Have Hobby Will Travel (2023)

Believe it or not, you paint better if you can see! (You came here for the killer insights right?!)

Seeing means light and magnification.

You can see that I’ve attached a magnifier light to my hobby desk and I’ve really come to rely on it.  If the painting looks neat under a bit of magnification then it’ll certainly look neat on the tabletop, and also has half a chance of looking neat when photographed (we’ve all experienced seeing the mistakes on a photographed model that we thought was finished, right?!).  A bit of magnification sorts that.

Another relic from before the little home painting station was the Fancii head magnifier.  You can run it with the ear pieces or with the head strap.

There are many other makes out there, many of which probably better than this one but all very similar.  But these are what I have.  These have come with me on previous trips.  The main issue I have with them is that they are quite heavy, largely due to the 3xAAA batteries that power the light.  Whether using the ear pieces or the strap, most of the weight sits on the nose and they get really uncomfortable really quickly.  I used to wedge some foam between them and my nose, it kind of did the job but it wasn’t ideal and needed continual fidgeting.

But then I became aware of a piece of genius via our very own CoG Grand Master Boris!  He posted this on his Facebook:

Oh you beautiful hunk of owl-bear riding Connery successor you!  After my polite enquiry he revealed that he’d used a hot glue gun to attach the lenses to the brim of the cap.  Now, I don’t have a hot glue gun but I have super glue.  I also have a cap from the Cult of Games 40k Weekend whose brim is curved at exactly the right shape to take my Fancii lenses.

The dry fit looked ok, so it was out with the screwdriver to remove the arm hinges and the pain-inducing nose piece.  Then a ton of superglue to fix it into place!