A thing a week 2021, week 22 (city map)

A couple years ago I drew a city for use in a single-city campaign. Over the months I made several regional maps for the game, two of which wound up documented here, and a couple iterations of a large battle map used as the end of that campaign. That turned out to be a pretty good investment and one that shaped that campaign in ways that I could never have predicted.

I'm now running another single-city campaign now so I drew another one. While I freehanded the Cedarwood map, this time around I started with a seed city from the fantasy city generator at watabou.itch.io. Tools like these can save a lot of time provided you're not as obsessive about these things as I am. From the original seed, I used the site to alter some of the roads to fit what I had in mind, then took a download to draw over. 

From the original seed, I hand-drew buildings in Krita across multiple layers and composited them in paint.net (my two favorite free image manipulation tools). These buildings were mostly in the same places and roughly the same size and shape of the seed but altered to fit my needs. In some cases, I redrew the roads based on some critical thinking. For example, there was no southern road out of the castle even though most of the easily reached significant nearby cities are found in that direction. I also changed a lot of the very acute angle neighborhoods because I don't particularly like triangular buildings because they're hard to build props for.

How much use I'll get out of this map isn't clear yet, but now that I have it, I'm sure various versions will be popping up here in the future. 

(c) me 2021

A Pirate's Life part 4 (2021 week 21)

We finish up this theme with the five doods from the purple squad from Frostgrave Ghost Archipelago. Now that they're done, I rather wish I was more careful with them. They are good sculpts and probably deserved more time than I spent on them inasmuch as any mini deserves anything. 

Purple is a lousy color to highlight. White in it gets real extra grainy which I can say from experience. These are Daler Rowney Purple Lake ink lightened with a light skin tone. Vince's hint was that a sunny skin tone could be used as a universal highlight and that's proving to be true in my experience. He also said that Purple Lake was a great color and he's right on that one, too. 

Overall, I think the group came out OK which is better than the time I'd originally allotted to them. I do wish I'd kept better records but my gut tells me that the whole group of 20 guys are maybe 30 hours including assembly. I did learn quite a lot about painting with inks on these and not relying quite so heavily on washes so I think that even though they're not well painted, it was worth the effort.

2021 finished mini counter: 128/100

A Pirate's Life part 3 (2021 week 20)

As threatened last week, we have the five guys of the red squad from Frostgrave Ghost Archipelago crewmen. As this is a theme that I'm stretching out because I've got a lot of other crap going on, I'm also having to parcel out my shoddy commentary. Good, bad, or ugly, that's what we got.

One thing you might notice is their lousy bases. I had grand plans of doing a fun sandy texture putting down multiple kinds of grit. Well, that went poorly. Eventually I switched over to using Vallejo Texture Paste which conveniently holds much better than the PVA glue I'd normally use. This makes the two types stand out in fairly stark contrast. I'd hoped that the primer would hold more of the PVAed grit down (yeah, I verbed that) but this wasn't the case.

The painting of said bases is similarly lousy. I mostly hit them with Vallejo Model Air Sand which is the same color on most of their shirts. This was highlighted slightly in a damp-brushy kind of way and some of them have some tinting with green in the shadows. This didn't work but my excuse was that they're supposed to be a speed paint. Someday I will revisit sandy bases because, well, these suck. I don't expect them to get a ton of screen time either way but I also don't expect to repaint them.

2021 finished mini counter: 123/100

A Pirate's Life part 2 (2021 week 19)

Unsurprisingly, this week we have five more Ghost Archipelago Crewmen. These felt somewhat speedier than the last five though I have no evidence of this. After quite a long break, it's been good getting back to mini painting but it's show me just how important it is to paint on a regular basis. The good news is that it's a lot like riding a bike, if riding a bike involved putting paint on tiny figures.

Pretty sure I've said this somewhere (maybe youtubes) that if you're not a wargamer, you don't have to paint like a wargamer. For my use case (RPGs) it's way more important that I can tell doods apart than have them look good in a giant blob. As a result, I try to make their weapon and color scheme distinguish between them. Last week we had the indigo squad. That makes these guys the green squad. Next week we'll have the red squad and the last week of the theme we'll finish up with the purple squad.

2021 finished mini counter: 118/100

A Pirate's Life part 1 (2021 week 18)

More mini's this week and a new and shiny theme. These dooders are Frostgrave Ghost Archipelago Crewmen. I really like the official Frostgrave figures which, sadly, I don't think have ever been sufficiently documented here (these and these, if you care, painted very early in my painting journey). I will almost certainly buy more of this line at some point, but hopefully further down the line when (a lot) more of my >1900 figure collection is painted.

These guys come in a box of 20 and these are the first five. I'd hoped to burn through them ten at a time but I've been busy with other crap. They're supposed to have been a speed paint but like all of my best ideas, it didn't go quite how I planned. They're assembled mostly without terrible mold line issues (the ones that remain are pretty bad, however) and pre-shaded with Indigo Daler Rowney from below and warm white from the top as per usual, and that's where it gets weird.

I have a problem buying paints. I like buying paints. I like painting with new paints, so when I was heading out to one of the the Lego stores near me, I stopped by my friendly local game store and nearby craft store and bought some paints. I've been wanting to pick up more Daler Rowney inks for a while...so I did! These guys are primarily colored with these inks which, now, I've learned a lot about. Some of them are fairly opaque. Some of them are really, really not, which I like for certain applications. 

These guys look OK but honestly, I've forgotten how much time I spent on them. I think these five are around five hours not including assembly but that's just a guess. They're not great, but they are done and that counts for something.

2021 finished mini counter: 113/100