Manda’s (Amachan) Hobby with Disabilities.

I have lost a lot of functionality in my right hand. I have tremors in my hand that when bad will cause me to spill my drinks in a glass or mug when I hold it. And when it is calmer, my hand is so stiff that I struggle doing anything precise with it. Further more, the tremors are completely messing up my right arm and shoulders with muscle tensions in combination with my fibromyalgia. This isn’t everything, my eye hand coordination has gotten worse as well and some other things like my balance which doesn’t really effect my painting. My Doctor also found it to be very similar to Parkinson’s Disease. At first we suspected some medication to be the cause, but after reducing them for a while there was no difference, so now I am awaiting an appointment with a specialist.

Since I have always felt that I can do a lot with my left as well as with my right hand, just that I was taught everything with right and thus it is more practised. Because of this I have decided to want to learn how to paint with my left hand. It is not as simple as that though, I will also struggle holding miniatures with my right hand, so I am going to need some additional tools to help me. For this I have ordered a model holder that will firmly stand on my table to hold the miniatures. More on this when it comes in. I also ordered a paint shaker to make things easier.

I will be painting a one armed Ork from 40k. It is an old model and I thought it fitting to paint him for this project. His name is Stumpy and there is some background to him as well.

When I was first learning 40k with a friend I had these old Orks painted from when I was a kid. They were painted quite terribly. But when we were learning 40k, his arm kept falling off, it was a metal arm holding a stick grenade. This is how he got the nickname stumpy. I was in the process of repainting him back then and then we lost him, couldn’t find him for years. So it kind of became the legend of Stumpy. I earlier this year found him again hiding in an old shoe of mine. So at that moment I decided I want to give him a proper paint job and a proper stump where is arm used to be.

So this project will go over the process of getting Stumpy looking proper and to see how my disabilities are going to effect my hobby going forward.

Here is Stumpy, all stripped of any existing paint for as far as I am currently able to.

Overall the process of stripping Stumpy went okay. For those not sure how I strip miniatures, here is a link to my post on my Eastern Front project about it:

I still have some old Ork bits laying around so I got an arm out and carved it into a stump, I also filled in some gaps and stuck him on a base. Overall it went okay, not as easy as before, but it got together slowly.

I used my airbrush to put a coat of primer on Stumpy today. Airbrushing still goes well for basecoats and I know I can use my airbrush with my left hand as I have done that many times before for more precise work, I wasn’t expecting this to be an issue. Now it is just waiting for my new tools to come in so I can start painting again.

I got my tools in from Greenstuff World, here is a bit of a first impressions on them.

Universal Work Holder

This is looking really sturdy, it is just going to be bit of fiddling out how I can mount my miniatures to it in a sturdy way, but apart from that it is feeling really sturdy and good.

Paintlauncher….. I mean Shaker.

Overall it does work well, once I figured out how to use it. So let’s see how it works.
So first off the way it shows you how to do it…..

I found the paint pot and I then mounted it in this way, it works but I can hardly get the pot back out of the launcher….. I mean shaker.

And then I tried the small size holder as the instruction clearly don’t say and it works well.

Hopefully in the next couple of days I can try and see if I can paint using my left hand and my eye-hand coordination isn’t going to be as shit as it feels at times.

So, this about a bit over an hour’s worth of work painting with my left hand for the first time. It went okay overall and I think with loads of practice I could possibly do this, but it is eating energy like a banana out of hell. I went for a classic Duke Nukem scheme for the clothing of Stumpy.

While everyone is off gallivanting on their Christmas shenanigans, I have myself a couple of quiet days where I have to do absolutely nothing. Thus, I practised a bit more painting with my left hand on Stumpy and even did some free-hand triangles on the grenades. I got most of the base coats done now, I did however notice a couple of things that I still do want to try and correct and then I am going on to the shading and weathering of Stumpy.

Just a quick and small update on Stumpy, I fixed most of the stuff I wanted to fix and covered him with a matte varnish with my airbrush, which is still wet in the picture, to protect the acrylics from all the stuff I am going to throw on it later. Not technically necessary if the acrylics are left to cure properly for some time, but it also gets rid of any of the shininess of some of the acrylic paints.

One thing I really started to notice is that at times you can’t easily reach something with your brush and the angles you have to approach things as are completely opposite from what I am used to. This is the biggest problem I have found so far to painting with my left compared to my right. Another issue is, that when I used to come across this issue when I was painting with my right I could just for that little bit paint it with left in order to reach that. I can’t really use my right hand to paint any more, not even small bits it is just too unstable. I am finding my way around it and mostly this just requires more practice to overcome.

I didn’t really think about the base and what I was going to do with it, so I just painted it a sandy colour and then completely forgot about it…. Anyway, I now painted it brown and added a crackle paint on the top, this will do fine when Stumpy is all weathered and shaded.

Stumpy has got all of his weathering and shading done, now it just needs to dry. So in a couple of days there will be the final photo’s of Stumpy unless I find something that still needs doing. There are little bits that I would like to fix still, but I just can’t with where I am at with my painting right now. Overall, I really like how he has turned out and how things went.

Here is Stumpy, my first miniature painted with my left (non-dominant) hand because of the disabilities I currently have. I am overall happy with the result, although I would like to perfect a couple of things, but let’s not let perfection be the enemy of good here.

Here is Stumpy’s little party piece when exposed to UV light.

While I have shown and proven that I can paint and do hobby with my left hand, within this project I am going to do a couple more models, just to see if there is anything else I run into. So stay tuned for a handful more models being painted over the coming month or so.

It’s time for the next chapter in me trying to do my hobby with my recent disabilities and this time it is the best superhero ever. So let’s get dangerous with Darkwing Duck! Did I mention he is also a duck ?. One thing I really noticed I am struggling with is smooth coats of paint on larger surfaces with my left hand and that really shows here, but this is great practice in improving that.

So here is another update on the duck with the darkest of wings and a bit of an health update. I have done some shading on Darkwing Duck and I am happy with certain parts less happy with others, I’ll have to see how I feel about him later. And for my health, my right hand has become calmer, still nowhere near as steady or precise as it used to be, but calmer. On top of that I have started to lose feeling in my left hand. So I have done all this work with my right as I don’t need a steady hand for the kind of shading that I do, but I am not sure how my hobby is looking going forward, I’ll keep trying though and see where I’ll end up. Still awaiting more tests and such to figure out what the heck is wrong with me.

I have also decided that I am just going to keep this project going until I know what it is that I have, just painting random miniatures in whatever way I can. Luckily I have a large pile of random miniatures I can just paint up for this.

As the some of the oils on Darkwing Duck still aren’t dry yet, I applied it a little bit too thick in certain areas, completely my fault, I started working on the next model. This is Commissar Yarrick, one of the victims of GW’s purges. He seriously doesn’t have any rules any more, not even legends. I painted this all with my left (non-dominant) hand again as I can do detail a lot better with that at this moment, slowly getting better at it.

Some more work on Commissar Yarrick done. I noticed that near the end of my painting session subconsciously started painting with my right hand, so I thought let’s see how well that goes and it went okay for a short time, but having to keep my hand this steady really hurts my entire right arm and shoulder. Maybe in time I will be able to paint normally with my right hand again. My main focus right now is still on painting with left though, but trying little bits every now and then with my right might not be a bad idea.

This is Darkwing Duck finished. I am just leaving it here, I am not really happy with the paint job and I honestly did not really enjoy painting this model as it was all very flat with a lack of detail. On the plus side, I learned a lot about shading and highlighting using oil paints and I will definitely take those steps I learned moving forward.

More work done on Yarrick and lesson learned, even though it is primed and received a base coat of acrylic paint before I put on the crackle paint, the crackle paint still pulls the strukture paste up…

I think he’s ready for shading and weathering. I did paint with my right hand today and it went okay for a bit. At least I got a lot of tiny detail bits done that I am just not yet able to do with my left hand.

I did a little bit more work on Yarrick and I am fairly confident this will be the last work in progress pictures from him.

So on to the next model. This model is going to be a bit of a proof of concept, but should still end up being a good looking model in the end.
First up, I used a gloss black lacquer primer and put on like 3 or 4 layers. Before it dried I used a toothpick to just scratch and damage the paint and then followed up with one final layer of primer and let that all cure fully.

And then it was about getting the chrome right. I was really struggling getting the chrome right, it turns out the chrome is on perfectly it is the light that messes it up. So I put the model in just the normal ambient light and it looks absolutely fantastic. The camera does not do it justice though.