Nipponpalooza part 1 (2021 week 5)

This week's theme is "paint all the feudal Japanese troops I have" which are basically Test of Honor sprues I bought a year and a half ago during what I assume was a Black Friday sale.  I have four sets of these totaling 27 figures split among mounted, ranged, and infantry and yes, horses count as a fig.  So for this exercise we're going to try to speed it up a lot by carefully picking the colors, carefully picking the details to focus on, and not very carefully using the airbrush to hopefully complete the batch in a couple weeks.  These will not be high quality paint jobs and will not include a bunch of detail work.  

These guys were a pain in the butt to build.  They have a lot of bejangles many of which I didn't mess with.  I also had a lot of trouble with their spears and I'm pretty sure the no dachi I equipped them with wasn't the bladed one I was supposed to use but I couldn't get them into their dang hands.  The blue guy with the blowgun even has two right arms which I didn't notice before I had him mostly painted.  I did get most of the mold lines, so points for that.

These are basically all of the normal troops in blue, red, green, and purple fifteen in total.  This was an exercise of pretending to use my airbrush productively for more than priming and shading but then still having to clean up most of that work with a brush.  I'm looking for an excuse a justification to buy a fancier airbrush but I don't think this was a good step in that direction.  On top of the typical prime + dark shadows from below + warm light from the top zenithal, these were also washed in Vallejo Dark Grey Wash and drybrushed badly to bring out more of the details.  The next step was to hit them with inks or Pro Acryl transparents as a thin-ish glaze to give them enough color to move forward with minimal details and brush work.  This almost worked.

The blue and purple were shadowed with Vallejo Game Air Mahogany, a really nice red brown, and the red and green ones were shadowed with a Daler Rowney Indigo Ink which is way more convenient than mixing Vallejo Game Ink black and blue that I've been doing previously.  This worked fine for everything but the red which was weak and turned those figures a really funky magenta.  I mostly fixed this with a brush mixing Pro Acryl Transparent Red and Transparent Yellow and some Vallejo Air Skin Tone which I use pretty much all the time now as a universal highlight color.  

Details were called out with brush work with special attention to the dark colors that weren't supposed to be the fig's primary color.  After that, most things were hit with a wash and in some cases, metallics and final highlights.  I considered breaking one of my rules since these guys have such small and inconvenient to reach eyes but ultimately I caved and painted them anyway.  They look better as a result but it added a couple hours to the total painting time.  The fifteen here were done as a batch with the guys from next week (six riders and six horses).  Including assembly, they ran at around 25 hours which seems reasonable given the not-spectacular results I got.  

2021 finished mini counter:  44/100

A thing a week 2021, week 4

No theme this week; the landsknechts took a lot out of me.  Thus, I'm taking the opportunity to catch up on some random stuff on my table.

These five are two Shades of the Drowned Nymph and three Ghosts of the Drowned Nymph from Bones 4.  Those following those links will note that a) the ones on sale seem to be made of a transparent blue plastic, and b) they're shot such that you can tell what's going on.  Mine are in translucent green plastic and looked like random lumps.  Luckily, we can fix that with paint!  I started with Pro Acryl transparent green thinned down with water.  That didn't stick despite a good scrubbing with dish cleaner and a toothbrush.  Then I tried adjuncts of Liquitex Matte Medium, Vallejo Glaze Medium, and Vallejo Thinner and eventually got something that stuck but was too thick.  More medium made this better but the gal was already painted so she's darker than the rest.  A drybrush with the same green wash plus white ink later got us here.  I think they work OK for about thirty minutes of work.

Next up we have Ankoa, Barbarian Hero also from Bones 4.  He's been partially painted up on my desk for a while but I was between steps on next week's project and wanted to do something other than that.  I've been really trying to push contrast in skin tones and this guy has a lot of good volumes to practice on so I focused mainly on that.  I think they work OK but the highs probably aren't high enough and the lows probably aren't low enough.  Everything else on him was a speed paint which shows.  I wasn't sure what to do with all the fur and leather though I did do quite a lot of shading on it.  I tried to vary the myriad browns between saturation and hues but I don't think any of that really comes through.  The fur got knocked down with a wash and really could have used another highlighting step to bring it all back up again.  Other than being done which is a win in my book, it was fun to revisit James Wappel's shaded basecoat again.  

2021 finished mini counter:  29/100

Landsknechts a'Plenty part 2 (2021 week 3)

Last week's offering was a half dozen Warlord Landsknecht missile troops.  This week we have the other six plus four extras!  As discussed last week, these guys were a mess but having mostly completed them before the week started helped get them to a better place this week.  

These six are much like the first six.  Since I had the time I tried to punch up the contrast a half step.  I also cleaned up a lot of the missing details from last week which helped some.  Looking through the pictures, the inks went a bit glossy on me which isn't super surprising.  These guys were never going to be great, I plain don't like them enough to really spend the time, but I'd like to think they look slightly better than last week.  Still not super happy with them, but they're the best color:  painted.

Now the fun stuff.  I think I bought these old Warhammer Fantasy figs at a hobby store's going out of business in like 2007 or something, and I regret not buying more then.  I was poor.  What do you want?  I also bought some Earthdawn miniatures at the same time which will show up in a few weeks during Elf Fest 2021(TM).  They're metal and heavy and have some interesting mold issues but they're full of character and unlike the missile troops, I wanted them to look fun.  

First up we have Empire Greatsword 3 and Empire Sword 1 which probably means more to you than it does to me if you played Warhammer Fantasy.  The greatsword guy got a lot of screen time as one of the player characters in a previous campaign.  The second guy's shield was lost and replaced with an extra of a similar style that I had laying around and re-painted and I can tell from the photos that I re-glued it on crooked.  I took extra time to shade the metal bits with Badger Ghost Tint Midnight Blue which is starting to be my go-to for this kind of thing. In this case I both used it raw and mixed it into a glaze with the Vallejo Metal Colors I was highlighting with.  While not spectacular, I think they work.

Next we have Empire Archers 6 and 7 and they followed the same general pattern as their blister-mates but with a few more details.  These guys also used Daler Rowney inks, the blues in Blue and Indigo and the red in Pro Acryl Burnt Red base, Red and Transparent Red highlights brought up with yellow and a light skin tone.  They have the typical blue/black ink undershade and ivory zeninthal even though the vast majority of it was painted over.  Their skin tones needed a little more contrast which is mostly around the lowtones and the beige on the skirt of the one really doesn't sell at all.  Overall I got them where I wanted to but I might do more if I ever encountered them again.  

This concludes Landsknecht a'Plenty 2021 a full week early (thought I'd do the last four next week).  Next week we may or may not have the start of a new theme so stay tuned!

2021 finished mini counter:  23/100

Landsknechts a'Plenty part 1 (A thing a week 2021, week 2)

This year we're doing something a little different.  I generally paint faster in batches and I have a lot of stuff that could be themed if I'd put any real thought into it.  So big chunks of this year will be themed around something hopefully fun with a snappy title and spanning at least two weeks, sadly starting somewhat inauspiciously today.

This week we've got Landsknecht missile troops from Warlord's Pike & Shotte, a game that I notably don't play but own a lot of figures from.  For those not familiar, Landsknechts were career mercenaries in the 16th century known for their flamboyant attire.  I bought a pair of sprues on sale which produced twelve figures, six featured here.  These guys sat fully assembled and zenithaled on my workbench for months last year.  Because of their historical accuracy, these guys are excessively fiddly which makes everything hard.  

The short:  I do not like these figs.  I didn't paint them in assemblies which made them even harder to paint.  Furthermore, despite having spent many hours scraping mold lines, I for sure didn't get them all most notably on their bollock daggers which I painted incorrectly.  

I wanted to sell the flamboyance of the historical figures so I painted them in multiple saturated colors.  In fact, this was a terrible idea.  The more colors you use on a fig the longer they tend to take and the less wins you get out of batch painting.  On top of that, it's difficult to ensure proper highlighting across blocked colors on the same volume ostensibly made of the same material.  

Knowing all of this, they were intended to be done with a speedy "simple glazes over a strong zenithal" operation to make them a quick job.  I don't know where that all went wrong, but I ended up layering these guys like crazy and doing a lot of experimentation with Daler Rowney inks.  I am not happy with their inconsistent highlights and chalky basecoats.  I didn't even get all their colors on--the off white parts of their armor was supposed to be green.  The metallics are also super flat because I just wanted to be done.  

I did not look forward to painting these guys which is why they sat on my desk like a Sword of Damocles for so many months.  They look OK in groups on the tabletop but they do not hold up well under scrutiny despite the ~40 hours I've put into them so far across the batch of 12+4 I've had kicking around.  This kind of investment should yield a much higher quality paint job.  If I played an army where these guys played a prominent part, I could see bringing these figs up to a higher quality but that's not the situation.  Tune in next week to see if I can resolve some of this week's issues.

2021 finished mini counter:  13/100

A thing a week 2021, week 1

New year, new week, new figs, so lets get to work.  

As 2020 wound down I had some time off and started catching up on my "wouldn't it be nice" tasks.  One of these was refilling my pre-thinned oil paints and helped by the fact that I bought two new tubes to fill a couple holes in my current lineup.  So today's offerings are painted in oils (finally) and done mostly as a speed paint even though they weren't super speedy.  In these shots they're shiny because they haven't cured yet which is also why they're still on painting handles.  They were painted over several days in a batch to the tune of around twelve hours total.  When they are cured, I'll probably hit them with a clear coat.

These four folks are from Reaper Bones 4 and are in Townsfolk 1, 2, and 3.  The others from those sets should be on the way soon.  The beggar and farmer are from 1 and are done mostly in earth tones.  I think they came out OK but are ultimately not that interesting.  The courtesan is from 2 and despite spending extra time on her face and details, I don't think she turned out super well.  Oils, I'm learning, require a lot more care when it comes to putting down additional colors even if you intend on a blending step.  The Ben Franklin lookalike is from 3 and I'm not 100% sure what he's supposed to be.  A cartographer maybe?  Overall, I think these are fine if not interesting.  

Last year we saw Anuminar Winterbeard back in Week 35 painted in oils.  These three folks are from the same group from Bones 4.  In green we've got Oman Ruul, Wizard complete with pale yellow crystal ball.  While I think he turned out OK, I probably should have spent more time on the crystal ball which doesn't super sell.  In magenta we have Zenfis Zadar, Wizard.  His robe is slightly more red than his cloak which lost its warmer color in all of my blending.  This guy has been on Reaper's landing page for a while so when I ended up with almost the right colors on my palette, I figured what the heck.  This is a great figure and I spent quite a while working on the details I got.  I might get another copy (in metal if available) for future fun.  Arakus Landarzad, Wizard rounds out the bunch in Gandalf blue.  I would have painted him in desaturated tones except that I had some awesome blue available.  I think these guys read OK on the table and I really liked the opportunity to use really saturated colors.

Before I do more in oils at this scale, I think I need to figure some stuff out.  I love the blending but I'm struggling with finding the right thinness and keeping the right amount of paint on the figs.  I've also had to spend quite a lot of time fixing the brushes I use for oils which I've not taken great care of.  This has led me to quite a lot less detail work on these seven than I'd normally attempt.  Also, given their long "not safe to handle" time, I'm going to need more painting handles.

2021 finished mini counter:  7/100

2021 Crafting challenge

Last year's "A thing a week" went super well so this year let's do it again!  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 still 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
• A tool for hobbying or something
• Other?  Much of what I do defies easy categorization

In addition to these, I have the additional goals:

• One Hundred painted miniatures again (my pile of potential isn't going to paint itself, yo)
• Five miniatures pushing quality at the high end of what I can do (NMM strictly optional)
• Five miniatures with OSL (not optional)
• Five significant buildings/terrain/liftships/whatevers
• Improve in prep, specifically dealing with mold lines
• Paint some stuff in oils even if filling the bottles is such a dang pain
• Use the airbrush to do more work so that I can justify buying a new one this year

The list was shorter last year and felt big even if I was able to burn way past it.  Like last year, I expect to be unusually busy this year but if 2020 taught me anything, it's that I can't really predict these things.

2020 in Review

I don't think anyone could have predicted what 2020 turned out to be with any accuracy.  For readers who might not have first hand experience (I mean, I don't know when you're reading this), we had covid-19 pandemic which super sucked and I ended up working about 3/4 of the year from home like most of the folks who could do such a thing.  The bright side of this was that my commute was drastically reduced and I spent a lot more time hobbying, so there's that.  I think that's kind of how life is--you can't really predict the major beats and a lot of it is as much up to luck as anything else.  That's one of my big takeaways for thislast year.  

Gaming

Last last year (2019) wasn't great for gaming and 2020 wasn't either.  That isn't to say I didn't play anything, but it wasn't a focus of the year by any means.  The bulk of my unencumbered spare time hasn't been spent in video games for a while now so this shouldn't be surprising.  Younger me would have been terrified by this.  

Battletech ***** (2018)

I re-visted Hare-Brained Schemes' Battletech again this year and again it did not disappoint.  I bought all of the remaining expansions and re-played everything though not as modded as last time around.  I still enjoyed all of it even though it's my third time through the main storyline.  Battletech is one of the few things I have any nostalgia for and this particular game still delivers.  Given that at least some of my Battletech:  Clan Invasion kickstarter has arrived this year, we're well overdue for seeing some battlemech action in these un-hallowed pixels.

Mount and Blade II:  Bannerlord **** (2020)

I have burned a lot of words on my love of the Mount and Blade series.  I modded the crap out of the original.  I put about 400 hours into its successor, Warband.  So when Bannerlord was finally released this year, I was all in.  I ended up modding it for myself because they very cleverly switched from their own hand-rolled modding language to C# which has way more tools available.  I think I wouldn't have enjoyed it quite so much if I hadn't modded it but as the game is under active development, I suspect I'll take another look at some point in the future.  I wrote up my thoughts at the time here.  

Shadowrun Returns *** (2013)

I don't remember when I bought this game and I'm far too lazy to go look it up but much like Battletech, Shadowrun is a thing I have some nostalgia for.  Apparently most of my nostalgia is for FASA properties.  This isn't a great game, but it is a good one.  The first campaign is called Dead Man's Switch and the writing did a lot of the heavy lifting in it.  It captured the Shadowrun-ness with a handful of fairly fun characters (Kluwe, I'm lookin' at you, bro) and reminded me of all the things I loved in the 90s when I last played the tabletop RPG.  It also reminded me of all the things I hated about that system, so it's kind of like the original Mass Effect:  good writing, questionable gameplay.

Shadowrun Dragonfall **** (2014)

The next one off the HBS press was Dragonfall which really upped the writing acumen.  Demon-worshiping mage turned street sam'?  Punk rock front-elf shaman?  Elf Bear shaman wielding assault rifles?  Yes.  Yes, I want that, and all of it.  The characters are good in this one, real good, and there's even a fantastic pair of callbacks to my beloved Earthdawn for which I suspect I will always remember this game fondly.  There's a good twist, one I didn't predict though possibly because I played most of my ~30 hours with it very drunk.  There don't seem to be any "good" endings but Shadowrun wasn't ever really about good or bad so that's true to form.  This is the kind of writing I want to see in games:  punchy, irreverent, and thoughtful.  Next up:  Shadowun:  Hong Kong which I'm told is the best of the three.  Can't wait.

RPGs 

ThisLast year I ran two campaigns for most of the year.  The Saturday fantasy-every-other-week-supposedly-in-person game was done completely online and started in a brand-new sandbox world.  It's going well and it feels like it's just getting started even after 22 episodes.  The Sunday sci-fi-every-week-always-online game ran for most of the year before I killed it in early November.  It was past it's sell-by date most likely but we cleared a Star Trek:  The Next Generation in run time which is its own accomplishment.  I started a new fantasy game in its place in the same world as the Saturday game at roughly the same timeline but far, far away.  It's a concept game and is going well at the moment but it's way too early to know for sure.  

This year I did a lot more improvisation than usual, and I typically improvise a lot.  Most of my two campaigns were improvised, the fantasy one almost completely.  I think this is the best way to run these kinds of games but it is not for the faint of heart.  I never really got my thoughts together for youtube but I hope to some day.  The down side is that Roll20 is not improvisation friendly.  In fact, I haven't found a VTT that is.  It's easy in person to slap down tiles, some scatter, and some figs for an improvised encounter but online requires a lot more precision which takes a 5-10 minute operation and turns it into a 30-60 minute operation.  And yes, I have tiles in Roll20 but setting stuff up there isn't especially convenient.

Painting

ThisLast year I really wanted to level up my painting and I knew going into my 2020 crafting challenge that I didn't actually know how far I could push quality.  I'd meant to do this last year in 2019 but never did.  Over 2020 I did this intentionally eight times and learned a lot in the process.  In order with calendar time, these landed thuslywise:

• Nolzur's Human Female Ranger (flatbow), January 9th, 25 hours
• Highland Heroine, January 19th, 30-35 hours
• Kogo, Male Kitsune, July 4th, < 5 hours
• Dijoro, Female Kitsune, July 4th, < 5 hours
• Juliette, Female Sorceress, July 7th, < 5 hours
• Whitemane Duelists (2), September 7th, ~50 hours
• Aina, Female Valkyrie, November 16th, ~9 hours

Overall these eight figures (and their pals) account for a serious chunk of the total time I spent hobbying this year and some good stuff came with them.  Contrast is now something I push as a reflex more than a hassle even if I'm still not good at it.  Thinking through color theory and composition is easier.  NMM no longer seems like impossible magic, though, I don't think it'll ever be easy.  I don't view basing as an arcane inanity any longer.  I have significantly improved my brush control, learned a lot more about brushes and their care, and have shifted from buying a millionty shades of each color to mixing my own.  Given all of that, I can say with some confidence, that I've succeeded in my goal.

The biggest takeaway from this effort is that quality comes at a price.  It's obvious when you saytype it but it's true across all kinds of things.  There seems to be a point in any high-effort project where it seems like nothing's going right and that there's way too much work left to go to get where you want.  This occurs regularly around 20 or 30 hours (for the efforts that reach that size, anyway) and I note that when I was actively engineering I recall that 3-4 days is when I hit this on coding projects, too.  In my art I've only ever pulled out all the stops twice: the Hayabusa which remains my favorite SHIP, and the Normandy SR2 which has won multiple awards and not just for its size.  I've yet to do this with a miniature--maybe nextthis year.

The other major takeaway is that speed comes with experience which is something Uncle Atom told me...somewhere in his backlog, but now I have first hand evidence of it.  My studies of James Wappel's painting techniques has helped tremendously.  His is one of the top Patreons I contribute to and worth every penny.  Last yearIn 2019 I didn't think I could ever paint a "real" fig (whatever that means) in fewer than eight hours.  Now I'm regularly finishing figs at tabletop quality within three--faster if I'm batch painting.  Ironically, pushing quality helped speed quite a lot too.  It became more clear which things made bigger bangs in quality so focusing on those things really sped stuff up.  I also made a real effort to use my airbrush more which I really need more reps with.  

Deliberate practice helped me more than I ever thought it could in a year.  I am in no way a good painter and I might not ever be, but I'm getting closer to where I want to be and thislast year presented a better than average opportunity.  Without the bulk of figs (226 and 4.5x my original goal) I seriously doubt I would have made as much progress.  This represents somewhere in the ballpark of 400-600 hours at best estimate and gives me hope that some day I'll get through my pile of shamepotential, or at least the parts I care about, before my time is up.

Two and a half-ish years ago I embarked on my mini painting journey more as a thing that I thought I should do more than a thing that I particularly cared about.  I painted because I felt like I had to more than because I wanted to.  I've heard this referred to as "hate painting" and I think I'm past that now.  For sure I don't enjoy everything about the hobby but this year somewhere the switch flipped which is pretty cool.  Being cooped up in the house by myself for nine months with no end in sight did not hurt in this respect.

Crafting

This year also marked a return to foam crafting, specifically XPS.  I did a lot of this in 2019 thanks to Shoe's 30 for 30 challenge and my then-recent purchasing of my trusty Proxxon hot wire foam cutter.  This time up, we focused on airlift ships for use in my in-person-every-other-Saturday fantasy campaign which we still haven't used.  When I built them, I didn't expect we'd end the year in lockdown. 

These ships really stretched what I thought I could do with XPS.  They're the kind of thing I'd always envisioned building with balsa wood when I was small dreaming about tall ships.  I tried lots of stuff which was captured here, here, and here.  Magnetizing the Cutter and Golden Sun was an improvised experiment that really demands more experimentation.  It solves a problem with my multi-story buildings like this one whose construction was terribly complicated by having to friction-fit the floors together.  The details on the ships are still lacking but I feel like I'm capable enough now as a crafter and painter to punch these up another level with a little effort.  I suspect that when I build my next building (whenever that might be), I'll have learned enough this time around to try something fairly different and hopefully better!

Fin

So that was my 2020 in a nutshell.  Like most years it was some good, some bad, but overall it was a thing.  It'd be easy to chalk 2020 up as an all-bad nightmare but I don't think it had to be.  I suspect if we look real close, we can find all kinds of stuff that were good--not just my hobbying.