter-shading, then applied that on the mane with a narrow flat brush. The paint was so diluted that it mostly filled the crevices but didn't cover anything else that well. That brought the mane's texture more visible, just like I wanted. After it dried, I applied some of the base yellow back on the more outer areas. 

To finish the white markings and to add details in them I used my smallest brushes. I always say that I will not do anything hair-by-hair, but that is exactly what I have done for white markings in some of my horses... Let me say, it was rather odd to feel that every brush was too large and the paint was too liquid to get full control over what I did. Unthinned paints are easier to control than this stuff. And this scale...! Didn't help when I yet got an idea to try to paint so that the hair growth direction could be visible. Fail.

I signed the horse by using one of the colors I used for him and a brush which has unusually long and narrow hairs. I use it basically just for this purpose, because it gives really, really narrow lines. I got that brush ages ago from a friend and a fellow artist. 

The sealant was applied only after that. I thinned it down and applied in a couple or more layers, not sure if it serves at all, though.

His eyes were scary to do. I have never painted anything so small, other than the irises and pupils in my dolls' eyes (in some cases). I must have trimmed one of my tiniest brushes so that there were even less hairs, because, you know, it wasn't small enough... And I never learn how to do horse pupils in a way which doesn't go completely wrong. Had to redo one of them. 

Anyway, here is a photo of all the brushes I used with this horse:

Centimetres (and millis) up, inches down.

And how did he turn out? He should be a flaxen red chestnut sabino, but I seriously don't know if I wrecked the sabinoing or not. It's not a whitening type I'm that familiar with, unlike splashed white (alias Finnish pinto). Anyway, I am quite okay with how he turned out, especially for a first horse-looking stablemate I've ever painted.

I had to photograph him in two different settings, since his color really IS so bright and contrasty that it can look dull in average settings. I never know which really serves so variations are practical. 

These pics were taken in a small studio box which I have made from a traditional scale Breyer's package. It sits on my table under a work lamp, and because that light is yellowish and bright, I have placed some household paper on top to soften it. And I forgot that I have made "mirrors" from another package part and foil... Despite using flash by default, I managed to get the colors turn out more orange than I wished, so had to adjust the tones afterwards.

First I took photos with a setting that will make colors bright and also bring some contrast by default. This is mostly close to what his color truly is, it's not exaggerated. This horse is literally a red chestnut.

Just in case, I also snapped a few basic shots with the average brightness and contrast. In these the colors aren't as strong, and actually the horse looks less red than he really is. Usually it's easy to do the other way around! One of these was what I posted to the completion page (mostly because some people said the contrasty ones hurt their eyes).

Headshots were taken too. These are again contrasty.

He looks scared.

A new horse always needs a name. I talk a lot with Kave, my co-blogger, and we quite suggested a name after name. Eventually I didn't know whose horse each was meant for, but well, it was fun... She used fixative on her model and I didn't, which helped me to find a name for mine. Far From Freezing Feb Fixes. 

It doesn't make sense more than by connecting the month to the horse and by telling what I could have used if I had that as an option. Yet less it will be acceptable for a peruvian paso name. I've played with languages when naming things, but my actual grammar skills are limited to Finnish and English (and maybe minimally to some other languages, like German and Swedish...?), and I recently got enough of trying to build a sentence name from a language I don't understand. That is why it is English this time. Also, my horses are not going to reach showing in any form, so I don't even care. Hah. 

I remember finishing him on the 27th day, and the calendar read that it was the name day of Torsti. Therefore I decided that it can serve as his nickname. The name's colors match enough to the horse's warmth and sharpness (the sabino!), that will be it.

All I can now say is... I did it! Officially! 

I also got to use my most recent signature/watermark on paint for the first time. It combines the initials of my full real name into one "logo". 

Aftermess:

Did I learn anything? Yes. I experienced painting a stablemate. This horse was my first one of the scale since before 2011. My paintjobs back then were terrifyingly rough and I didn't even care if they were done properly, let alone realistic. And no need to say that the models I painted then were just some cheap toys. I have evidence: 

Most of these were painted (and resculpted) somewhere around 2010. The draft in red harness may be from 2014?

I learned that scale matters. If I need to thin out the paint a lot, I will definitely prefer bigger scales. Thinned color will be slurped in much higher in the brush than unthinned, which made it hard to control the amounts, I think. It was annoying, although not very dangerous because such a watery pigment was possible to just wipe off if there was too much of it. Unthinned paint could be layered much faster due to it covering better, but stablemates are too small for that; it will eat details of the sculpture. It's no problem with anything bigger than Schleich, to be honest. And no one has to agree with me. 

This mare's body color was painted with acrylics which were thinner very little or not at all, and I had no problem with it.

I also simply don't mind a paintjob which looks "painted", literally. It can have some subtle brush strokes, but not in the sense what you can see in my oldest paintjobs. Maybe the term "texture" fits better. I just don't mind if everything isn't blended to the point of an airbrush look... This kind of painted-like paintjob is most likely easier to do well on a horse which has more surface for proper techniques and paint consistencies. 

Maybe I'm just trying to justify myself the fact that I can never reach the photorealistic paintjobs' level, but overall, I don't even expect my own work to reach those levels. It doesn't mean I couldn't want quality and realism. 

Will I paint more stablemates? Yes. But my prefered scales will be bigger. 

Not my best in either resculpt or paintjob, but you can see the directions of my brush. And that is what I don't mind.

What about NaMoPaiMo and me experiencing it? I'm pleased, although I didn't feel like I painted with others any more than usually. I do my hobby crafts in a small room without digi devices, except camera. I also wished I was able to update everything in time, but that is technically impossible and is always going to be. This is a human who doesn't have and will not get a smartphone and who also does not use Facebook, Instagram or other popular somes. I'm a blog and Discord person.

But NaMoPaiMo in general... It's wonderful and awesome. And Jennifer Buxton is great person and one of my hobby idols. The best thing was that I realised I now was one of the painters, not just a person who reads about it and sees all that community stuff happening. Participating a challenge really does feel totally different from being just a sideviewer!