A thing a week 2020, week 4

Cedarwood is the city that keeps on giving.  This is the tactical map we were supposed to use yesterday in the final act of my Saturday campaign.  People fell ill and, well, I've now got a bunch of brisket to eat.  It's a hard life.

I could have used the neighborhood map but I felt it lost some of the nuance of the street layout.  This offers more tactical decisions which is what I wanted.  It's notable that tactical decisions is not what the map was drawn for--it was purely an artistic work motivated slightly by some critical thought on how the city might function.  We've gotten a year of gameplay out of this thing (more than 125 hours of table time) so I feel like it was a good investment.

I'd make it bigger if I were to do it again.  It's a little hard to fit the chips where you might want them and they obscure the map itself which will be a pain when we actually start playing.  This is basically a giant image printed out on my trusty color printer and mounted on medium weight chipboard.  Each page is 7.5"x7.5" which is a half inch smaller than I wanted but I mathed wrong and did the page setup incorrectly before printing.  Mounting was done with gluesticks because I didn't need more than that. 

The unit chips were glued in 1" strips and cut out with scissors.  I spaced them out by about 1/16" of an inch so there'd be space to cut.  I would have preferred a little bit more.  Also, since it's hard to see in the picture, the actual unit stats are in purple.  This makes the stats much easier to read on the black structure.  I learned this when writing out the stat cards I usually use at the table.

A thing a week 2020, week 3

Like last week, this week we have a mini.  This is a Reaper Bones Highland Heroine and a fig I like quite a lot.  This was the original figure I wanted to take to the highest quality I could more than a year ago at the end of 2018.  She sat partially painted all of last year as a reminder that I had no idea how far I could take a figure.  She's painted for Finch, the northern warrior in my Saturday game and every time she took the field, I had to have a standin--another sad reminder.

Even though I had other projects going, I decided at the very tail end of last year to finish.  The cloak is wet blended at an OK level.  The lows and highs are good but the midtones are weak.  Her hair is many (many) layers including washes and drybrushing that doesn't really come through. 

And now I get to talkwrite about all the things that are super wrong.  Her sword is bent.  This is a common thing for Bones figures.  You can usually straighten that stuff out in very hot tap water but this one wouldn't.  Next up, I did a crap job with mold lines.  This is also hard with bones since they're mostly all white and they're hard to see.  How hard?  Well, I cut a bunch of the actual molding on her right leg with a very sharp knife trying to get rid of one.  I painted the strapping to make up for it but if you look close, it's clearly very wrong.  The paint is heavy in places because last year I didn't really know a) how to prime, and b) how to thin paint properly.  She might be one of the last figs I primed with rattle cans which I'm super bad at.

The fur on her cloak looks good as does the strapping minus where I had to make it up because I destroyed the molding.  The metal disks are super washed with Nuln gloss which really popped them out.  I also put real effort into tonal variation and color wheel balance.  Even though I didn't do any freehand (tartan or something would be appropriate), I think she looks good.

What I think went best was her face.  The eyes on the sculpt are already big so I painted them as big anime eyes.  Since they were so (relatively) big, I did lit colored irises in her eyes with a reflection point for the first time.  Her skin is well-shaded and I tried to account for a lower jaw sculpt that felt weak to me.  My shading doesn't hold up super well under scrutiny but  it works on the table.

Overall, I think this might be a shade lower quality than last week's offering but better than average.  I can only guess at the work time with a year's pause between but I'd go with 30-35 hours total, maybe 20ish of which was done in the last three weeks.  I'm pretty sure nothing of the original paint job exists.  She's better in person than in these shots which my phone super struggled with.  I might have to break out the nice camera in the future. 

2020 finished mini counter:  2/50

A thing a week 2020, week 2

This week we have a mini.  This is the crossbow variant of Nolzur's Human Female Ranger.  (The bow variant is way back here.)  She's mostly a good fig.  I had to work extra hard to get some expression in her face and there are places that are super hard to reach with a brush like behind the bow or underneath the cloak.  Given the myriad other figs I've painted, it feels like these are less well laid out.

The goal was to take her as far as I could reasonably go in about 25 hours so this currently marks the limit of quality that I can produce.  I painted as many details as I could stand in addition to these four things:

• I pushed the lighting through different colors rather than relying on zenithal and glazes with special attention to increasing tonal variation.
• The cloak marks the first serious attempt at wet blending I've done.  
• I put extra attention into details on her face despite the questionable sculpt.  
• I used a color wheel for the first time for color composition and put some thought into having color triangles.  

I'm not unhappy with the quality but I don't think it's my best work despite what I saidtyped above.    I'd prepped the model a while ago and really didn't do a good job and since most of this fig was painted late in the night over a couple weeks, my brush work is not all as non-sloppy as it should be.  She does look better in person than in these lousy phone shots, FWIW.  

On the other hand, I quite like wet blending.  It's faster and easier than a lot of the other blending methods I've tried and gives a lot more time to adjust if it goes wrong.  I've done more of this since I did the cloak on this fig and it's getting better.  

2020 finished mini counter:  1/50

edit:  apparently didn't hit "publish" even though it was ready to go on time :/

A thing a week 2020, week 1

Starting the year we've got something different.  I'm pretty sure I've said this before here, but I love building tools, especially if they're going to get a lot of usage.  I'd built a paint holder when I started mini painting for realz about a year and a half ago.  That's like a million years in game developer time.  Since then I've picked up some additional paint racks and quite a lot of additional paints to the point that the storage I have is overflowing.  Furthermore, none of my racks can hold large ink bottles like these.

Basic construction is double thickness cardboard and medium weight chipboard--basically the same stuff I built my old tiles out of.  It took about a day to cut everything and jam it together with hot glue and PVA.  Then everything got a couple coats of random hardware store rattle can paint that I once thought I could use for minis.  Note:  Reaper Bones are very particular about primers.

Overall, it fits its purpose--it holds paint.  The brush holders on top didn't work and I'll probably rip those off.  They're too far back to reach easily so I don't think revisiting them is going to be useful.  The basic rack parts are also pretty tight because I didn't account for the width of the chipboard when planning it out.  I made the same mistake on the old one but that was like a million years ago.  I'm not helped by the fact that Pro Acryl bottles are slightly larger than Army Painter droppers.

edit:  this guy didn't want to publish for some reason. 

2020 Crafting challenge

I'm not one for new year's resolutions or anything but I do like challenges.  Last year's two were fun, if a little daunting at times, and I figured I should do another such thing this year.  Just like last year, I want to make a thing a week and I'll use similar rules:

• The thing must be posted here (Sundays again, probably) and it has to be done unless it's part of a big thing like SHIPtember or NaNoWriMo which I still haven't done yet.
• Valid things:
• Gaming terrain, prop, scatter (etc.)
• A painted mini
• An illustration or sketch in digital or traditional media which I don't do nearly enough of
• An article or other piece of writing of, I dunno, 1000 words or more
• A Lego build
• A video
• Other?  I do enough stuff that it's hard to enumerate what all might end up here.

In addition to these, I have the additional goals:

• Fifty painted miniatures (down from 100 last year)
• Five miniatures pushing quality
• At least one serious attempt at non-metallic metals
• Five buildings of reasonable size pushing level of detail and quality

This feels like a lot (and it is).  I expect to be unusually busy this year.  If I'm smart I'll post quarterly goal updates to see how things are tracking but chances are real good that I'll forget.

2019 in Review

2019 has been a weird year full of things I didn't expect.  I won't write about everything but here's what we got.

Gaming
There was very little noteworthy video game playing this year which is unusual but my tabletop gaming ramped up.  At the end of this year we officially hit two and a half years for the Saturday bi-weekly fantasy game and started up a couple different campaigns on Sundays online.  That's had its own set of tradeoffs but is going well enough given the circumstances.  Here's hoping that nextthis year will continue going strong.

Articles
I did a lot of writing this year.  It started with Adventures in Mini Painting #2, rolled through some worldbuilding stuff and ended up with Filling Out a City.  I also hit 200 posts here which is an achievement of some kind.  I've wanted to do a bunch of this kind of writing for forever but never carved out the time to do it.  The additional research I did helped me improve my own worldbuilding, game, and designs, and served as a springboard for video making.

Videos
Through the latter half of the year I wrote, filmed, and edited 22 videos.  I learned a lot during that exercise and got to become very familiar with my various verbal ticks.  If all I got out of that effort was turning down the volume on those, I'd feel like it was worthwhile.  If other folks got something out of my ramblings, so much the better.

Other than wishing I'd done a better job with them, my only other regret was that these took sooooo much time.  I'd like to do more nextthis year given everything I've learned but we'll see.  I feel like there's more I want to say about video making and youtube in general but this isn't really the place for it.

Terrain
Shoe's 30 for 30 pretty much kicked off my terrain building hobbyaddiction.  I'd expected my Thing a Week to include more terrain but it didn't work out that way.  I've gotten some pretty good mileage out of the terrain I have in the Saturday game but I'm reminded that there's a bunch of stuff I need still.  During Shoe's 30 for 30 the focus was on speed and building fundamentals.  I don't expect to have many strict time constraints moving forward so I kind of want to push level of detail and quality in nextthis year's efforts.  Watch this space!

Painting
At the end of last year I wanted to bring a single fig to high (for me) quality and had started down that path.  I made some progress in January but never got back to it.  Shoe's 30 for 30 chewed up a lot of creative energy but the time constraint prevented large investments in any one thing which is why the figs painted that month look the way they do.  I was also extremely busy this year but that's usually true--it's about carving out the time and being deliberate in practice which I didn't do.  Worse still, the battle pods and Veritechs over the summer were a goddamn nightmare.  This really killed my motivation to hobby in the middle of this year when I did have time.

Pushing the level of quality is completely missing in my mini painting experience thusfar.  I've experimented a fair bit this year but got caught up in a lot of batch painting to meet an arbitrary number.  I hit the number but feel like I've lost some quality as a result.  While I do like batch painting, I'm not sure it's a good thing for me to do.  I'm really hoping I can carve off time to get better at this stuff in 2020.

Design
When I first wrote this section way back in the spring I had loftier goals for where my design efforts would land. Well, I didn't make those and my penance is that I've had to rewrite this section.  Life is hard sometimes.

I started down a path in late April to streamline my fantasy game or at the very furthest point, build a skirmish game with some of the same ideas.  Through the design process I ended up with a sci-fi game instead.  There's good and bad to that but being a completely different game led to some more creative solutions.  The first version of it ended up in a pretty good place that we're busy refining through play right now.  Some day there might be words here describing that effort if all goes well.

The really cool thing is that I started pulling some of those same ideas, now slightly tested, into the fantasy system.  Here too I made significant efforts to streamline.  Some of this has been rocky but I think it'll work out in the end.  This feels like a significant step in the design space--from very crunchy details to streamlined for playability that I wouldn't have otherwise gotten.  The other note I'll make is that I might think there's nothing really left to streamline but I've thought that twice already over the last three-ish years.

Fin
So that's 2019 in a nutshell, at least, the stuff I'm going to discuss here.  Tune in next year to see how 2020 went!

edit:  apparently I've been doing these for a decade including the two that got back-posted thislast year.  That feels like an accomplishment of some kind.