My Painting Journey

I want to preface this by saying, simply, that we all come to our painting hobby from different points, for different reasons and motivations, and with different experiences.

I started painting Tabletop Role Playing Game (TTRPG) miniatures in my early 20's ... way back in the early 1980's (I know, right?). I was fascinated by the miniatures and I played Dungeons and Dragons. Some of my earliest models were Ral Partha and Grenadier fantasy miniatures.

Back then, I didn't know that I was colour-blind, so there were some amusing scenarios where I proudly presented my latest creation to my gaming friends and I would be asked "Why the hell is it all brown?". It wasn't until I had my colour vision tested that I understood the reason that my colour choices were ... suspect.

To address my colour vision challenges, I stopped choosing my paints based on what colour I saw, but instead by the name of the colour. I was fine with tone and contrast ... just don't ask me to colour match, that ain't going to happen.

When I got into Warhammer 40k and Warhammer Fantasy, I had so many more miniatures to paint! Painting, for me, was much more interesting than playing the games. I had amassed a couple of armies (Space Marines and a large undead army) before I gave up playing table top war games ... but I persisted with buying mini's and painting them, for a time. My main gaming interest was now fantasy role playing games, so my focus returned to miniatures relating to that.

My painting hobby dried up in the early 2000's as my free time started to become more devoted to work and family. I could no longer justify the time or resources committed to gaming as I was commuting interstate every week for work. My job meant that I only had time on the weekends, and some of that was being taken up by flying away from home every Sunday night and flying back home on Friday night. During the week, I had a small flat and very little time ... so I started playing with electronics instead (also not a good choice for the colour vision impaired!). Oh ... and we live on a 5 acre property with sheep and chickens, so looking after them has taken up a lot of time (mostly around lambing season).

Over the intervening 20 something years, I managed to paint a few models ... but not many. I returned to painting as a hobby when I bought a 3D STL printer in the mid 20's and discovered, to my disappointment, that my vision had degraded to the point that I now need glasses and magnification.

I am now looking at ways that I can combine my professional skills and knowledge to give me the tools that I need to combat my painting challenges.

As I can't rely on my colour vision to choose paint colours, there is very little point in arranging my paint collection in a way that lets me see the colour of paint in the bottle. Little tricks that others can use, like painting the bottle cap or laying the bottles down so that you can see the bottom of the bottle don't work for me. Instead, I keep my paint collection in paint caddy's with a label on the front of the box showing the paint names and position. Each paint caddy has space for 49 paint dropper bottles (7 x 7). I choose the paint according to the label.

This also lead to writing the Paint Manager application to list ALL of the paint colours and allows me to match the paint colour to a colour in a reference image. Another feature of the Paint Manager application that helps me is the Paint Recipe feature. This allows me to write a list of painting steps (along with the paint colour, and a description of the step) so that I can reproduce a painting scheme or follow a painting technique without having to worry about the colours (as much).

I went through a bunch of colour charts from a couple of hobby paint manufacturers and recorded the paints along with their Red-Green-Blue (RGB) values using various Windows painting programs and wrote those out to a database. I wrote a couple of functions in C# to compare the colour values so that I could find similarities between each of the colours in my database. I found that this approach worked Okay, but sorting colours using three values like that has it's limitations. I then went about converting the RGB values into Hue, Saturation and Luminosity (HSL) values. This makes it easier to do things like converting a colour to an "Average Saturation" version and also sorting the colours by Hue, Saturation and then Luminosity. That method gave much better results ... so I now have both methods covered.

I expect that there are other hobby painters out there that face similar challenges in their hobby practice, and that lead me to make the Paint Manager application available for sale on my website (here). My hope is that I can build a community of hobby painters who will create and share their painting recipes for others to follow.

I want to paint more, but I still have a lot of other time pressures. I now use my painting hobby as a way to relax and unwind, so that works for me.