‘Driving’ a Horse

Laura Highcove

So most people in this country can drive, and the vast majority of those people do it with absolutely no idea how the car works. Of course they know that the car starts when you turn the key, that it goes forward when you hit the gas and stops when you hit the break, and it turns side to side with a twist of the steering wheel. If they didn’t, they would hopefully have not passed their driving test, and would not have been issued a license. A car, after all, is a weapon and should not be driven by someone who can’t control it.

A lot of people in this country ‘ride’ horses. Yes, I put that in quotations, because for the most part, I believe that most people don’t actually ride horses. They drive them. For most people, they know that when you kick a horse’s sides, they go forward, when you pull on the reins they stop, and when you pull the reins to either side they turn.

They do all of this without any (or very little) understanding of a horse’s mentality, or inner workings, just like most of them don’t know how their car works. Why is this? A horse is a huge animal, capable of inflicting serious damage or death in the same way a car can, only added to that is the fact that a horse is a living, breathing creature with a mind of his own.

The reason that so many people can get away with knowing so little about the horse’s mind is because of how gracious the horse is. He is, by his very nature, a submissive creature, and when a person simply gets on his back and drives him around, he is perfectly happy to just go.

At Advantage Ranch in Blacksburg, VA, the riding instructors are intentional about teaching riding as opposed to driving. On the first lesson they may use a car analogy in order to present the basics of how to ask a horse to go forward, stop, and turn, but that very quickly (age appropriately) develops into understanding how a horse moves, and supporting him with legs and reins, helping him to bend and supple his body, and have rhythm when he moves forward.

I still remember the first time I learned what real riding was. I had gone to a few shows to help work out the ‘show nerves’. (It was a rather eye opening experience to see my gorgeous, steady-minded mare quite literally freak out when she sensed my show nerves, but that’s a story for another time.) I was doing a circle. Now I’ve done circles before, but this time I was focused on actually making a circle that was even on all sides of a cone.

The this requires supporting the outside of the horse (the side on the outside of the circle) with both legs and reins to keep him from falling, which makes the circle bigger. As well as supporting the inside of the horse with legs and reins to keep him from falling in and thus making the circle smaller. All while continuing to keep the proper bend in the horse. The trick is basically to feel when the horse is falling one way or the other (which is basically every step) and to help support them. For the longest time I had thought that a horse just went and it was really on that day that I feel I went from a driver to a rider when I finally understood just how much support and thus work it took to actually ride a horse.

Now I’ve learned a lot since the above, and now realize what more there is to making a circle. If finding out how to really ride a horse sounds interesting to you, then look us up at advantageranch.com.

The Perfect Storm

Laura Highcove

So on Friday night, we had some sort of rare type of storm. Around 8 pm or so we lost power. We decided we might as well go to the grocery store since we didn’t have electricity to power much of anything else. We went outside and above the house I could see this huge black thunderhead. By the time we found the car keys in the dark (I’d left them in my jeans and then washed them) the winds had picked up.

The storm caused winds up to 75 mph. But apparently the type of winds and their direction meant we didn’t get any more than a light smattering of rain. And I hear tale of multi-colored lightning that I unfortunately missed.
The next morning I drove to the barn and I saw the destruction everywhere. The roads were coated with leaves and little branches, while in many places larger branches and even trees were down. Many were alongside the road where they had been pulled out of the way of traffic. About halfway down Mt. Tabor, the road I use to get to the barn, a tree (or most of it anyway) had gone down taking a power line with it, and thus the road had to be closed. I had to detour back and around 460 to get to the barn.

The days have been up to 100 degrees, which is part of the reason the conditions for the storm were possible, but it’s also a very unfortunate time to not have power. We were able to charge our devices at the store and there looked up that 50% of our county has no power, that the destruction extends through West Virginia and up past DC into Maryland, and that some sort of damage has been done to the Appalachian Power stations themselves and they estimate it could take up to a week to get power back.

Yeah; not kidding. And I bought ice cream Friday night thinking the power couldn’t be off for that long.

While it is unfortunate that we don’t have power, or air conditioning at home (it’s currently 3am and I am sitting on my porch without pants on, typing this because it’s too hot to sleep) I am grateful that no one I know was hurt. That houses are intact. None of the horses were hurt out in the fields. That we have a place we can go to get power. That our car still has air conditioning. That I have things to entertain me that don’t involve being on the computer. And that because I got up in the middle of the night and went outside I was able to see a beautiful sight of lightning bugs sparkling in a dazzling display against the blackness of the trees behind our house.

How I Paint – Part 1

Laura Highcove

Okay, so I showed some people at the store the gryffin from the previous post, and I got quite a lot of amazed reactions, much to my surprise. We are our own toughest critics after all. I know I am good at painting, but I don’t think I’m that amazing. Other people tend to disagree, so I would like to share all of the very simple, but extremely effective techniques I use in order to get the results I do.

Step One: Have your materials. Obviously, you can’t paint a miniature without a few key elements. The paint, a (set of) paint brushes, and the mini…

I use games workshop paints because those are the most easily available. I haven’t used any of the new ones yet, but I hear good things. The consistency of the paint is rather important for a good look. If it’s too thick it clumps and leaves paint lines. Some of my paints are rather poor right now. I do what I can, thinning them with clear Windex (tip credited to Blake).

I get a set of 3 detail brushes from a local hobby shop. Costs $3 and when the tip goes, I use that paintbrush for less important things like washes. If you don’t have a good tip on your paintbrush, then you might as well just flick the paint on there at random.

The mini I’m using for this “tutorial” of sorts is my set of Lotheran Sea Guard from the High Elf Army of Warhammer Fantasy fame.

Step Two: Get the “How to Paint Citadel Miniatures” book from Games Workshop (or have Blake order it) and read it. No seriously. If you really want nicely painted miniatures, looking at well painted miniatures (and the tutorials of those painting techniques) is essential. I mean you’re here reading this right? I’m not even that good. In addition I have White Dwarf Magazines (with High Elf and Empire articles) along with their Warhammer rules books. I look at them constantly.

Step Three: Cleaning and priming. Ah, so now we’re finally to the actual mini. Never underestimate the value of cleaning and green stuffing your mini. What use is a beautiful paint job if there are mold lines? In addition, what’s the use of a beautiful paint job if the paint chips off. I prime with black. I just like it better than white, yes, even with all those white high elf robes.

Step Four: The crappy paint step. I call it this because I tend to think my mini looks like crap during this phase. This is when I take the colors I have chosen and put on the foundation colors.

The gray is my most used because of all the white high elf robes. Basically I get all the colors down, then clean up the edges. It looks flat and horribly boring. However, it lets you make sure you have the colors in the places you want before you do anything fancy. This is especially important when painting a whole squad as opposed to a single mini. The little details are different on each mini, and you may find yourself changing things.

When in doubt, don’t feel guilty at all about looking up that particular mini and getting ideas. I had the hardest time with the gloves and shoes on these guys, wanting to paint them a metallic and not liking how much metal that was until I saw the ones in the book had brown gloves and shoes. It hadn’t even occurred to me before that. Developing an eye for colors is not really something that can be taught, per say. It’s the whole reason for Step Two. You just have to have the experience, and that comes with seeing what other people, who have put far more time into it than you, do.

Also, note that you want these first layers to be the darkest version of whatever color you want when it comes out at the end. I build up my color from darkest to lightest. You don’t even want to know how long it took me to figure out that technique…

Gryffin Detail

Laura Highcove

So I continue to be needlessly intimiatated by the tedious detail required for the feathers on my gryffin model. So two weeks ago I just sat down and did the outline for all of the remaining feathers on one wing. I didn’t like it at the time, but now after coming back to it, I feel a lot better about how it looks. So at some point I’m sure I will convince myself to do the other wing…

Lost Childhood

Laura Highcove

So I lived in Richmond, VA for most of my formative years, though I actually lived south of Richmond in Chesterfield County. Chesterfield County had a working farm called the Chesterfield Berry Farm, and most every year my mom would take me and my brother and sister to go pick strawberries on said farm.

Even when I moved away to Blacksburg, many years I went back around Mother’s Day to spend time with family and to go to this berry farm. I will share some of the wonderful pictures of the Berry Farm that I have.

While the picture says 2005, this is pretty typical of each year, notice the beautiful rows of strawberry plants, all big and healthy. Nice rows lined with straw. Huge strawberries just waiting to be picked, and plenty of them to fill our containers.

But this year when we went, apparently the farm had been passed on to the two sons and…well they don’t seem to have the same care as their parents.

I didn’t take more pictures because I was rather disgusted with the whole thing. Unlike past years, the wagon dropped us off, there was no one to direct which rows to go pick in to spread out the pickers, so everyone was just in the same area that had probably been picked over in past days as well. Weeds were abundant and huge, the plants themselves seemed to be struggling to even grow. The straw was old and rotting. There were beetles in almost all of the strawberries that had managed to ripen. And strawberries that hadn’t been good enough had been left to rot on the plants.

It did make me realize that there was probably a lot of work gone into the fields in past years to make them as beautiful as they were, but I can’t believe that the owners thought it was okay to send customers out into fields that they obviously didn’t care about. I would have much rather be told they were not opening fields for pickers this year than to have seen the fields in that state.

Gryffin Update

Laura Highcove

So I have been doing a lot of work on the warhammer gryffin. Besides the modeling work to put it together, and turn Karl Franz into a high elf with a high elf spear, and Will shaving off the “karl Franz” from the breast plate piece I wanted to use, there was some actual painting.

First thing I did was spray paint it black. I prefer black. Dunno why. White spray paint and I don’t really get along. Then I painted the top of the wings the foundation blue, and the bottom of the wings foundation light gray. (Yeah, I could look up their actual names, but blech.)

And then the blue got a blue wash, and the gray got a black wash. Crazy innovative rite?

Then I put white on the underside of the wings, leaving the dark recesses, but my white and I have never really gotten along (it’s something about that color, I swear) so a lot of places ended up grayer than I wanted. It was horrible and tedious. (The picture below only the chest has the white done, the wings are still only gray with a black wash.)

Then I used pictures of red-tailed hawks as inspiration, and painted on scorched brown (I use that brown a lot, so I remember it’s name!) patterns to the underside of the wings. Also stupid tedious.

But then! After I had painted on the brown, I didn’t like the look of the white, since it was so uneven and streaky looking, so I threw another black wash over the underside of the winds. For a bit I panicked, thinking I had ruined everything, but I went back and outlined the feathers in white, and started making white detail pulled from the outside of the feather toward the inside in uneven strokes, and it’s actually starting to look really good. Just more tedium. So below you can see the brown patterning, and on the right wing (your left) the first five primaries have the new white detail.

Update

Laura Highcove

I got away from posting everyday, which I really want to do. But I think I just have to do it in the evening instead of the morning, since I have more time in the evening. Anyway, I still haven’t missed any days of running which is pretty awesome. Nick is getting taller, but is still gangly. I’ve started framing Tori again. And I’m setting aside time each evening to work on my stories. All in all, pretty cool.

Tamineil

Laura Highcove

Tami is a new character that is actually my 5th Edition character, taken from one of my stories. She is the fighter class. She uses a bow and two daggers that are sheathed in the small of her back. This mini doesn’t really have the daggers, but it does at least have one blade, and it’s in the correct position, so it works for me.

The color of the fabric is actually a mix of hawk turquoise and the different shades of green. I wanted a green-teal color and I think it really came out great. Man did I get lucky with those eyes.