Or possibly not…

years ago I was at a mates house and his dad loaned me his copy of the hobbit…yeah, that was nice of him, I hear you cry… interestingly it was a first edition of the hobbit and it is different to the later editions…

The one that always stuck out to me was that Gollum offers the ring to Bilbo if he wins the riddle game, which is sacrosanct to Gollum. He couldn’t find his ring and was extremely apologetic to Bilbo, Bilbo who had already found it and said nowt about it!”I don’t know how many times Gollum begged Bilbo’s pardon. He kept on saying: ‘We are ssory; we didn’t mean to cheat, we meant to give it our only pressent, if it won the competition.”

Oh and there was definitely no ‘we hates him forever!’

Funnily enough, not that I can remember, Tolkien failed to describe Gollum, and as such various illustrations appeared… now anyone who has seen the Peter Jackson films will forevermore see Gollum looking like this…

However Tove Jansson, a Swedish illustrator ( of ‘The Moomins’ fame) drew him like this…

So as you can see, there is a bit of a height difference… this discrepancy led Tolkien to do a bit of an edit in relation to the size of Gollum.

First Edition…”Deep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum. I don’t know where he came from, nor who or what he was. He was Gollum — as dark as darkness, except for two big round pale eyes.”

Later editions…“Deep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum, a small slimy creature. I don’t know where he came from, nor who or what he was. He was Gollum—as dark as darkness, except for two big round pale eyes in his thin face.”

You probably already knew all of this, but it might be interesting if you didn’t… why bring this up now…well I heard on the radio yesterday that a charity shop had been given a first edition and the owner nearly binned it ad they thought it wouldn’t sell.

So I let the dogs out for their last pee and realised that one again we have hit midnight with a light Sky!

Time for bed methinks!

Be warned, this is probably going to be a rambling, stream of consciousness post. Plus I started writing it a couple of weeks ago now and have edited loads. Hopefully it still makes sense.

So, as you probably know, I print and paint as well as paint purchased miniatures and terrain. As part of this I watch many, many YouTube channels. Quite a lot of them tell me to do x or y to improve my painting. Some go as far as to tell me to try something new.

The question I want to ask is ‘why’?

Now before I start, this is a personal question and I am not telling anyone what to do/not do.

I have been painting miniatures for about 35 years. Over time have I improved… yes of course I have. Over those years have I tried new things, again yes.

I am now in a happy little groove, some may see it as a rut. I love my Contrast paints and pretty much use them all the time. So much so I have ordered a set of the Vallejo xpress range. So in reality I am trying something new 😉

Now what about this question. I recently watched Dave on MS Paints asking a question about why miniatures look terrible..

He made an interesting observation, if your miniature does not look like how you envisaged it from either the box art or your favourite YouTube influencer then you have a 180 degree shift in feeling from good… to crap in a heartbeat. I actually watched a video that auto loaded the other day it was a guy painting yellow and as we all know, yellow is a sod of a colour to paint. Anyway he did a close up and there was paint (shall we say) where it shouldn’t have been and it actually made me happy. It was almost like … Yey someone like me. I didn’t read the comments as I was actually worried the keyboard warriors would be in pointing it out.

I am of the opinion that good enough is good enough for what I want. If I entered competitions then I may feel different. I am an amateur, my painting style is that of an amateur and I will probably happily carry on in this vein until I find a different way to do things.

Just to show that I have made improvements over time, both of these were painted quickly for a game.

I suppose what I am trying to say is that to my knowledge I am not deliberately going out of my way to improve. It is happening in a more organic way. Funnily enough I have almost stopped watching painting videos on YouTube.

I am actually in awe of the skill of some people. They take the same amount of time to paint an arm as I take to paint a squad (or possibly an army). The final miniature is exquisite whereas mine are definitely at the other end of the scale… I go for the one metre rule… or maybe ten metres with 28mm.

So if you have got to the end of this, you deserve a medal.

Well some of you may remember that a while a while ago I posted that I was in chronic pain. The Doctor was investigating and narrowed it down to Poly myalgia or fibro myalgia. Well after draining about an arm full of blood over the last six weeks he has decided on the former, which thankfully is treatable.

So I am now on about an 18 month to two year course of steroids. I started on Wednesday and by Friday the pain had pretty much gone. Because I am a pillock I did too much yesterday so today I am taking it easy 😉

So, because I am going to be on steroids long term then I am going to also have to go on other medication to counteract some of the side effects.

So there you go folks, a huge thank you to the people who got in touch it really did help me realise that that there was a light at the end of the tunnel.

Well if you remember I was commenting on the fact that we had written to a load of companies to ask if they would be willing to support us. Of the nine letters sent, one, with sadness, said they couldn’t help. Which is absolutely fine, I am just pleased they replied.

However, the big news is… I wrote to Games Workshop and lo and behold they replied within the day. To cut a long story short they are sending me a school starter pack.

So a big shout out to them. The caveat is that it is their way to hook kids in. I recognise that and accept it. But at least they are supporting us.

This is going to be a bit of a rambling stream of consciousness kind of a post.

As you know, if you follow my blog, that I paint little toy men and goblins (among others). If you just popped by, then hello and thank you.

So this said hobby of mine can get a little expensive, add in a printer and after the initial outlay then it can become a bit cheaper. Paints, flock glue etc bumps the price a bit too.

I opened my Geek club in school where the kids paint models that I print for them. I support them by using the tools and resin. There are six of them and each one of them wrote to a company to see if they would help us out in any small way they could. Would you like to guess how many bothered to reply?

Zero,

We only chose companies that I have spent hundreds of pounds with. Not one even bothered to reply.

Now, I know that my little school with its little website isn’t going to make any companies their millions, but it is half a dozen 10 year olds who are getting into the hobby . One is moving onto pastures new and bless her on Friday she was making a list of the companies I got my stuff from.

I have written to the company we get our paints from. I did send a bit of a begging letter to see if they could send us some paint so we can get her a good start keeping up her hobby that she loves. My little club has spent nearly £200 getting paints etc. from them. Sadly I am not holding my breath.

Every other YouTube channel I watch has these companies firing out free stuff to people. One guy I watched was up to his third 3D printer.

Now this may seem that it is sour grapes and to some extent it is, not for me, but for a little group if six kids who wrote letters instead of painting miniatures. I did advise them that people might not be able to help, but to not answer in my books is pretty shitty.

Here endeth the rambling B.S. for today

Well if you remember I wrote a couple of days ago that I am in constant aches. Removing the old washing machine from the house and putting a new one in certainly didn’t help with this. We checked the weight on the new one… 75kg.

The old one went out the front door (which because I am in a croft house is narrow), the new one wouldn’t come in the same way so we had to take it right the way through the conservatory in one direction and right the way back through the house in another.

I now cannot move and luckily Esther and Sam are doing the horse as I am stuck in the car groaning.

Hopefully it will have eased off by tomorrow.

This evening I was still aching. Waiting on the results of another blood test. Worst case scenario is that I have fibromyalgia. Which is a pain, no pun intended .

This has been grumbling on like this for eighteen months to two years. Last time I went to the doctors I was told it was just my age. At least this one actually listened and came up with a couple of possible causes. One being poly myalgic rheumatism and the other was mentioned above.

So the aches and pains continue for a while.