Tools for Painting Miniatures

I post a lot about painting, but choosing and collecting the tools behind the craft can be just as interesting.  Here is a run-down of the tools that make my miniatures look less dull. For those looking for help building miniatures, I'll do a separate post about assembly tools and decals.

Brushes

Brushes are the vehicle for all your artistic endeavor with miniatures.  They can also be really expensive! Most guides focus on what to do (and not do) with your brushes, so let me focus on how to buy them.

For starting painters, don't worry about having all the right brushes, and especially don't buy the expensive ones! Take your starter kit brushes, maybe a bigger one for dry brushing, and learn on them. Learn to draw the brush away from the point instead of stubbing it into corners. Learn to load up the brush less than halfway. Above all, wash it thoroughly and prevent paint from drying in the ferrule. You will screw it up eventually, and your beloved companion will split, and then you can bury them. Keep a few of these starter brushes around for applying washes. Here's a picture of some of my first brushes that have bent and split over time due to abuse. Time to retire them from detail work.

Time for retirement, old friends

Keep your old crappy watercolor brushes for applying shades and washes

You will hit your stride with the next set of brushes. Having graduated from the $10 twelve-pack of watercolor brushes, the world splits into synthetic and sable. Synthetic are just that: plastic bristles.  And they wear over time mush faster than natural hair. Citadel just released their latest STC set, but The Army Painter brush set is probably the best value for your money. It comes with enough variety that you can learn what brushes are your favorite (and some editions come with a free sable brush, neat!).  If you already have strong opinions or lack options at your local store, you may be able to find quality synthetics like this Princeton Velvetouch Round 2 for a reasonable price at art stores that aren't expressly for nerds. Expect to pay about $6-8 per brush. And don't stress about getting the tiniest of brushes for the detail. The important part of detail work is holding a point and not how big the brush is! Even with better synthetics, you will gradually see bent tips as you use the brush.  This is how synthetics wear, and it is totally normal. If you treat them right, your first synthetic should last a squad or 10 figures. You will know your brush skills are maturing when a fresh brush lasts a whole army.

My standard kit

Curling bristles are normal, and they can get into tight corners!

 

Standard drybrush kit

Finally we come to the joyous pinnacle of your painting kit, the sable hair brushes. Yes, these brushes are made with actual animal hair.  And they are superior in almost every way to synthetics, but their price also puts them out of reach for most people.  They hold their shape better when loaded up with paint, and their hairs hold more paint so you can cover more area without going back to the palette. You probably only need one sable brush to start.  Grow your collection slowly, and they will last you forever. A note that the Kolinsky Sable is endangered in Siberia and import is difficult at best. So you're probably not getting real Kolinsky sable for under $25 a brush. Here again, Army Painter wins for having the right brushes for hobbyists. I inherited my Regiment brush, and it is still going strong after a decade of use by my father. By the time you're ready for your next sable brush, you will have enough experience to know if you want to go all-in on the Winsor & Newtons.

A few notes on storage: Try to keep the plastic tip covers for all your brushes.  It's the easiest way to protect them from accidental damage in transit.  If you find your collection growing and cannot bear to part with your new friends, make or buy a brush case in hard plastic (if you don't need to travel and know they will always be sitting up) or fabric like the one pictured below.  I threw it together from duck cloth in about an hour on a sewing machine with basic measurements. Your local art supply or fabric store has something similar for sale.

Citadel Colours App

Available for both iOS and Android, The Citadel Colour app helps me create and remember my color schemes.  I can create projects, track my color inventory, and keep a shopping list of paints for the next time I hit the local game store.  It comes loaded with a diverse palette, but it only offers the Citadel range from Games Workshop. If you use dropper bottles from Vallejo or the new Two Thin Coats range from Duncan Rhodes, you're out of luck. It also doesn't have cloud storage, so switching phones means transferring your inventory, projects, and history as well (my scheme images come from doing CYA in case I lose my phone). Notwithstanding, it has worked to keep me organized.  I would love to know if there were some non-GW options available out there to cover the various paint brands I might use.

  

Storage for Paint

I paint at both my house and my SO's, so this 48-bottle nail polish organizer is perfect for carrying almost my entire collection of paint pots or droppers when I'm being indecisive.  The important part of storage is being able to see the shade without having to look at the label.  Having a clear storage system that can corral a large collection while keeping them visible is ideal. Injection-molded two-sided plastic carrying cases for nail polish go by many brand names on Amazon, and they'll all run you about twenty-five bucks. I haven't found a better mobile solution than this, but I would also suggest similar nail polish storage for a workbench installation.  Both tiered shelves and wall-mount nail polish racks are going to be way more affordable, and see-through, than any miniature-specific laser cut racks you might find at your local game store.

Painting Handle

Whether you buy the Citadel handle or print your own, These little contraptions keep your mitts off the details until they are sufficiently primed sealed.  This is doubly important with Contrast Paints as it can almost be rubbed off like chalk when applied in thin coats and handled with your bare hands. You can even temporarily glue a base to a larger miniature like a vehicle so it can be mounted on the painting handle. Get one.  It's worth it.

 

The Wet Palette

I have used ceramic tiles and even tried Citadel's Palette Paper, but I will never go back now that I've started using a wet palette. The idea is simple: parchment floated atop a spongey pad allows water to pass from the wet pad, through the parchment, and into the paint. The paint doesn't bleed down into the pad, and instead stays hydrated as it dries from the top down. This flow retains water in your paint longer so it remains workable. But it also keeps your blends around longer without drying out, and it speeds up the "always thin your paints" advice that was key to so many of us making the leap from gloopy to gorgeous. Simply put, a wet palette will make getting paint onto models easier. Even if you have your doubts, you should give it a shot. And I'm going to show you how to do that as cheaply as possible. 

This is one area where I have not graduated to a professional solution because I'm so satisfied with how my DIY palette is working. The key is getting a truly air tight container like this now-discontinued Snapware. All it needs is a shallow depth into which you can lay something absorbent (like paper towels) and top that with a layer of parchment. The shallow depth allows you to have a low angle of attack with your brush.  You want this when rolling your brush or mixing paint around. The one I bought is deep, but the two-well insert can be removed with one well used as a wet palette and another used to hold the wiping cloth. The deep well is handy for transporting the paint itself.

On sale, it was cheapest of my options

All layers visible (palette, folded paper towel pad, and parchment)

All soaked up; you can see the water beading on the surface

If you don't want to DIY it, there is a $10 wet palette on Amazon right now that couldn't be any worse than what you're painting on. The Army Painter palette is possibly the most widely known.  It comes with a pad, sheets of their "special paper" that looks and feels like parchment, and brush storage.

Note: Since first publishing this, I obtained the Red Grass Games palette and have been loving it. Whatever you choose, get to it! It will change how you paint forever.

Photos

Susan Sontag once wrote, “Today everything exists to end in a photograph.” And the pandemic has only heightened the importance of good pictures to show your friends why you can't come out hiking on a Sunday morning.

My main photo rig is a photo tent lined with white polyester and a selection of backdrops that drape down the back in a long curve to remove seams from the finished picture.  In the past, I have built photo tents out of PVC and cotton, or vellum pasted to a rough frame of furring strips.  What really matters is the next part: I point as much direct light as possible at the walls of the tent in the hopes that it will diffuse through and evenly light my miniature from all possible angles.

For the camera, I will use a smartphone camera in a pinch, but I prefer a DLSR with a macro lens.  This combo gives ultra-detailed shots for individual minis. Remove the macro for group shots, and make sure you are lining everyone up in your depth of field. There are packs of lenses available for smartphones too.  They work, and they are a whole lot cheaper than a new DSLR just so you can take pretty pictures of your knick knacks, but you do you!

"Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!

Oddments

Stop struggling with a yellow overhead light.  Get a portable or installable full-spectrum lamp or bulb like an Ott Light or LED strip.  If you haven't received your baby book update since Middle School, your grandmother's scrapbooking light is probably up for grabs! They are cheaper now than ever before, so buy one of your own rather than stealing hers. I combine the LED strip pictured below with a Costco-bought Ott Lite that even has wireless charging built in.

Applying technical paints like snow and muck is 10x easier with a sculpting tool.  These also work with green stuff, so get a big pack of them and find just the right tool for those nooks and crannies. Moving around muck is also a good use for those small brushes you can no longer use but cannot bear to throw away.

Paint cups wit ribbed bottoms can be hell on your bristles, so go easy, Bob Ross. The wide bottom on the Citadel pot can help keep it from spilling pink paint onto the carpet of your room.  Do that too much and your partner/landlord might get stabby.

Even if you aren't painting regularly on a tile anymore, a ceramic well palette can help mix larger batches of Contrast or Washes. Cover the palette with saran wrap and it will retain water like a wet palette. 

Star Wars Legion - Clone Wars Core Set and Commander Rex

 After painting Rex with my son, he convinced me to get the core set (what a fool I am). The kit was good for a first offering for new players and new collectors. And I got to take Citadel Contrast for a spin to add another skill for my painting belt.

The models were decent. ObiWan and Clone Troopers were supplied in bags, basically clean except for mould lines.  Owing to their spindly bits, Grevious, two Droidekas, and the  B-1 Battle Droids were still on sprue. The plastic is definitely different from Games Workshop sprue. It was less solvable than GW plastic when using Testors and Tamiya plastic glue. Parts kept coming unwelded, but a little super glue put it right. Detail was tight and almost always movie/animation accurate, and the extra parts for Grevious even allowed for some simple conversions (see below for an extra surprise; you can blame my son for it). After assembling them, I realized the 28mm accurate scale is so much more fiddly than the 28mm heroics I'm used to.  Hands and guns are smaller.  Weapons are smaller too. But the accurate proportions make for great squads. In a crowd, they look like right even when base to base.

I was not interested in spending months painting these minis.  Especially since my son had lost interest in playing almost immediately after purchase. I was delighted to find Sorastro's painting guides for Legion.  He helped me get from prime to table-ready in less than a month. This was my first adventure with Citadel's Contrast paint, and the advice to thin with medium and how to handle flow was excellent.  His colors were spot on too. After spending the pandemic bemoaning my mistake, it was refreshing to go so fast from concept to finished product.

Militarum Tempestus Start Collecting: Reliquary Squad and Taurox

I bought a Tempestus Scions Start Collecting box from Games Workshop, part of their Adeptus Militarum line, with the intention of painting them in memoriam for my father who passed in 2017. After four years and some tribulation, I completely painted the entire box.

The initial plan for the Scions was a true-to-life Reliquary Guard: I wanted to display them with my father's urn, but it seemed like a little much after ruminating on it for a while. I took several runs at the squad, but my painting was very inconsistent as well. Did I know enought to do them justice? After a move to Washington and the start of the pandemic, I had no more excuses.  I worked a color at a time and taught myself highlighting, wet blending, and how to use a wet palette. I also started managing my paints and color schemes with the Citadel Colour app. I seriously skilled up on these minis. I finished the squad in March of 2020. Or so I thought.

After the highlights and before 'ard Coat for the lenses, I needed to seal the minis with matte spray. So on April 1, 2020, I lined them up and hit them with Testors Dullcote. Except something was wrong. It wasn't Dullcote; it was white primer in that tiny can. Some had it worse than others, but all were at least speckled with the brightest of white dots where perfect highlights had shown through only moments earlier. In my desperation, I tried washing them. I tried brushing the primer away with a toothbrush.  I almost tossed them in the trash can. But I couldn't, after buying them in mourning, throw them away in despair. So they sat, dusty white, for the rest of 2020.

It took a year to pull myself together and get the courage to face them again.  Normally, I paint one color at a time from base to highlights. But I knew that looking at the dusty white splotches would demotivate me. So I first blocked in all the colors and eradicated the evidence of my carelessness. Laying down base colors first allowed me to get most borders clean and crisp and clean up any mistakes almost immediately.  If I happened to stray, I did not need to redo the base, layer, and highlights. This worked so well that I would try it again on the Taurox with great success. Another delight was that, in spite of the minis bearing two complete paint jobs, the detail remains crisp on most surfaces. Praise the Lord of Layers, Duncan Rhodes! To remember the mishap in as good a spirit as possible, I added snow to all the bases. They were reborn after almost going in the trash, and I could not have been happier.

As the first vehicle under my brush since my Techmarine army, the Taurox taught me about the mechanics of painting vehicles. It is a ghastly beast of an impractical APC with serious OSHA concerns (laser cannons with a fire line that shoots across the side doors, 4 tracks instead of wheels, brilliant!). I applied all I learned on the squad to their new ride.  I painted and repainted until I could get that perfect pop from highlighting the deep blue-green tones into a brilliant and sharp white corner.  There are no painting handles for these big boys unless you glue one on, so I also learned to be careful with the corners lest you rub off all your hard work flipping the tank every which way in your hands. And I learned to block in the major color on vehicles including the first layer.  Building up the true and main color of the hull before the rest of the base coats allows you to get those most-prevalent colors out of the way fast, and without too much muss or fuss over stray paint. My understanding of how light plays across a geometric surface also improved. I am finally looking forward to painting my Knights and any vehicles I need for my Adeptus Mechanicus force that is taking shape.

Yes, painting miniatures can sometimes be relaxing, but mistakes like mine bring up the possibility for therapy in the creative process of building and painting these miniatures. I took a terrible time in my life and turned out a touchstone for future me. And I have tangible evidence of my stubbornness in the face of things going awry. I would rather not have had it happen, but I'm glad the salvage operation netted a good-looking squad as well as some soul-searching in high-definition.

And so, without further ado, and with the minis safely primed SEALED this time, here are my repainted Tempestus Scions in all their glory.

Taurox Prime

 

Squad Detail

Citadel Colours Palette 

PAYEE! at the Disco

Note: This post is a part of a series detailing my family's fight with dementia and elder abuse.

Navigating the patchwork of pensions and benefits systems available to my grandfather is a challenge, but it’s necessary to help him live comfortably now that he’s safe. If a relation or friend of yours needs help managing their finances, you may be able to help them with most financial transactions through a Power of Attorney, but the US Social Security Administration does not recognize such documents.  Instead, SSA has a separate process for helping someone administer their benefits by being named as a representative payee. It is fairly straightforward for something that feels like it was designed in 1940, but it can take time and be hard to navigate.  Your experience may be more or less complicated depending on the nature of your relationship and who the payee is, but the process to get started should be the same.

When someone you care for needs help with their benefits, you need to be named by SSA as their representative payee.  You can become a payee for a partner, spouse, child, parent, or close friend, and the only power you have is to help this person administer their Social Security Benefits. This means the money is sent to you, but you are merely an administrator for it. You spend it on behalf of the recipient, and it must be used for their care and upkeep. Everyone with a Social Security Number can pick a designated representative payee by logging on to their Social Security Account at ssa.gov and naming them. This might ease the process should something go wrong that prevents you from administrating your own benefits, but the person you name will still have to go through the verification steps that follow.

The payee appointment process starts with an interview (in-person or over the phone, depending on the current pandemic threat level) with the SSA itself.  Your local office should be able to help you directly. At the appointment, they ask you questions about your eligibility, relationship with the beneficiary, and try to tease out if you are taking advantage of the person you want to represent.  Be honest, and if it comes out during the interview that you may not be the best person to take care of them, you and the SSA rep will know. The SSA rep will ask for documentation (sent via fax or mail, blech) of why this person needs a payee due to their disability or incapacitation.  Afterwards, the rep may solicit more documentation from doctors or care facility staff about your relationship with the person receiving benefits.  They will ensure this person is being taken care of now, and that you, as the payee, are working with skilled providers in the patient’s best interest.  The collection/submittal period for this documentation has a strict deadline of 30 days.  You will need to start all over again with another interview if something goes awry.  In my case, the payee appointment coincided with the beginning of the pandemic. Doctors were slow to respond, and the first attempt expired with no decision, so stay on top of it!  If you have any doubts, reach out to the SSA rep that interviewed you.

After a nerve-wracking 30 days, you should receive paperwork in the mail from the SSA that you have been appointed as as representative payee.  It should also explain how much the benefits are, how they will be paid, and where they will be sent. The booklet that comes with this details your responsibilities, so read it, memorize it, and prepare to follow its guidance. It is also possible that you will receive a letter after appointment but before the payment has been sorted out.  It may say something panic-inducing like, "We have chosen you to be NNN's representative payee. However, we cannot pay you benefits at this time." After calling around and finding some threads after the fact, this letter is nothing to panic about.  It is automatically generated by the system, and it indicates that you, personally, are not receiving benefits, even if your payee will be.  This thread helped a lot to assuage my fears. The benefit information pertaining to the person for which you are responsible will be in the letter about your appointment as a payee.

If your are the payee for a relative or friend (not a spouse, child, or institutional relation), the next step is to create a separate bank account for the payee.  This will make managing the flow of money as easy as possible without mingling your funds with theirs. It also gives you is an account for direct deposit so you don’t need to handle paper checks..  Talk to your bank or credit union. Most will understand what you mean when you say you want to open up a "payee account", and the guidebook on payees includes specific language for titling the account.  Talk with your banker to ensure you have chosen an account type with no fees. Having direct deposit means you can usually get one for free, so shop around, and don’t be afraid to take your business elsewhere if the big banks want to charge you a monthly fee. I was able to set up an account and direct deposit the same day. You will need to call the SSA National Line at (800)772-1213 once you have the routing and account numbers. Once this is set up, another letter with a panic-inducing first sentence may arrive.  It may say, "We cannot pay you NNN's regular monthly benefit at this time..." followed by the fact that they are instead sending them to a financial institution.  This is just to warn you that you will no longer be getting paper checks. At this point, the benefits should be flowing securely and with minimal overhead for you.

Your main paperwork duty is the annual Representative Payee Report detailing that funds were spent in the interests of the person receiving the benefits.  Start keeping receipts in a central place, write expenses down in a log book, make copies, and familiarize yourself with the forms ahead of time.  You don't want to panic at the last minute and have to assemble documentation from scraps or jeopardize your appointment as payee. While I haven't had to do the yearly accounting just yet, I have had to do similar steps for trustee paperwork. I'll be sure to update this once I have gone through the process.

Having the payee designation allows me a lot more peace of mind when interacting with SSA on my grandfather's behalf. It's parallel to a Power of Attorney process, and its procedures are a little arcane. I hope this brought you some clarity when doing it for your own loved ones.

Clearing out old dev-certs from `dotnet dev-certs`

 If you are trying to run a dotnet app locally with HTTPS (normalization of which is a good idea for many reasons), you will need to trust the dev cert.  On Windows, this process was made particularly easy with the `dotnet dev-certs` tool.  Simply run `dotnet dev-certs https --trust` to install and trust a cert that your app can use to allow https forwarding.

If the process goes awry (usually because you've installed a bunch of different certs in the past), Chrome might still whine about the cert being bad.  Alternatively, you could get the following errors when you `dotnet run` your app:

Unable to start Kestrel.

System.InvalidOperationException: Unable to configure HTTPS endpoint. No server certificate was specified, and the default developer certificate could not be found or is out of date.

You have a few options to solve this:

1. Generate certs using the `dotnet dev-certs` tool:
• Run `dotnet dev-certs https --clean` to clean up old certs
• Run `dotnet dev-certs https` to generate a new one
• Run `dotnet dev-certs https --trust` to trust the new cert
• Build your app.  Et voila!
2. If this does not work, I found a troubleshooting thread that ended up working for me.
• Run `certmgr.msc`
• Go to Personal --> Certificates
• Delete all localhost certs
• Run Step 1 to generate and then trust the cert again.
• You should then be able to build and run your app and see it launch

Preparing Legally and Medically for Dementia

 Note: This post is a part of a series detailing my family's fight with dementia and elder abuse.

Most people know about Do Not Resuscitate orders and similar preparations for care should the worst happen, but they may not include in their plans a long goodbye.  As a part of estate and healthcare planning, it is important to prepare for end-of-life scenarios that include dementia.  This includes consultation with a lawyer and those that will have power after you become incapacitated so the path during a crisis is clear.  It also includes keeping family involved in your health planning and interactions.  Options and decisions should also be publicized to your broader family and cleared with the people you plan to rely on for care to reduce their stress and yours.  This preparation is an act of love for your family just as much as it helps you protect yourself.

My grandfather appeared to have done everything right.  He had an estate lawyer with whom he set up a trust; we knew he had a DNR as he would often talk about not wanting to linger should he become a "vegetable"; he had a talk with my father, brother, and I about how we would all split his assets after he was gone.  This preparation assisted him and us when my grandmother passed, and he was able to collect her death benefits and notify pension organizations in fairly short order.  But there was a donut hole in his preparation, and none of us saw it until after he started showing signs of dementia. Alongside a provision that covered his passing included a separate line about incapacity that kicked in once he was declared as such by two doctors.  All of the provisions for taking over his trust were triggered by this provision.  His appointed the successors, my brother and I, could only take over and have the power to manage his assets in his stead if he was so far gone as to be considered incapacitated.  And this line, one that seemed straightforward at first glance, turned out to be an incredibly high bar in the middle of a crisis.

Understandably, doctors are loathe to declare someone as incapacitated based on the word of panicked relatives alone. My grandfather was gregarious, if forgetful, and he seemed collected at times of low stress like after a hospital stay.  Through a steady five year decline, he appeared lucid enough to sow doubt that anything was actually wrong at all!  His dementia made him unable to make and keep regular doctor appointments, so it was impossible to obtain the opinion of a primary care physician capable of a longitudinal assessment of his mental state.

This gradual breakdown of personal interaction also extended to family relationships.  His personal choices to bring in strangers to the house had also alienated his family from his day-to-day health.   He became combative when we tried to intervene in his healthcare or suggest he was being adversely impacted by the people living with him.  He would argue that he was well enough to live independently and that he would rather die than go to a home.  Truthfully, his moments of lucidity caused me to wonder if he was fine, he didn't see anything wrong with the people taking advantage of him, and that maybe I had misjudged his character my entire life. I even had the heartbreaking thing that maybe he was just an asshole in disguise this entire time.  This all brought out one of the most pernicious symptoms of dementia: it can make victims actively antagonistic to caretakers like doctors and family.

Without two statements of incapacity, we could not administer any part of grandfather's estate even if it was obvious to us that he was no longer capable of doing so.  Banks turned us away even while they acknowledged my grandfather was being shadowed by his abusers in and out of the branch.  Without the trust paperwork in order, the bankers could barely acknowledge that he was a customer. Repeated hospitalizations for failing to take his medications properly were met with stonewalling by recovery centers when we set about trying to obtain a psychiatric evaluation.  The doctors had only seen him for a few weeks, and most were used to judging physical, and not mental, fitness.

To counter this wall of professionalism, we built strong ties to his in-home care nurses that began to visit once or twice a week after a particularly egregious health scare.  Luckily, the attending physician at the home health company was also doing rounds at a facility connected with the hospital my grandfather would go to in an emergency.  This created a chain of custody for his medical history that eventually lead to him being declared incapacitated.  After that piece fell into place, the planning of the trust finally worked to his benefit.  And my brother and I were able to manage his healthcare, his finances, and his safety with the full force of the law backing us up.

Preparing early to allow affirmative control of an estate by trustees rather than aging relatives can save time and heartache for both.  Those given control can dispute fraudulent transactions, process evictions for abusive house guests, or allow trustees to deal with police while enjoying the legal backing of the estate's property rights if situations escalate.  Setting up your aging relative to retirees CEO to become Chairperson of the Family allows a family Board of Directors to take on the burden of management, but it also invests capable individuals with the power to react with their full facilities.

If I have advice, it is to protect your assets within a trust or similar legal framework, but make the bar for taking control in the case of your partial mental incapacity be lower than the one for your total incapacity. My grandfather chose to protect his assets with a trust having multiple co-trustees once either he or my grandmother passed. The trust held all assets and property, and appointing multiple co-trustees meant everyone with a stake in my surviving grandfather’s health and well-being had a say. My brother and I, even while living in different states, had to stay informed and consent to any material changes in assets or income. The same attorney that helped draw up the trust also helped with DNR and Medical Power of Attorney documents that were vital in ensuring my grandfather received care even as he stopped being able to advocate for himself. The one part of the trust that made it difficult for us in the case of dementia was the requirement for an assessment of capacity before co-trustees would assume control. The fact that we could not act on his behalf in terms of his property or financial health, meant he lost almost $100,000 through theft, fraud, and property damage.  I am still unsure if estate law has been able to provide a middle ground in this area. Please talk with your estate planner, especially if you have a history of dementia in your family, to find out what your options are in the current legal system for your jurisdiction. Being prepared for dementia can be just as important as prepping for incapacitation from a stroke or an accident.

In the end, everything you do with and for your family will ease the burden of dementia on them.  Talk to an estate planning professional about your options, as a family, to prepare for long-term illnesses that may cause diminished capacity.  Keep in regular contact with your loved-one's doctors or assist your loved ones in obtaining such care.  Discuss options before symptoms start to appear instead of after the difficulties mount.  The interaction of legal and medical preparations will protect both your loved one and you should they decline.

Reducing Oregon Tax Liability for Washington Residents that Work From Home

NOTE: 

I am not a CPA, tax specialist, tax attorney, or other skilled professional in the tax space.  I'm just a schmuck with personal experience with the system.  If there is any doubt as to the applicability of my experience to your situation, consult a tax specialist near you.  Throwing a few hundred that them, just in case, could save you thousands in the long-run in audits, refund delays, and headaches.