[SGII] The Eyes Have It.

After catching up with this weekend's messages, I'm left with the lyrics
of Billy Joel's "Angry Young Man"  (And there's always a place for the
angry 
young man/ With his fist in the air and his head in the sand...) ringing
in my ears.  That's all well and good -- it managed to drive the Muppet
Movie 
soundtrack out of my brain, where it's been tying up processing power
for well over a week now -- but I'd rather bring my mind back around to
something 
even less relevant to my daily life...like painting miniatures.

Thus, a survey of sorts: You Stargrunt players, how many of you bother
painting the eyes on your miniatures?  I'm speaking mainly to the
25mm/28mm 
folks here, although any of you crazed 15mm enthusiasts are free to
speak up here as well.

(Give a moment or two to the angry young man/ With his foot in his mouth
and his heart in his hand....)

Any of you who paint eyes on your 6mm infantry, on the other hand, are
cordially invited to keep this fact to yourselves, lest you infect the
rest of us with 
your madness.

Me, I paint the eyes.  And I'm starting to wonder if it's really worth
the trouble.  You see, I follow a few simple steps when painting eyes:

 1) Paint the eye socket a very dark shade of the skin color -- usually
medium brown for caucasian figures.

 2) Paint the eyeballs a light gray -- white is too bright.

 3) Dot the first eyeball with a point of black, resulting in a perfect
eye, the Platonic Ideal of a 25mm miniature eye, an eye so perfect as to
make 
Leonardo himself weep with envy.

 4) Paint the other pupil.

 5) Look at the miniature, and consider it in the light of years of
painting experience.

 6) Admit to myself that the figure now looks like Bill the Cat.

 7) Curse.

 8) Repaint the second eye.

 9) Return to step 4, and repeat for about half an hour.

 10) Decide that, at last, the second eye is good enough.

 11) Move on to the next miniature, and return to step one.

As you can imagine, this makes painting any decent sized force into an
almost Sisyphean task.	It's no coincidence that my largest forces are
either 
wearing full visored helmets, or have eyes without any pupils at all. 
See these guys, for example...

http://www.users.voicenet.com/~johncrim/Bogies.html

....of which I managed to paint some 80 miniatures in a little over two
weeks.	Big bulging eyes, no details, and they look pretty good with a
bit of gloss.

(But his honor is pure and his courage as well / And he's fair and he's
true and he's boring as hell/ And he'll go to the grave as an angry old
man.)

So, I'm considering changing my habits.  For character figures, intended
for RPG use, eyes have their place.  For wargame minis, painted and
deployed 
en mass, it doesn't seem worth the effort.  Just darken the eye sockets,
and there you go -- looks good enough on the tabletop.	Besides, at
least for 
SGII, you generally want more attention being paid to the uniform than
to the face anyway.

Although if you are a firm believe in WYSIWYG gaming, deploying an army
without eyes is just asking for trouble.

So, in the interest of starting an interesting discussion which will no
doubt degenerate into a bitter argument over the innate superiority of
American eyes, 
I'd tap into the vast resources of the mass-mind that is the GZGlist and
see what they thought.	Because I *care*.

That and, y'know, it's been kind of a slow day so far.

-- 
John Crimmins
johncrim@voicenet.com