Crafting challenge, week 13

Earlier in the week I thought that things were going well.  By the end of Tuesday night I had already recorded all of my video for the week.  You can see the results here.  Sadly, I didn't finish my editing until Friday.  Saturday I was busy with other stuff, but Sunday, yeah, Sunday I'd finally get to sit down and paint.

Welp, it's Sunday and I've given up on painting for the day.  I had some new techniques to try out and some lofty goals and the short version is both fell short.  The technique for pin lining didn't work on the Veritechs and I ended up stopping after a few hours of frustration.  You can see the results on the right.  I think they're some of the poorest paint jobs I've done in a while.  Unlike most of my pictures, these look far worse in person. 

I could not get the wash into the lines without making a mess and I wasn't able to clean up the mess without screwing something else up.  My ink-infused white paint would come off with staggering ease and washing the whole thing looked really bad.  I was going to start on the Zentraedi pods but it turns out the places you have to paint them aren't at all denoted on the mini which means I'd need to freehand it on every single pod.  Not today. 

I really want to strip these and try again.  The airbrushing went so well but everything else went so badly.  Construction was a huge pain and painting is proving to be a huge pain too.  I'll have some time this week to work on the pods but just like these I suspect I'll get to the point that I just want to be done and leave them looking crappy.  I was so excited to get these and they have been nothing but frustration.  That sucks.  The rest of the unassembled ones will stay in the box until I get the skill to do these better.

2019 finished mini counter:  42/100

Crafting challenge, week 12

Remember how I said I wanted to do more in a week than just a video?  Well, I failed at that this week.  I did get a video up, you can watch it here, but that's all I did.

This one was rough.  The script is long (~350 lines) and even though I think it turned out pretty well, it went through a mess of revisions.  In fact, the main thesis changed after two days of writing which certainly didn't help.  I can make excuses about other time commitments and whatnot but they're not really germane.  This video just took a bunch of time. 

Where did the time go?  Four days to research, writing, and editing weigh in at ~12 hours.  Friday I did nothing--I needed a break.  Sunday I did all the filming, editing, and wrestling with youtube.  That took ~6 hours.  That's ~18 hours for just under 13 minutes of video.  That seems like a lot, and that's despite a lot of stuff going very well like editing. 

If I'm going to keep doing this youtube thing long term I'm going to have to start being way more efficient at it.  I don't think I want to be spending my entire week making one ~10 minute video--I got way too much crap going on for that to be sustainable.  I regularly say "everything is an optimization problem" and this is no different.  I just don't know how to optimize it yet. 

Crafting challenge, week 11

This week went quite a lot like last week with big chunks of it consumed by making and editing a video.  This one's a recording of one of my preparation sessions for a game I ran not long after the recording.  As an added bonus I did a recap of the session afterward.

I did manage to do a bunch of hobbying but unfortunately most of it didn't get finished.  The three badly painted giant spiders on the right are what I did finish.  These are from one of the D&D boardgames but I can't be bothered to look up which one.  They're basically primed, zenithal-ed, and then washed twice with Badger Minitaire Ghost Tints (brown then engine oil).  Next week (scheduling gods willing) I should have at least some swoopy planes.

2019 finished mini counter:  37/100.  I'm about a dozen behind right now :/

Crafting challenge, week 10

A couple things got done this week.  I made this video about initiative and time but it's really about game design, and I built the ship layout displayed somewhere on here.  I needed a ship's blueprints so I could invade it with pirates.  As one does.  This is the v01 deck plan for the Oriens class freighter which I've posted here before.  Feel free to use this for your home games and whatnot but please do not publish it without written permission.

My wrestling with my Robotech Tactics figures continues.  I've got the dozen-ish Zentraedi mecha and five plane-mode Veritechs assembled and primed.  Hopefully I can carve off some time this week to paint them.  I'm also hoping that painting these will be easier than assembling these was.  I am not in a hurry to put together the remaining Veritechs and Destroids.

I've also started prepping another army of kobolds and goblins and I think some skeletons in hope more than expectation at this point.  I'm about 17 figs short of where I should be right now to hit 100 figs painted this year but I suspect the next two batches will get me pretty close.

Crafting challenge, week 9

This week was pretty busy for me but I did a thing which you can find here.  Those of you who know me won't find this surprising in any way but I have very strong opinions on stances and metagaming.  I was going to do something less interesting but when I got to looking at my potential video topics list that's the guy that jumped off the page at me.  I didn't think I could get away with not doing that one next.  

The creation process went long for a couple reasons.  Despite having had a lot of time to think and develop my ideas, I'd never organized them more than explaining stuff in person.  The editing process, for those who don't know, is often where a pile of time is spent.  My first two videos were recaps of articles I'd already published so a lot of that hard work had already been done.  This time around that wasn't true and I covered a couple deep topics.  Between the research, pulling my awful jokes out of it, writing the script, and general difficulty with a medium I don't fully grok yet, it all went long.  

An additional problem is that this week I ran two games. Well, as of the writing of this post, the second hasn't happened quite yet, but the other one ran yesterday.  We were at a point in the other game that I needed to do a bunch of prep which also ate a bunch of time.  Life's hard that way sometimes.  

I don't really want the "thing a week challenge" to devolve into "I made another video this week" but it probably will be for a while until I get things humming along better.  In particular, I've super wanted to paint some stuff (Bones 4 shipment arrived recently) but I haven't made the time to sit down and do so.  I'm also not helped by having started to put together Robotech RPG Tactics figs a couple weeks ago which are in about a thousandy-eleventy parts each so my crafting table is full of partially assembled mecha.  Someday those will be assembled and painted mecha but not today.  Someday I'll also get back to designing my other game, somewhat ironically why I was putting those mecha together in the first place.