Perspective

I have this recurring ideal that keeps coming to me; a really difficult, mentally challenging task, but in a situation where my basic needs are being taken care of; so I'm eating well and sleeping well, and can devote full concentration.

Reality too often is when I'm up against a deadline, shows to be built without enough time or material in places with difficult access...I'm also more often than not, it feels like, at the end of my financial rope.

I'm there right now. Painting all day out in the hot sun is physically challenging, trying to work fast enough for the opening night deadline yet neat enough is mentally challenging, as well as physically challenging in its own way; I'm struggling just to keep the tremors down from near-heat exhaustion, yet having to make extremely precise moves with an unfamiliar brush.

But, of course, I'm doing this hungry -- can't even afford lunch anymore, and there's not enough gas in the tank to get me to work through the end of the week, either.

This was among the tasks for today (well, actually -- we ended up doing the stairs differently. This was me working in Carrara to see if I could problem-solve how to translate the desired pattern on to the surface of a flight of stairs. The ones I did today were done with ruler, and once again I felt like I was trying to trisect the circle or something as I worked out the geometry.)

(And, yes. It's one of the two well-known musicals that requires swastikas. Makes you wonder if there are musicals that require, say, the Japanese W.W.II "Meatball." Well...if you want dangerous symbols, I know of one musical that might require the Elder Sign...)

Today, I felt okay after work. I could have actually eaten something quick and ran off to the City to put in a couple hours on the Raygun. But, alas -- I can't afford to purchase food so I'm left trying to cook something with whatever is left in the kitchen and not too rotted, I can't really afford the transit fares to the City...and, oh well, I probably couldn't get a machine reservation anyhow.

The Shapeways order arrived, at least. The parts all look plausible, and I am really happy now that even if I do go on to make a metal one some time in the far future, I will have been able to problem-solve the CAD files on a simpler 3d print instead.


I've tried a light test fit and so far nothing is critically wrong. The parts also seem firm enough to do at least a PETG "pull" (aka make a vacuum-formed duplicate) but this isn't necessarily a good idea.


The parts I printed at TechShop don't fit quite so well. I need to re-print the donuts, probably. Which is a pity; I did a nice job of smoothing them out -- chucked them in my drill press and held sandpaper up to them.

And of course I still need several other parts, both printed and (preferably) milled. Which is basically going to have to wait until next week. About the only things I can really do this week is sand smooth the print and prime it, as well as install the electronics (and get started on programming.)

Among other compromises to meet deadline, I'm skipping trying to make the Atomic Energy Cell work properly. As of the moment, it will have to be pried out, and the connector to the Lithium Polymer battery fished out of an inconveniently small hole in order to recharge the thing. Well, it beats the Morrow Project CBR -- a failure in the lid latch meant I had to glue the box shut around the batteries!


Also for next week is any plan to run off this thing:

Yes: it's the Acme Disintegrating Pistol. And yes; in the original cartoon Duck Dodgers holds it with one finger inside the trigger guard, as shown here. I am somewhat tempted to just fire up my scroll saw and knock this thing out this week out of 1/4" MDF, but some parts are so thin I am afraid it might actually disintegrate (like its namesake, if not quite as completely) unless I make it from better wood or something like acrylic.

And besides -- as much as I want to turn this thing in to the client on the same due date as the Raygun, the latter must take priority in my efforts. At least once this week is over I will be a little bit freer of immediate financial worries.

If I can somehow stretch one day of gas and two days of food to cover from Wednesday through till Friday....

And soon back to props

Have a few more days of painting (they offered me a full week but I'm not sure how much more I can take right now). We think the majority of the wagons are done now, so the bulk is the remaining drops and the floor.

Floors can take a big chunk of time. Because of course they are a big chunk of material. And few things in theater just get one overall color; it is usually as long (if not significantly longer) coming back over the base coat with various detail/texturing/glazing techniques.

We pretty much finished backdrop and proscenium. Made good progress on the first of three full-stage drops. The first one is a semi-realistic alpine scene and may take a while in detail painting. We'll see how good the lead scenic is at the Bob Ross routine.

Second drop is a roofline which may take a little time to layout. Third is signage -- which means more hand lettering.

I love doing lettering. It is a pain to cut in letters with a brush, and with a lot of paints you have to do multiple coats, but I like working out approximations of various fonts and the typographical details thereof. Thursday was very Zen that way; we free-handed a bunch of signs, lettering without even making guides first.

I also like the mechanical/mathematical aspect of laying out; of figuring out how to map what is on the drawings or the painter's elevations to the real material. Up there on the ladder with lining stick and plumb bob and measuring tape makes me feel a little like Archimedes and his circles (only without the latter's fatal interruption).

What makes this one more challenging than many is that the designer has given us watercolor renderings. Which in itself is not a critical problem (especially if samples or chits are included) but this is also very loose. The Painter's Elevations are not accurately scaled. They aren't even square.

So it took me a while at the first layout. The second one, I'd figured out what to do; create arbitrary reference points on the elevation, drop points to within the nearest three inches -- by counting panels or going from known landmarks so I didn't have to run a tape measure out 20' every time I took a measurement -- and then adjust by eye to correct his perspective and plumb his lines whilst maintaining the overall massing and flow of the rendering.

So, drat... with that many drops to go, plus there's a lot of exposed material which is going to need to go black, I think there might be a full week still to go. Not that the money is a bad thing, mind you!




On the props side, though, I'm waiting on deliveries. Between Grainger and UPS they messed up and I won't get the end mill I ordered until tuesday. If I'm lucky. Shapeways hopes to have the majority of the raygun parts in my hands some time monday. I left the trigger and guard, decorative swooshes, the plate holding the potentiometer and the sounding board/diaphragm for the speaker to be done in metal, but it makes more sense to fit them to the actual print dimensions anyhow.

Was reminded of a delayed CAD project -- the Commando Cody flash suppressor (not to be confused with Commander Cody). Need to borrow a Luger and CAD up the front end before that part will be ready for printing, and I still don't know how to properly lathe it. I need to put that pot back on the stove.

Holocron is basically waiting on me to finish lasing the new panels, assemble and paint, and go into Eagle again to create a new PCB. I've been sort of holding off on assembling the parts I have already because I want to record the entire process to make instructions.

Priority projects after the Raygun are another raygun (rather, the Morrow Project Laser) and a few sections of Imperial Road (Dragon Age). And I have a rather strong desire to knock off an Acme Disintegrating Pistol for the same deadline as the Raygun. I do wish I could put several copies of the raygun into production, but the best viable option at this point is to take a cast or a couple of pulls off the one that's getting printed for me, and quickly make up some (probably non-firing) resin or vacuum-formed ones.

Much as I hate to turn down paying work, some of those deadlines are tight enough I am really hoping we can blow through the rest of the painting and free me up again to work on props. Oh; and I wore my Tomb Raider pendant to a party and got a couple nice comments....including one person who wanted to order one for herself! (and she doesn't even know Tomb Raider...)

Painting

Like several similar tasks, the actual act named in the verb takes only a portion of the time. For painting, there's layout, there's mixing, there's setting up ladders and shifting things around to get access (and laying out drop cloths over the things you don't want paint on), and there's clean-up.

I finished off the week with six hours on my feet with my hands in cold water, cleaning brushes and buckets. I'm still sore this morning.

A significant part of technique -- a big part of what I've been learning on the metal lathe over the past few months -- is achieving two somewhat paradoxical goals in regards to the verb; to increase the relative proportion of time spent in which tool edge is actually touching work piece, and to increase the rate at which material is removed (or in the case of painting, added).

I've been introduced to a new paint technique and I like it a lot. I've done speed-roller painting for floors before, and used rag rollers and die-cut texture rollers, but I've never done an entire set using dry-roller and roller feathering as the primary shading and texture method.

There are downsides. It takes concentration, slip-ups are inevitable, and their correction is difficult. It takes only a fraction of an inch of too much wrist rotation, or an ounce too much pressure, to put a hard roller-edge line in the middle of a softly feathered gradient. And it can't be corrected without going back and extending the entire gradient. Rollers also take a lot longer to clean, and can't be put back into service immediately.

Unlike, say, brushes, which can be put back into service damp, and can in a pinch be wiped off on a scrap or a rag and used on the spot. Which means roller feathering shines when there is a small number of colors, but gets labor intensive when there is a large number of colors happening at the same time. Among other things, the sheer effort in juggling multiple roller pans begins to add up.

The upside is of course speed. Rollers hold a lot more paint than brushes, meaning fewer trips to the paint pot or roller tray, and when you are using an extension pole this can be a significant saving in arm motions. In the right places of the work, you have the full width of the roller available, so it is like feathering with an 8" wide brush.




For smaller sets and detail work I'm not going to give up my 2" sash brush. This is a tool I found after several years of experimentation. It is a generalists' tool; it doesn't carry as much paint as a 4" layout and it isn't as easy to get in tight as a detail brush, and it is too clean to make a good dry brush (the best dry brushes are old, fuzzed-out brushes of just the right level of hairy disorder. Like a clarinet reed, they take a while to be broken in to this perfect state, and you struggle to keep them there as long as possible). But the 2" sash will basically do everything.

This was my previous time-saver; the 2" sash and a rag, meaning I could keep moving without having to change brushes, wash brushes, etc. All I had to do was change the amount of paint captured on it and the way I applied it to the work, shifting without any perceptible pause from laying in a patch of fresh color to feathering out a detail to cutting in hand lettering.

Theater techniques are, unsurprisingly, about speed. They are also about coverage; a typical regional theater seating 400-2000 will have a proscenium width of forty to sixty feet and a height upwards of twenty-five. A full-width drop, then, is easily 1,800 square feet. If it is new material it could take four gallons of paint to just cover it once. Fortunately most theater drops are recycled, but it will still take a couple of gallons to get some color on it.

Also fortunately, theater is about scale; in many cases we are trying to simulate real materials, in most cases we are adding extra texture and shadowing and detail just in the same way and for the same reason the actor accentuates their natural features with make-up (so the people seated sixty feet away can see something), and in many cases we aren't trying for realism anyhow.

So there are innumerable texturing and detail techniques to bring in wood grain, grime, marble, wall paper. And these are almost all techniques that are done with large, sweeping motions with the biggest tool we can use. Probably the subtlest and slowest technique that has common application is spattering, the poor man's airbrush. This is done quite literally by hand (or on a aptly-named Spatter Stick); you carefully get just enough paint on a brush, then you slap it repeatedly to send out a haze of fine droplets of paint.

Needless to say, with two weeks and a crew of three to cover four full-stage drops and three wagons on a 100' foot apron with 20' high walls, we are not doing any spattering.

Paint Your Wagon

Third day down on my new (temporary) job as a scenic painter and I'm exhausted. The last gig I clearly remember working all day in the sun was the load-in of the NFL Experience at Chrissy Field, which is more than a decade ago.

Great hourly pay, though. Best I've had since that emergency lighting load-in at a local high school. I've made rent already. If I stick through until opening I'll have next month's bills paid as well.

I'm rusty as heck and I was never a scenic to begin with. Like a lot of things, it is a skill most techies can claim the rudiments of, and skilled techies can fake if pressed. (The difference being, "most" techies can do basic carpentry and hang lights. "Skilled" techies can also weld, and they can design the lights as well.) There is a whole language of methods and techniques, from gridding (to transfer painter's elevations to the flat or drop), to scumbling and rag-rolling and feather-dusting and wet blending. And then there are all the skills in identifying kinds of paints and mixing colors from scratch and really, really knowing how to take care of brushes, and that's the point at which even this skilled techie has to back off and make sure he had made clear to his prospective employer that he is no scenic.

I've painted sets. I've painted my own sets (functioning as essentially the lead scenic artist). So I can stumble through it. But I'm rusty now and there's a heck of a lot I never knew.



For all of that, and all of the near sun-stroke heat and long hours with cold and swelling hands washing paint rollers, the only real bubble in this week is knowing I've passed the preferred delivery date on the Raygun and I'm going to be pushing hard to hit the final, drop-dead deliverable.

Water Boy

Looks like I have work. The summer stock kind; just signed on to put up a set in at an outdoors theater I've worked at before, sweltering in the heat and mostly (from the sound of it) pushing paint. Hopefully I'm not too rusty there.

It will be just my luck if the sit-down inside assembly job calls now. But I think I can schedule that. The only question is getting enough time to keep the Raygun on schedule. And other things. I finally tracked down the correct diffuse layer files from my new Holocron but I've had the devil of a time trying to get out of the house for most of this week. By the time I have files prepped and am ready to go out and do them, all the machine reservations are snapped up.

Well, you push where it gives, right? The fanfic -- for all that it earns me no money and a dishearteningly small amount of feedback -- started moving briskly. I just this morning put down 1200 words about a book signing in Berlin. Helps that I only had to look up a few things here and there and could basically just write from memory of my own trip there. Unlike the Prague chapters, which were open-book essays involving up to forty browser tabs at a time.

Well. The final Prague chapter was stalled for weeks because I couldn't figure out how to recover from the chapter break. Restarting the inertia with a recap or a long camera shot wasn't working, starting in media res wasn't working, and cutting away to Sam's adventures on an abandoned Goa'uld mining world wasn't right, either.

At last I pretty much stumbled on how to do it. Come in hard with the somatics. Which is generally great advice. A lot of writers forget to put anything other than sight and sound in. Smell, kinesthetics...all of those I think help ground the reader more strongly in the world you are building.

In this case, I started with the cold of the underground room, and pretty much free-associated a synopsis on Lara's early and life-shaping experience in Nepal. With my own spin, which I think explains a number of things and makes her an even more interesting (but conflicted) character.

Oh...I was on a roll, and was able to finish off Sam's adventure in the next 7,000 words. Which was practically straight-to-the-page from my own experience in the military and, I suspect, a wee bit too much recently-read military science fiction. In fact, I'm damned if Sam didn't get just a wee bit too Honor Harrington on me there. I really, really have to back off, take the idiot lectures and info dumps way down, and pay way more attention than I have to capturing the distinct voices of these various characters.

Carrying Buckets

Still no luck in finding work for the month. All I want is a little hourly to put me over the hill. All I've been finding is stuff that's a two-hour drive away...even if my car was up to it (which it isn't, without some likely expensive repairs).

The horrible thing is that sort of worry always makes me slow down myself. I have less appetite, less energy, and thus I move slower on the stuff I could be doing to make a little extra cash. I have people ready to order a Holocron now, but it is taking forever to prep the new graphics, schedule the laser sessions, and assemble a sample of the latest version.

I feel frozen on the Raygun also; main parts are at the printer now, and I can't keep from feeling like I want them in my hands before I solder up the electronics. Or more, schedule the machine time to cut/print the rest of the pieces. Doesn't help that I keep running into those minor niggling expenses...a new end mill here, some spray paint there, all of which I have trouble keeping myself from putting off...because of course I'm worried about not having work!

So I took a break, and finally pushed through the last "Prague" chapter of my Tomb Raider story.

How do you fix fic?

I've complained quite a bit about how Tomb Raider 2013 starts with some interesting ideas but ends up foundering on the crass and rote machinery of contemporary AAA games. I am not sure how you would "fix" the game, given as many of the potential ideas it introduces are of a sort that no-one has yet figured out how to turn into a proper game mechanic. And if you removed the cover-shooter combat fest, the remaining game would be too short.

You could, however, re-tell the story in a form that does allow better use of the archaeological problem-solving, and survivalism that goes beyond simply hitting a few quick-time events (let's put it this way...starting a fire to survive her first night is given in a cutscene. Period. There isn't even a QTE to react to. Your involvement as player in this basic act of survival is quite nill.)

So given that, what would change?