2019 Crafting challenge wrap-up

As 2019 winds to a close, my self-imposed crafting challenge was a success.  A week was enough time to do some reasonably sized stuff but spaced out enough that on super busy weeks it wasn't too big of a commitment.  If I have a regret, it's that it felt like too many of these ended up being video-only weeks.  I'll probably do something similar next year, too, so watch this space!

Week 39 interesting goblin minis
Week 38 horde of goblin minis
Week 37 Elethar map
Week 36 Thriemar map
Week 35 mini peg board
Week 34 mounted tree props
Week 33 a danger of kobold minis
Week 32 Eridani blueprints
Week 31 Lego Envoy and Barracuda
Week 30 dungeon stacker stackers
Week 29 Lego gunships
Week 28 Lego Pelican tanker
Week 27 video only
Week 26 video only
Week 25 video + SHIPtember
Week 24 video only
Week 23 video only
Week 22 video only
Week 21 video only
Week 20 video + 5 skellington minis
Week 19 video + Lego Eridani
Week 18 video + Kelldra map
Week 17 video only
Week 16 video only
Week 15 video + Regault battlepods
Week 14 video only
Week 13 video + Veritechs
Week 12 video only
Week 11 video + giant spider minis
Week 10 video + Oriens blueprints
Week 9 video only
Week 8 video + cobblestone tile repaint
Week 7 video only
Week 6 L-shaped building
Week 5 Lego freighters
Week 4 Lego gunships + mecha + alcohol article
Week 3 cobblestone tiles + dwarven brother minis
Week 2 Ezren, Rogan, female human ranger minis + coinage article
Week 1 Rolling box
Kickoff

Crafting challenge, week 39

Squeaking in just before the end of the year I hit my 100 figs painted with these four goblins.  These were the interesting ones in the set from Bones 4 and in a better world I wouldn't have rushed some of the details.  I think they'll be fine on the table but don't work under scrutiny.

I'll do a longer wrap up in a couple days in my increasingly non-award winning year in review post but I'll say a few things here since I'm thinking about it.  Even though I hit my goal, it feels like a hollow success.  I tried some new stuff out and learned a few things but feel like I ended the year only slightly better off than I started it.  I bought a lot of gear and got gains out of that but feel like everything this year was rushed to hit a deadline.  While I went faster, I feel like I did so at generally lower quality overall and I'm not sure that's a good trade.  I'll write more about this later.

2019 finished mini counter:  102/100

Crafting challenge, week 38

These are most of the goblins I've been working on over the last few weeks.  There have been good days and bad days and I tried a bunch of new stuff.  These and took somewhere in the range of 30ish hours over the 24 of them at fairly low quality--under table top quality which I am not happy with. 

For my own historical records, here's more or less what I did:

• Kind of cleaned mold lines (looked better while I was cleaning but the figs are white plastic)
• Primed, zenithaled with the airbrush
• Home-made wash + drybrush value sketch
• Green skintones put down with airbrush (painfully)
• Wet blended the different color coding; everything else was normal base + highlights
• Picked out some small details, pulled up some highlights
• Ruined everything with badly applied washes

These are in no way my best work but get me to within striking range of my goal.  I've got the four more interesting characters for next week as they're already mostly done.  

2019 finished mini counter:  98/100

Crafting challenge, week 37

Slightly filler-y entry this week because I've been really busy and burning hard on my small army of goblins.  This is another of the neighborhoods in Cedarwood and one that some stuff will probably happen in when we resume the campaign in the new year.  There might be another one of these next week because of typical holiday stuff.

So.  Goblins.  I'm at 74/100 for the year which is super disappointing.  There are 28 of them maybe just over half done given most of a day of painting yesterday.  I figure I've got eight to twelve hours left to finish them so there's still hope.

Crafting challenge, week 36

This week I've been super busy but ended up making some maps for Saturday's game.  I've made several of these this year and this isn't the first one to show up here.  We don't always use them but then again, they aren't hard to make, either.  The advice I gave in that post still stands:  GMing magic happens in the spaces between and every time I've filled in all the blanks I've been sad about it.  As usual, (c) 2019 me but feel free to use in your home games.

In other news, my goblins are going really slowly.  Despite batch painting being overall faster, the number of them makes it seem more daunting than it actually is.  I don't get many blocks of 3-4 uninterrupted hours and I have a hangup for not finishing a step completely.  Luckily, Vince gives this advice which I'm going to experiment with as soon as I can get back to the painting desk.

Crafting challenge, week 35

If there's a thing I like to build other than spaceships and buildings (and games...and stories...and probably other stuff) it's tools.  But before we get to the main event we need some background stuff.

I'm in the process of moving furniture around.  Earlier this year I moved my crafting area from downstairs to a small bedroom upstairs that also contained a bunch of office stuff.  While this was an improvement, it was awfully cramped.  While this house is significantly smaller than my last, I'm offended that I've been using the space so badly.  This round of moves frees up the large master bedroom complete with its own sinks which will be the new crafting/office/misc stuff room.

When I moved the crafting area upstairs, the first thing I built was a pegboard for storing mini blister packs since I have so many.  This didn't get logged here for...reasons (I can't actually remember why).  It was one of my old painting blotters with some bamboo skewers hotglued to it.  While this worked OK, the hot glue wasn't strong and couldn't hold much weight.  I had to move stuff anyway, so I took the time to rebuild it.

Instead of the janky "this was a paint blotter" pattern that was on it, I primed it with one of my ancient cans of mini primer.  I also poked holes at an upward angle to a) keep the blisters from falling off, and b) to allow for a stronger connection.  These were then glued on front and back.  So far it's holding but hopefully it won't need another go around.

I'm also painting a passel of goblins but they're going very slowly.