#ropecon

Mä ja mun kollektiivi Kollektiivi Puolikas ollaan tulossa Ropeconiin 26.7. myymään kamaa! Sikäli mikäli Jumalanpelko kirja on sillon jo valmiina nii sitä tulee sinne myyntiin (ja Juma merchiä ainakin) ja muuta printtiä yms multa! Muilta tulee myös sarjakuvakirjaa, koruja ja tarroja yms!

Previously I repainted the last model before the long hiatus. This time we go all the way back to the beginning. These are the first models I ever painted.

I would have painted these anyway because of the significance of the year, but when I saw that the Cold North Open (formerly Ropecon miniature painting contest) registration form had a non-competition category I knew I needed to show this there. I wrote a page about the context and crammed in the "new worlds" theme to the title to help it fit in.[1]

Turns out the category wasn't supposed to be there (they're using a tool originally made for the scale modelling community), but I was absolutely not putting it in competition, as it's not what I made it for. Competition entries are supposed to be kind of standalone (certainly no full-page blurbs with personal details!).

One of the organizers and I agreed to put it next to the dioramas but that it wouldn't be registered for competition. I guess it's kind of a diorama in the museum display[2] sense, where the description is a necessary part of the thing and the tray is simple and mainly just a container to stand the figures up in.

(Transcription of the text on the description page is at the end of the post, below the cut.)

So when I went in Sunday morning wondering if I'd be pleasantly surprised by a commendation for one of my actual entries (lol no ofc not) I was surprised and confused instead to see the card on this.

The awards presentation didn't provide answers either as my name wasn't called.[3] One of the other competitors told me that it wouldn't have been the only omission, so I chased down the judges to check. In their hurry to get through everything over the night (they were up until 4AM judging and preparing the results), it seemed that they had forgotten to skip over my display. I mean I won't decline the honor, but I wanted to make sure that it's included on the results list because it doesn't feel legit if it's not on record.

The new versions are arguably not painted much better (and I spent longer on the W'adhrun in my previous post), so it certainly wasn't the painting that they liked??

After I posted this on my Insta the other day the organizer/judge whom I'd spoken to earlier about the display left a note to say that actually, they had wanted to recognize it despite being unregistered for competition. He was touched by the story because he was a teacher providing a similar experience for his students as Mr Mac did for me. Because the piece wasn't registered it consequently wasn't in the list of names that they copy-pasted to the awards Powerpoint.

But like, that's what I'm reaching for with my art. I think everybody wants to tell the stories about what makes them who they are, especially those who've had difficulty being taken seriously and/or finding an audience (or "appropriate" venue). Hearts are a lot harder to win over than heads, but heart is kind of really all I have. In performing arts, underdeveloped skill can distract from delivering the message, but visual arts I think is more open to seeing it as a stylistic choice.

P.S. I was in Jyväskylä last week and both the Jyväskylä and Joensuu Fantasiapelit shops (at least those two, don't remember about the one in Tampere) have display cases filled with painted miniatures in them. In Joensuu there were some painted warbands for sale in there too. So why the heck doesn't the Helsinki store actually use theirs? (I'd emailed about showing off some things there but they never responded.)

Project notes:

The models are Ral Partha's AD&D Battlesystem Cormyr Lords & War Wizards. I waited a while to find an affordable set that wasn't sealed or converted. Still pricey though, mostly because of importing them from the US.

The vivid green is different from that on the dwarf I previously repainted, because at this time I was using my teacher's '90s Citadel paints. Again I couldn't find a confident match in regular acrylics. I even bought Stahly's comprehensive paint swatches to look this up. Here I used Citadel's Warp Lightning contrast paint over Army Painter Greenskin. I don't know if the AP Fanatics Greenskin is the same shade. The AP Orc Skin Speedpaint would have worked but I only have the 1.0 Speedpaint with the horrible reactivation and I'd had to strip the one model once already because of that.

Nobody knows why I went with 15mm for my first miniatures. They're really hard to photograph.

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[1] As hinted in the text, there's also a whole lot of context for how the characters relate to the story I wrote and what the "for various reasons" refers to, but you don't want to get TOO personal.

[2] That's not what folks mean by "display" painting lol.

[3] Unsurprisingly the same handful of people swept the golds and big awards. And I'm thinking, to what extent are THEY here to compete when they're already on top and there are bigger and more prestigious competitions out there?[4] Would having a non-competition category benefit them too? Like, so they can step aside for new talent. The organizer I talked to mentioned not only issues of space but also that non-competition display categories are kind of controversial in international events because people try to use it as advertising space for their commission painting services. Which I guess is kind of specific to miniatures painting and not really a thing in scale modelling more generally.

[4] When I did piano seriously, me and one other girl in my age group would basically get 1st place in any category we competed in at the local music festival. Or 1st and 2nd if we were both there. It kinda got pretty boring. But I guess other participants got something out of hearing us too because the adjudicators would give some oral remarks about each performance before handing out the prizes. (We also all got a page of written individual feedback.) The other girl eventually also did national competitions and I don't remember why my teacher didn't steer me in that direction as well. Might have been he felt it would be too much pressure (he would have been correct).

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Ropecon day 2 look! My aim was to make a cosplay where you could describe the gender only as Fabulous.

Much fun was had, but it was ridiculously hot summer weather, so I wasn't able to wear that for too many hours without being afraid of fainting. So I changed to plain top and pants after a while.

rest in con floor little white tiger. 2023-2025, presumably dead, missing at a con i'm at.