A thing a week 2022, week 35, Return of the Dauntless Edition

And now for something completely the same. This is The Dauntless again, in its fully 3d prop form and I can already hearread what you're sayingtyping. "That's not a building." It's not, but it's nonetheless spectacular. If you read last week's post then you probably know that this is the player characters' ship in my current bi-weekly in-person Saturday game. This is the fifth campaign played in that world and at this point this campaign started several months ago.

Like my other large ships, the Golden Sun and Cutter featured in Week 25 of 2020 has multiple decks connected either by friction (top decks) or magnet (bottom decks), and yes, that is my dining room table. This ship is big, ~30 inches and I was far too lazy to clean off my large photography area to take these pictures. Her size posed multiple challenges not all of which I handled well but overall, I think the result is good and she is quite striking on the gaming table. 

We start with patterns. The cross section templates I had from the last builds though they had to be re-scaled to the proper size. The deck template is exactly the template in last week's deck map reference. These were printed to roughly the right size with the cross sections pasted to medium weight chipboard and each deck traced on Readi-Board which is still my go to for such things. The cross sections were fixed to a slab of XPS foam (the high density green shown) and traced badly with my Proxxon. These would be further shaped badly with the wrong-handed OLFA knife in many of the WIP shots. And before you ask, yes, they do come in left handed versions and I didn't know that when I bought it. Deck texture was done with a medium ball point pen that I keep solely for this purpose with grain made by running a steel wire brush over the top. 

Basic construction is more or less what you might expect. I jam things together with a hot glue gun adding crafting sticks to reinforce things that require it. Somewhere before then, I cut the cross sections at a regular height and magnetized them. The keel was laid into carved channels across the cross sections. XPS is naturally flexible which makes it mercifully forgiving to work with. 

The only really scary part in this phase was cutting the keel horizontally with that same OLFA knife after everything had been fixed into place. Note that I had to increase the number of cross sections for strength and because I had concerns about milling planks long enough to run front to back. 

Speaking of planks, I milled them much thicker than usual, right around 1/8" and wider than usual to cut down on construction time. I let the front and back run wild until I got the majority of the planking where I wanted it. This worked fine for smaller pieces but for this build it ended up being really unwieldy. Eventually it all got cut cut down and glued down appropriately. 

During construction I noted that despite the thicker planking, that the whole thing gave a lot more than I was comfortable with. Thus began the laborious process of reinforcing the hull with various off cuts and other bits. This also gave me an opportunity to force waylay planks into closer alignment. The smaller ships don't have this and I think they'd have been better with it even though it was a pain. 

The last step was painting which started as usual with Black Magic Craft foam primer made from Mod Podge and black craft paint. After that I had grand plans of airbrushing the basecoat on it but my airbrush had other plans. I settled for painting the base and my mini photography background. With a trusty 1" craft brush I basecoated everything except the metallics and proceeded to drybrush with a very light tan before washing the entire thing with Liquitex Raw Umber Ink. The penultimate step was airbrushing AK Interactive Matte Varnish instead of the rattle can dullcoat I'd have preferred because it was like a billionty degrees outside and I was hiding in the one air conditioned room in my house. The last step was finishing the metallics, this time with Pro Acryl metallics which I otherwise don't normally use.

All told this was a multi-week effort probably 20 to 30 hours all told. The Dauntless will fill this year's complex structure requirement and despite not being a building, I learned an awful lot that should be transferrable to more conventional buildings.

A thing a week 2022, week 34, Dauntless Edition

And now for something completely different. This is The Dauntless, the ship we're using in my bi-weekly in-person Saturday game. They're gallivanting around the world in style this time partially because last campaign they barely left the city and one of the selling points of this world is liftships. It also keeps them from being murder hobos since they technically have somewhere to live. Giving up the murdering part is a harder sell.

Liftship schematics have been featured here quite a lot over the last few years and since I've got this one, I thought I'd throw it here, too. From the poetry layer, she's a new ship commissioned by Thraxis, the ancient sphinx ruler of Vasseosp and the Widdenroll. It's a bespoke liftship of war, the first of its kind with an experimental drive system harnessing cutting edge arcane powers. Feel free to use for your home games and whatnot (c) me 2022.

Four years of painting - batch edition (2022 week 33)

I managed my timing pretty poorly this year so this post arrives at about a month later than I would have liked but I really had to finish the mega batch of nord-saxon-viking-barbarians. Since I just got done with a giant batch, I thought it'd be fun to see the difference between big batches over the years. It's worth noting that the cleanup quality also changes through this sequence so it's not just the painting. 

Week 33 of 2019 presents a danger of kobolds (installment #1). Installment #2 would cover many of the same figures as a batch from Bones 5 starting in Week 5 2022. I didn't record times for the first danger  (top) but I recall it being pretty grindy. The second batch was just over 65 minutes per fig. When I was doing the 2019 batch I was in a real hurry and even noted that they really wanted more effort. Luckily, I got that opportunity with Bones 5.

Week 41 of 2020 presents Stark Sworn Swords from ASOIAF. Week 48 of 2021 ended the not-award winning theme A Song of Ice and Paint with these four Sword Bothers. Apparently there's a lot of swearing going on in that game. The former (top) was done in about 68 minutes per fig including prep and basing which at the time felt really fast. The latter completed in about 75 minutes per fig not including prep and basing so no speedup here but the quality is pretty different. I mean, I barely painted the Sworn Swords' shields for crying out loud. As a random note, I really wish these guys were quite so big. They tower over most of my figs at 40mm or  so. 

And now a three-for. The figs in question are Saxon Fyrd Warriors painted somewhere in the Fall of 2018 (no records) on top, the identical Viking Bondi in teal from Week 42 2020 in the middle, and from the mega batch on Week 22 2022 we have 4x Viking Hirdmen. The first batch has no records and were among the first figs I assembled and painted. The teal guys are around 105 minutes per fig including assembly, cleanup, and basing. The mega batch guys clocked in at around 45 minutes per sans assembly, cleanup, and basing which I don't count anymore so likely right around the same mark. If memory serves, the first guys were awful grindy and I ended the batch by slapping a wash on everything which looks pretty awful. I didn't slop a heavy wash on the teal guys (I was far more judicious with it) and on inspection, probably the wrapping and sleeves could have been better handled. Also, the belts are a little garish. I'm pretty happy with the last batch though their shields are a little plain (note: meant for decals). It doesn't super well show from the photos, but everything is just a little bit better on them. Non-painters could probably spot the difference in quality but likely not the details. 

Last comparison: Frostrave Soldiers. I painted the first ten of these in the fall of 2018 (top) which seems like a completely other age. They've gotten a lot of screen time as mooks, bandits, and other ne'er do wells and I distinctly remember being very impressed with their configurability and very confused by the many (many) layers of their clothing. I don't have any records for them but I recall the batch taking several weeks of effort. Below, we have five of the rest of the box of 20 done Week 51 2021 and I did more with these guys than I might have earlier in the year. These figs are great and three years and many hundreds of figs' experience between, I think they show a marked improvement. 

Ultimately, we paint for all kinds of reasons. I want to play fully painted for in-person games from here on out. I've got enough figs, the flexibility of 3d printing, and a process that completes reasonable figs in a few hours to make this realistic. Somewhere along the line I started to enjoy the process which makes it even easier to push to higher quality levels and part of that is seeing how I'm progressing. I'm not a world class painter and I may never be, but that's where I'm setting my sights. Tune in next year for my half decade update!

Nord-a-thon week 11 (2022 week 32)

This week we (finally) round out both the batch and the theme with team green of Frostgrave Barbarians. It's notable that the duration of painting these guys spanned many months (late April till mid July) and were done out of order with respect to the order they're presented here. I started a new campaign and I'm sticking to my vow of playing fully painted and I had some other needs which will show up sometime in the future.

All told, these 20 dudes were done in 42 hours to the tune of just over two hours per fig. That doesn't count priming/zenithal/assembly/prep/basing but it feels low for the result I got and the mental space that they took up. There's definitely more that I could have done on them, but I'm not unhappy with how they turned out. This also pushes my "total miniatures painted ever" over 1000, so I got that goin' for me, too. 

That's going to round out Nord-a-thon 2022 and because these guys were pushed in quality, I'm counting the 20 of them as 3 toward my high quality total (one per team). That'll round out that goal as well.

2022 finished mini counter: 160/100, 10/10 high quality