A thing a week 2026, week 29

More characters this week and the first ones are in my school colors which is nice. These are Jolie Adventuring Scribe, Ogana Savannah Ranger, Thregan Helmsplitter Duskwarden. These three came out well despite the shininess of the bases which are a lot less shiny in person. Ogana's skintone shininess is intentional in this case and is played by I think an old Army Painter wash, maybe Dark Tone? I put a lot of work into the yellows which I think shows and even did a little bit of freehand on Jolie's book. Ogana's bow probably should have been in a different tone of brown or maybe taken up a couple hits in value. Thragen is a little rough though I didn't cop out and paint the center shield on his armor in metallic.

Next up we have Burgermeister, Aurelio Endrino Bonehenge Warlock, and Surkar Orc Shaman. These three aren't grouped together for any particular reason except that I painted them in roughly the same span. These guys are chock full of details which took more effort than normal to pick out. The black leather on Burgermeister and Aurelio are pretty good and I did an OK job of distinguishing myriad leathers on Aurelio and Surkar. I did not clock Aurelio's pal as a raccoon which is why he's in a beary chocolate brown. Burgermeister's gems and Aurelio's cloak's stitching were a goddamn pain, tho, and I'm glad they're done. Surkar got a lot more attention than normal since I had christened a new natural hair brush which is always nice. I'd been working without a nice natural hair brush for far too long and I was reminded (again) that I really need to use my expensive nice tools rather than saving them for...something.

2026 finished mini counter:  172

A thing a week 2026, week 28

This week we have more of Bones 5 as I can kind of see the finish line from here. First up we have Kamaria Eshe, Bonehenge Priestess, "mother of dragons", and All Hallow's Eve. These gals got more effort than usual because a) they're nice sculpts, b) as character figs they're more likely to get screen time, and c) I'd been doing a bunch of speed-like paint jobs so it was nice to spend a little more time on each fig. The glossy bits are from the base coat which always throws me. More work could have been done here on the details, clothes, and hair though ultimately I think they landed in a good place.

Next up we have Anduriel Elf Paladin, Krass Omenthrall Evil Warrior which is a little on the nose, and Hanrik Dwarf Pugilist. The first and the last aren't super interesting as I didn't put much work into them. The middle guys is more interesting and he also didn't get much work. Regular readers (ha!) will remember that I've been experimenting with colored metallics for a while, now. This is a mix of Vallejo Aluminum (I think) and a dark blue Golden High Flow Acrylic which I normally don't use because they're glossy. Over top of that I hit it with a coat of Badger Ghost Tint Blue. It mostly works on the table though it's really glossy in these shots. I also notice for the first time that the symbol on his back is unpainted. I'd intended to paint it gold but can't be bothered to do so now. 

2026 finished min counter: 166

 

A thing a week 2026, week 27

This week we have a bunch of undead. My games don't feature undead, generally, so despite having a really big pile of them, they don't get a lot of screen time. 

First up we have Grave Kings, well, most of them. The first guy was featured way back in Week 40 of 2023 which feels like a lifetime and about 850 figs ago. Also, wow was my photography shoddy back then. I burned through these guys pretty quickly and probably the guy on the left and the guy in the helm needed a Seraphim Sepia wash or something to make them blend in less with the background (I do like the bleached effect, tho). I put a lot of effort into pulling the highlights up which I think shows though I didn't do nearly enough in the blending which I hate doing. They could have been weathered and dirtied down as undead but I really couldn't be bothered.

Next up we have The Grim Reaper and Wraith Dread Knight. We saw the first of the Grim Reapers of Bones 5 in Bonus Week 53 of 2023. That guy didn't get as much time and doesn't look quite as nice. This guy was mostly drybrushed and I had a really hard time contrasting his cloak in black and his robe in a more blue dark grey. It kind of sells but only in really high light situations. The sand in the hour glass looks OK at arm's length but doesn't really work close up. If the Wraith Dread Knight on the right looks familiar, he should! He's the missing guy in the trio last seen on Week 18 of 2024 which isn't nearly as long ago (maybe 500 figs ago). I tried to match the color scheme so they'd look OK together but this guy got way more effort even if it wasn't very much all told. 

Last up we have Murkillor the Wraith King and he also doesn't doesn't get a link. I was going to do some fancy purple OSL but clearly didn't. This guy was kind of a speed paint with the Grave Kings above and it kind of shows. He's really tall which makes my lack of blending really stand out. Ultimately, he's done and that's what counts.

2026 finished mini counter: 160

A thing a week 2026, week 26

This week we continue our tour of the biggies which will clear out most of them. I also get to re-live the trauma of "I was lazy and glued everything together without thinking about how I'm going to paint them." So we got that to look forward to. 

First up we get both! The blue guy on the left is a Greater Basilisk and he turned out really sharp. This is a high drama, low effort offering and I specifically picked an undercoat that was a little bit glossy. In this case, it works! He's mostly drybrushed with increasingly high valued paints, in this case Golden So Flat Ultramarine. The guy on the right is a Celestial Stag and even though he took way longer, the result is so much less good. Horns in particular eat a lot of time and the total effect is kind of patchy because of the many layers of drybrush I did to pop out the very shallow texture and still do anything with the volumes. More work could have sold it more but I wasn't in that headspace when I painted it.

Next up we have a coupla really big dragons. The blue guy on the left is an Amber Dragon which I couldn't be bothered to look up before I painted him. He's the same color scheme as our basilisk on purpose so I could go a tiny bit faster. This is a great sculpt with a lot of very nice texture so I spent a lot of time dry brushing and washing over it which landed in a nice place. I would have liked his cyan bits to be a tad lighter but he came out well anyway. Probably the base needed more work but when I got there, I was just plain done. The guy on the right is Narthalyssk and despite having as much texture and effort, came out so much less dramatic. Red is hard to highlight and I was afraid of pushing into oranges which I thought would lose contrast with the yellow ventral scales and wing membranes. Joke's on me, though, since I did a lousy job highlighting those too. Under the my very bright painting lights, he looked OK. On the table, his reds look indistinct and his yellows look washed out and dirty. I did like the demon dots, tho. 

2026 finished mini counter: 153

 

A thing a week 2026, week 25

ed> due to some scheduling shenanigans, this guy didn't get posted when it was supposed to. Luckily, with the power of the Internet, I've backdated so that none shall be the wiser.

 This week we start our biggies tour where I work through a bunch of the bigger-than-normal figs in Bones 5. 

First up we have two biggies and neither of them are particularly worthy efforts. The Dragon-Lion on the left needed at least some gap filling and the fur colors really needed to go up at least a couple layers. I got good hue contrast between the scales, the fur, and his mane but none of those parts by themselves is well handled. At the time of this writing, I was going through a really painful medical issue and freaking out about making it to Bricks Cascade so suffice to say, my attention was elsewhere. The Catoblepas on the right is more or less the same deal except that the sculpt featured more or less one texture which makes my indiscretions less obvious. Also of note, I glued it all together and really struggled getting the green on the base he's standing on. Don't worry, I didn't learn, and will make the same mistake many times in the coming weeks. 

One of the most egregious example of gluing stuff together and then struggling to paint stuff is this guy who I call "treasure dragon." Because he's on a pile of treasure. Get it? This guy is purple to contrast with the yellowy gold pile he's laying on and his left arm is a real mess. Somewhere during the painting, it fell off and I think I ended up with a blob of glue that made it not fit correctly so I ended up having to do a lot of filling. It's hard to notice if you don't know but it's definitely not as good as it probably should have been. A coat of Badger Ghost Tint Orange went over the gold which makes it pop a little better and ultimately the composition works even if the dragon's paint job isn't particularly good. They can't all be bangers, kids.

2026 finished mini counter: 149

 

A thing a week 2026, week 24

One of the things I find fun about these kinds of big fig kickstarters is I end up with a bunch of stuff that I might not have ever considered but that I might try really hard to work in somewhere. Notably, last week's offering wasn't this kind of thing. Also like last week, links seem to be few and far between despite how many levers and dials the Reaper site has. If I give the figure a "name" it means "I have no idea what this guy is so here's a silly name for it."

First up we have Night Cloak, "angry dagger worm", and Dire Cabbage. The first and last are the best kind of paint jobs: high drama, low effort. In both cases, the sculpt is doing most of the work and both were painted as successive sets of drybrush and transparent paints. The angry dagger worm guy took way more effort since he wasn't all one color. I had a rough time getting the fleshtones on his underbelly to look OK and, well, they still don't. I was done with him, tho, so that's where he landed.

Next up we have Young Fire Dragon who I might have painted in red if I'd known that before looking up the link and "frogmouth wing guy". These are two more high drama, low effort works. Probably the dragon could use a little more variation top to bottom and/or picking out the wing membranes which I normally do. Still, I don't think either are terrible but neither is particularly good.

2026 finished mini counter: 146

 

A thing a week 2026, week 23

And now for something completely different. Bones 5 came with a bunch of spell effects that make sense if you're playing D&D. I'm not, so some of these guys will have far less utility than otherwise. As such, I didn't do much to paint them and it shows. These guys are (I think) Bigby's Interposing Hand, Bigby's Grasping Hand, and Bigby's Fist and like a lot of Bones 5 figs, I can't find links. 

The pinky-magenta ones are washed and hit with a coat of Badger Ghost Tint Magenta and as usual with the Reaper Bones transparent figures and basically any paint: I had a really hard time getting the paint to stick. As far as I can tell, the material itself is hydrophobic and no amount of washing seems to help. These guys are (I think) Wall of Stone, Wall of Thorns, Tenser's Floating Disk, Spiritual Weapon, and Planar Servant. 

Not shown here are the three hand-sized spell effects that I forgot to shoot that I'll use somehow, somewhere. Ultimately these guys look OK in these shots and the majority of them won't get a lot of screen time which is pretty much par for the course.

2026 finished mini counter: 141  

A thing a week 2026, week 22

As promised, this week we have the hench gals, the other not quite half of Reaper's Henchmen and Hirelings Bones Black Deluxe Boxed Set. Notably, I paid a lot less with the Bones 5 kickstarter. Like the henchdudes, I like these sculpts a lot and really didn't spend enough time with them. These gals (obviously) share a color scheme as a time saving feature and I tried to let the sculpts do as much work as possible with a little bit of OSL to keep things interesting. Notably, I pre-assembled the porter gal and her wheelbarrow which turned out to be a big mistake. Don't worry; I haven't learned and we'll see the same mistake in a couple weeks. No idea why the torch gal insists on blinding herself with the torch in front or why she has no shoes. Quite a few of the Bones 5 sculpts are barefoot which I find very suspicious.

These two are Tara the Silent on the left and Daschelle, Female Rogue on the right. More Golden So Flat Ultramarine this time around and I spent a little extra effort in blending, helped by the fact that these figs are so much smaller. Tara's abs are painted in because she looked wrong without them. Her hair looks better in person since the highlights are just out of frame. I had a heck of a time figuring out what was going on with Daschelle's hands though I think I got it in the end. There's a really nasty mold line going down the rope which I tried my best to paint over. I think it mostly sells. I think these are pretty good results all told. No clue why the hue is off on the top shot. 

2026 finished mini counter: 130

A thing a week 2026, week 21

This week we get some of my favorite fantasy races: catfolk and foxfolk. They were painted as a batch which is probably obvious since they're all in the same color scheme. These first dudes are Bones 5's Catfolk. Left to right: Catfolk Mage, Catfolk Rogue, Catfolk Warrior, Catfolk Paladin, and Catfolk Ranger. NGL, the yarn ball hearldry got me good. These guys probably could have used one or two extra highlights on their fur. It's really hard to paint black fur in general and these guys are only OK. Either way, I'm always happy to add more kitty people to my collection. 

Notably not from Bones 5, we have left to right: Tabaxi Dancer by Velrock, Kogo, Male Kitsune, and Dijoro, Female Kitsune. If Kogo and Dijoro look familiar, they should! They've showed up here a couple times before. In other news, wow has my photography improved. Despite the results, I spent a lot of time on these three, the dancer because she's mostly fur, the other two because they're a comparison to previous works. Like the other catfolk in this post, they're only OK. More highlights would have helped. The sad part is that the dancer got that but it was so patchy that I hit her with a coat of Nuln Oil which darkened everything down too much. She's got an orange twin that will show up at some point in the future. 

2026 finished mini counter: 123

A thing a week 2026, week 20

This week in addition to the normal junk, we're gonna go over a little color theory. Boring stuff first: these are the Dragonfolk add-on for Bones 5 split into Dragonfolk Wizard and Cleric, Dragonfolk Bard and Thief, Dragonfolk Fighter and Ranger and I'll leave figuring out which is which as an exercise for the reader. No back shot for the first three because I'm a doof and forgot to shoot it. You can probably guess what's going on by context. Anyway...

These guys had some really lousy mold lines which I handled very poorly. They also had a lot of really nice contrasting texture that I didn't want to lose so I started exactly the same way as you might expect: dry brush over speed paint base coat. I put some extra effort around some of the highlights and rather than doing a lot of tedious blending, I left most of the color jumps a little stark which lends a bit of a cartoony effect which I kind of like. Overall these are pretty good sculpts for the most part though I don't particularly like the fighter. It wasn't clear whether he was scale in which case he's weirdly proportioned or armor in which case the details are confusing. Clearly I went scale.

Color theory time! These guys are split complementary with the first choice being their scale color played by Akhelian Green Contrast Paint which is probably one of my favorites. When I realized that purple was one of the other potential splits which put yellow as the complement, well, I couldn't say no. Yellow and purple are a pretty good complementary scheme by themselves and while I'd intended to push the yellow more into an orange to be more technically correct, I still think these guys came out well. Everything could have used another level of highlight but I kept the nice darks from the contrast paint which was a goal. Done in about ten hours all told, I think these are a good result.

2026 finished mini counter:  115

A thing a week 2026, week 19

These guys are more or less only grouped together because they were painted in the same pseudo-batch. The blending here is a little sus mostly because I couldn't be bothered to do more. The ultramarine here is Golden So Flat and for whatever reason, I've always had a rough time blending it. That sucks because it's a really nice shade. Left to right we have: Brother Hammond, Traveling Monk, Grundor Hoardtaker, Barbarian, and Baran Blacktree, Veteran Warrior. Baran's shield really wanted some heraldry but I clearly couldn't be bothered. Probably his armor needed another metallic coat and additional shading. Grundor's base red played by Flesh Tearer's Red Contrast Paint is still surprisingly glossy which still surprises me every time. Brother Hammond's nice dark brown basecoat got kind of lost and I either needed to go higher on the highlights or bring the darks back down. 

These three mage-y dudes are left to right: Erebus Nalas, Evil Sorcerer, Young Mage, and Luwin Phost, Wizard. I am super bad to use whatever colors are on my palette at time of painting which is why these guys are all the same color as Baran's cloak. Also, I generally think that wizened mages should look like Gandalf which is a really hard thing to break away from. Nalas's OSL doesn't really cover up the weakness of the fire effect or the patchiness of the color fades. Young Mage came out really well to the point that I have him as a high quality fig (#1 for the year) but forgot to do a turnaround shot. Probably the lights could have gone higher regardless, and the orb on the end of his staff is pretty weak. Luwin's OSL looks a little subtle in these shots but they sell pretty well on the table.

Overall, a pretty OK offering for the week, IMO.  

2026 finished mini counter: 109, high quality: 1/10 

A thing a week 2026, week 18

And now for something completely different. With the mechs complete, I'm moving on to the next big phase: Bones 5 and I don't have a fancy theme for it. 

These eight dudes are the Henchmen option from Bones 5 and slightly more than half of the Henchmen and Hirelings pack on the Reaper store (the gals will arrive later). These guys were done mostly as a batch with a little bit of extra OSL effort on the lantern bearer, torch guy, and fire thrower. They didn't take super long at about twelve hours all told but I certainly could have doubled that easily as the sculpts can certainly take higher quality paint jobs. The read a little better in person than in these closeups, I think because my lighting washed out some of the detail. 

It felt a little weird going back to characters after so...many...mechs which are mostly a paint-by-numbers kind of process. Still, these were a good step back to more "normal" painting.  

2026 finished mini counter: 103

Heavy Metal Menagerie, bonus week (2026 week 17)

At time of writing, I thought last week was the end of the theme but as it turns out I decided to test out my FDM printer's fine detail abilities by printing out a bunch of mechs. Results were...mixed, as you can probably tell. I have a Bambu A1 mostly because it was widely hailed as about as user friendly a printer you can get and I can safely say that it is certainly user friendly. If I knew more about how the thing is configured I could probably dial it in better for this kind of work.

These four are fee sculpts from Matt Mason and are fills for some mechs I didn't have from official sources. Left to right we have Jagermech, Fafnir, Centurion, and Dragon. All four of them have print defects, most notably the missing arm badly camouflaged as battle damage on the Dragon but they painted up just fine otherwise. These guys are out of order in my record so my counts are sus from here until it catches up.

2026 finished mini counter: 94
 

Heavy Metal Menagerie, week 16 (2026 week 16)

This is the last of my force packs from the Battletech Kickstarters, the last week of this mega theme, and the last week for this first leg of this year's goals. As one might have guessed, we have Legendary Mechwarriors III Force Pack and like the last two, I didn't spend all that much time on them. These are all The Bounty Hunter or pals of, the former well-described as the

Dread Pirate Roberts of the Battletech universe. I chose the art variants closest in color to make my job easier and other than a handful of c-bill symbols, they have very few details. The edge highlighting got lost in the two dark green oil washes they got so they don't read as well as I'd hoped. Also, for reasons I don't fully comprehend, the image over there isn't alignable to the top of the frame. Technology; whattayagonndo amirite?

Left to right: Griffin C, Mad Cat S, MAD-8K Marauder II, Marauder,  Loki Mk II A, WHM-9K Warhammer

2026 finished mini counter: 91 

Heavy Metal Menagerie, week 15 (2026 week 15)

This week we have Legendary Mechwarriors II Force Pack and it's weird to have a tanker in there if I'm honest. I am not super well read in Battletech fiction so I only vaguely know who any of these folks are. Like last week, I tried to match the art in the cards which only shows one perspective so probably there's some stuff missing. 

Left to right we have Jeremiah Rose's CGR-3K Charger, Marcus GioAvanti's Archangel, Marcus Barton's DVS-2 Devastator, Abdoun Ricol's Red Hunter 3146, Callandre Kell's SM5 Field Commander

2026 finished mini counter: 85 

Heavy Metal Menagerie, week 14 (2026 week 14)

We're heading down the home stretch now. These are Legendary Mechwariors Pack and I considered doing a lot more work on these than I ended up doing. I did make an effort to match the art that came on their cards but I didn't spend a lot of time on them, either. There's a tiny bit of freehand on the Dire Wolf, particularly a very derpy Wolf Clan logo which is as much as I could be bothered with. Maybe in a world where I'm bored (ha!) and have a lot of spare time (ha!) I'll go back and make a real effort.

Left to right: Natasha Kerensky's Widowmaker,  Aiden Pryde's Timber Wolf, Grayson Death Carlyle's Mad-3R Marauder, Morgan Kell's ARC-2R Archer

2026 finished mini counter: 80 

Heavy Metal Menagerie, week 13 (2026 week 13)

This week we begin the final stretch of this mega theme. These first four mechs are Eridani Light Horse Hunter Lance and a gift from a pal. Sarna says that they've kept their original "SLDF olive drab" color scheme so that's what I painted. I thought I'd picked a light enough basecoat but it darkened down quite a lot after the oil wash. The cockpits on these could have been a little lighter as they don't read super well on the table. The Tbolt fell off of his smoke trails which was very fortuitous since it meant I could pant them more carefully. Actually, Sarna says it's intentionally configurable. Left to right: Sagittaire, Thunderbolt, Cyclops, Banshee

These guys are the remainder of the non-legendary salvage boxes in my collection and since I was already doing a batch in the olive drab, I painted these guys in the same scheme. I have many Grendels and at least a couple Dire Wolves but the Blood Asp is both new to my painted collection and new to me. Cool though it may be, it's out of my time period (Clan Invasion). Left to right: Blood Asp, Dire Wolf (Daishi), Mongrel (Grendel)

2026 finished mini counter: 76 

Heavy Metal Menagerie, week 12 (2026 week 12)

Have you ever wondered what a heavily militarized phone company might look like? No, me, neither, but Battletech has answered our unasked question. I present to you Comstar Command Level II. Their in-universe color scheme is supposed to be plain white with symbols. For those who aren't painters, white is really hard to paint. You don't just slap a white basecoat on a thing and call it a day if you want something that looks good. 

These guys got a wolf grey basecoat, almost no details, then a typical white drybrush and oil wash. Oil washing black over light colors is always a gamble and despite thinning it way down, these guys dirtied up more than I wanted. I could have taken the time to fix that but I clearly didn't. Despite that, I'm still happy with these.

Left to right:  Mercury, Sentinel, Black Knight, King Crab, Highlander, Exterminator

2026 finished mini counter: 69 

Heavy Metal Menagerie, week 11 (2026 week 11)

This is a Clan Heavy Star and I wanted more green and flame orangey guys to go with my previous Jade Falcon-ish mechs. Week 8's mechs were a little darker than I wanted so I specifically lightened these to match Week 3's mechs a bit more closely. They're still undershaded through the airbrush and I backed off a bit on the oil wash which still got me the shading I wanted and kept the orangey bits brighter than normal. Overall, I think, a good result.

Left to right:  Hunchback IIC, Stone Rhino, Supernova, Marauder IIC, Warhammer IIC.

2026 finished mini counter: 63 

Heavy Metal Menagerie week 10 (2026 week 10)

Another week, another clan star, particularly a Clan Heavy Striker Star. I liked the result from week 4 and wanted to do more guys in that color scheme so these are that. I kind of got that. Unlike most of my mechs, these guys look better close up than on the table where they look a little indistinct. The dry brush edge highlighting worked well but despite being very high contrast, doesn't read super well at arm's length for reasons I don't fully understand. Left to right we have: Ice Ferret (Fenris), Mad Dog (Vulture), Gargoyle (Man O' War), Hellbringer (Loki), and Viper (Dragonfly).

2026 finished mini counter: 58 

Heavy Metal Menagerie week 9 (2026 week 9)

This is an Inner Sphere Direct Fire Lance and they were a goddamn mess. They'd been kicking around my prep table for weeks being overtaken by the last three batches because their mold lines were soooooo bad. So far, these have been the worst of the boxes I've dealt with and as a result, they took way, way too long. For their colors, I wanted to match the Inner Sphere Command Lance from week 52 of last year. In addition to really liking that color scheme, I'd hoped that the high contrast would hide many of the prep shortcomings on these guys and I think it worked. Left to right we have: Orion, Marauder II, Atlas, Crusader. 

2026 finished mini counter: 53 

Heavy Metal Menagerie week 8 (2026 week 8)

Most of the giant batches are behind us now, so I'm grinding through the force packs one box a time. These would be a Clan Command Star and (clearly) did them in a similar color scheme as last week. These guys don't have the wash step, though I did spend more time on their base coat. They aren't quite as nice as last week but I'm not unhappy with where they landed. Not sure what happened with the back shot on these; my shooting has been fairly consistent of late and that is a lousy shot. 

I was excited to get these guys done since they fit some holes in the enemy forces I've been blowing up. Left to right: Mist Lynx (Koshi), Shadow Cat, Dire Wolf (Daishi), Summoner (Thor), and Stormcrow (Ryoken). 

2026 finished mini counter: 49
 

Heavy Metal Menagerie, week 7 (2026 week 7)

If my math is correct and I can manage to keep to the schedule I've been keeping, this is right around the midpoint of this mega theme. I'd expected to take a break at some point in my Battletech backlog, but I'm playing a lot of Alpha Strike (Aces, in particular), and at this point I'm so close to the end of the backlog. Provided that I don't buy any additional boxes to fill some empty spots in my roster, we should be closing this theme out in week 14.

First up we have a pair of elemental stars from the Clan Invasion box set. These guys are big burly space marine kinds of dudes in clantech power armor. I hate these guys. Their size and smoke plumes mean that mold lines were really sketchy to deal with so mostly I did a lousy job. Their smoke trails were fun which is another example of a low effort high drama effect--my favorite! They read OK on the table but don't hold up under scrutiny.  

These guys would be the rest of the box set which I got with the kickstarter. Left to right: Adder (Puma), Nova (Black Hawk), Executioner (Gladiator), Timber Wolf (Mad Cat), Mongrel (Grendel). I went with

Jade Falcon colors (kind of) to go with week 3's offering. My airbrush basecoat was iffy on these guys so I took an extra step to hit them with a dark green wash (a mix of Pro Acryl Transparent Green which is very blue mixed with some Transparent Yellow to shift the hue into more of a pure green). Everything else was more or less the same and I think they look a lot better than the last batch. Not sure I'm going to take the time to hit future batches with a wash (I'd prefer to get it right with the airbrush) but I like the deeper saturation on these. 

2026 finished mini counter: 44

Heavy Metal Menagerie, week 6 (2026 week 6)

If you guessed we'd get more mechs this week, you guessed correctly! Probably the title was a dead giveaway, tho. This week we've got mechs from the Mercenaries Box Set which I kickstarted whenever that kickstarter was going (2023? time is a flat circle right now). I liked the dark blue base and wanted to do an analogous color scheme and I don't think it worked out. The lighter blue could have been higher value and that might have helped but...no. The orange cockpits can't carry my bad color choices but hey, that's how we learn, right?

A bunch of these are new to me fitting cleanly between the points that I stopped playing a lot of Battletech in the mid 90s and, well, today more or less. These four from left to right are: Caesar, Devastator, Ostsol, and Quickdraw. 

These four are left to right: Flea, Starslayer, Chameleon, and Firefly. Of these, I only know the Flea and mostly because I've blown up so many of them in MW5:Mercs. The Firefly is a fun example of "an airplane with legs" style of mechs which I thought were a lot more rare in the Battletech universe than they seem to be. Those dirty clanners even have some! 

2026 finished mini counter: 37 

Heavy Metal Menagerie, week 5 (2026 week 5)

Our next installment of mechs is from the main box: A Game of Armored Combat and I'm not sure that's the same SKU as the one currently available from Catalyst. The one I have came with one of the kickstarters and comes with some of my favorite mechs. It also came with a bunch of vehicles but we've already seen them at the end of last year. 

These chonky dudes are (left to right): Thunderbolt, Awesome, Battlemaster, Catapult. Aside from the Awesome which I think is overrated, the other three are some of the mechs I've used the most across all Battletech universe games. In fact, I've got a Thunderbolt and Battlemaster in my Scouring Sands company. I sure hope they survived!

These less chonky dudes are (left to right): Locust, Wolverine, Shadow Hawk, and Commando. I'm using the Locust and Command, too! I painted these guys a while ago now in a flurry of painting exuberance. I have the luxury and resources to play fully painted so when I realized that I wanted four of these guys in my force, well, I knew what I had to do. The oil wash dirtied down the light yellow some on these guys which wasn't intended. It was also (obivously) not fixed.

2026 finished mini counter: 29 

Heavy Metal Menagerie, week 4 (2026 week 4)

This week we have, you guessed it, more mechs. This is a Clan Fire Star including (left to right): Fire Moth (Dasher),  Nova Cat, Warhawk (Maskari), Cougar, Kit Fox (Uller). I had fun with the bright green but I knew that oil washes are more kind to dark colors so I hit these guys with a Reaper Forest Green that seemed fit for the task. These are almost in Clan Wolf livery but again for the record, I can't be bothered to use someone else's color scheme. 

The dark grey on the forest green doesn't read well here and probably could have been lighter. Also probably these guys could use a highlight color of some sort, but the edges look real good.  

2026 finished mini counter: 21
 

Heavy Metal Menagerie, week 3 (2026 week 3)

These guys are Clan Cavalry Star including (left to right): Locust IIC, Griffin IIC, Black Python, Shadow Hawk IIC, and Jenner IIC. Scouring Sands campaign is against the Jade Falcon but I really wanted to do the desert camo so for these guys I picked a bright green for their main color. They aren't specifically in any Jade Falcon livery that I'm aware of because TBH, I can't be bothered to follow someone else's color scheme. 

These guys follow the same basic scheme as most of my mechs featuring heavy use of the airbrush and generally being done in a few hours per batch. The oil wash went on a little heavy which dirtied up the light orange. I could have fixed this but I couldn't be bothred. The Black Python in the middle is new to me and I really like its design. If only it weren't a dirty, dirty clanner. 

2026 finished mini counter: 16

Heavy Metal Menagerie, week 2 (2026 week 2)

For this batch, the Inner Sphere Fire Lance (left to right: Trebuchet, Zeus, Stalker, Longbow), I wanted to experiment with pushing contrast paints through the airbrush. I had it on very good authority that this would result in a tint or a filter but that it wouldn't do the normal contrast paint thing, specifically gather in the recesses to darken and whatnot. I figured if I oversprayed a bit, I'd put down enough contrast paint to a) work like contrast paints usually do, and b) be a lot faster/smoother than doing so with a brush. The culprit: Blood Angels Red, a tone that I don't particularly care for (I like Flesh Tearer's Red a lot better). 

I was kind of right. Overspraying does work, provided you move fast enough to cover the target before things dry. That's a challenge since it dries way faster coming out of an airbrush which isn't really that surprising. The result I got was very patchy and I spent not enough effort cleaning these guys up, though the drybrush and oil wash at the end of the process hide it pretty well. Ultimately, these guys got to a more orange-y destination that I'm not unhappy with.

2026 finished mini counter: 11
 

Heavy Metal Menagarie, week 1 (2026 week 1)

We kick off the new year with a new theme, and if you were paying attention last month, it should be no surprise that it's mechs. These guys are from Battletech Aces Scouring Sands, a few of the support vehicles of which we saw a couple weeks ago. For those not familiar, Aces is a solo or co-op campaign engine for Alpha Strike and I am super stoked to give it a shot. By the time this is posted, I've probably played at least a couple missions, even. 

These hefty guys are (left to right) Thunderbolt IIC, Bane, and Marauder IIC. I wanted to do a camo pattern because I'd never done one. They were basecoated with Pro Acryl Yellow Ochre through the airbrush and the darker splotches played by Pro Acryl Dark Golden Brown were freehanded on. Edges were pulled out by a not-light-enough drybrush and the whole batch was hit with a light oilwash. The oil wash darkened these guys down way more than I was expecting. I could have gone back and fixed that when I put the oil wash on, but, meh, these are dirty clanners and I'm fine if their mechs look dirty too.

These other dudes (left to right) are Howler, Summoner (Thor), Rifleman IIC, and Locust IIC. The Bane and Howler are new to me but the Scouring Sands campaign is happening after all the Battletech I'm familiar with. Notably, I stopped playing around the time I went off to college way back in the last milennium. 

2026 finished mini counter: 7

2026 crafting challenge

This will be the seventh full year for this series of challenges which has been almost unbelievably productive. Keeping with last years' structure, I'm less interested in big counts, not that I don't like big counts, than getting through older categories in my pile of shamepotential. We're overdue for a Reaper Bones 7 which will push the goalposts further out but otherwise I've been fairly disciplined about not buying/printing a stupid number of figs for the last few years. With a little luck and a lot of work, we'll be under 500 left. 

Valid things:

• A finished piece or WIP representing a reasonable amount of progress
• Gaming terrain, prop, scatter built and/or printed but not just printed
• One or more painted minis
• A sketch in digital or traditional media
  
• An article or other piece of writing of, I dunno, 1000 words or so
• A Lego build of non-trivial complexity
• Other?  Dunno, categories are hard.

Goals:

• Twelve figures of significant quality featuring OSL/NMM/something else notable 
• Complete 2023 prints/purchases (<10)   
• Pick any two of these, bonus points for all three which is certainly possible:
• Complete Battletech collection (~100)   
• Complete Bones 5 kickstarter minis (~100)
• Complete Bones 6 kickstarter minis (~100)

 

2025 in review

2025 was one of the years of all time. Far more astute observers of culture have said and written way more than I could ever sanely do so I'ma leave it to the experts. Here's my little slice of reality parceled and presented in an almost-bite-sized-piece for your amusement. 

Hobbying 

Most of you are here for the glamor shots so let's lead with that. It feels like there was a lot going on thislast year and as a result I didn't paint nearly as many minis as I have been the last few years. Due to Battletech figs being on the whole easier to paint than the normal fantasy characters, I cranked out quite a lot in the last month which elevated the total to land at 5/week which I think is pretty respectable. 

 

I hit 2,000 minis painted lifetime sometime over the summer which seems significant and though I completed 13 high quality (for me) works for the display case, I'm not sure that quality is going up all that much though they're also not going any faster. 

 

What other stuff was going on that ate up so much time? 

 

I'm Building a Game!

It was probably inevitable that I'd get back to game development in my retirement and I guess that this was the time. At the end of 2024 I started messing around with Godot and at this point I don't even remember why. Turns out, it's not only very full featured, it's convenient in all the ways I wish Unity was. 

I've always said that you want to start small and keep it small if you want to finish with your sanity at least partially in tact so naturally I picked the second biggest thing that I'd always wanted to make. Roughly a thousand hours later and it feels like it should go up on Steam for fun and almost no profit, probably nextthis year. If you're bored and want to take a look, send me a ping.

 

Gaming 

Most of my gaming happened in the last quarter of thislast year but what it lacked in quantity, it more than made up in quality. 

 

Star Traders: Frontiers (2018): ***

If you like super deep space-opera-like captain sims, this game is for you. If you like straightforward and approachable games wrapped up in a bow, you might take a pass. Star Traders: Frontiers is extremely complex and does very little to explain how the game works (insert ominous foreshadowing here). The intent (as I gather it) is that you'll play it multiple times on multiple difficulties with multiple different builds and whatnot. I completed my first game on super duper easy mode in about 80 hours. Do with this information what you must. On the whole, it's a little clunky and near the end I found the endless "jump all over the galaxy to deliver someone's coffee" style quests super tedious. I really wanted to like this one (hence the 80 hours) but I don't see ever going back to it. 

 

Mechwarrior 5 Mercenaries: Shadow of Kerensky (2025): *****

There's been a lot of MW5:Mercs over the years and since MW5:Clans was released last  year, I was surprised to see a new expansion for the older game late in the year. My love of most things BattleTech is pretty well documented at this point so I had to buy it and had to start a new playthrough and had to begin at the earliest year possible so it'd be the longest possible. Notably, most of the new content is at the end of the timeline but it's not like I didn't know that. Smashing clanners is as satisfying as I'd expected and getting to go through all the Duncan Fisher missions again was an added bonus. Notably, every new expansion raises the power level a bunch so that first encounter was missing some of its edge, probably. 

 

Endless Sky (2015): ***

As a liker of space sims, Endless Sky seems to have everything I like: space-y combat, alien diplomacy, trading simulations, deep ship customization. Unfortunately, it really only delivers on one of those. The combat is iffy given that there are no ship stacking rules and the RNG can be particularly punishing even beyond the emphasis being on commanding a multiple ship fleet. The text is extremely over-wrought in places and there is just plain too much of it. The whole thing is tied up with an economic model that only a banker could love. The worst part, IMO, is that the customization system is so...fiddly. You've got multiple overlapping budgets to manage none of which is either super well documented or obvious to new players, and a fairly narrow list of places that you can get the components that actually matter that are inconveniently scattered all across the galaxy if you can even buy stuff there at all. Add to that the emphasis on multiple ship fleets and you're multiplying your frustration across a bunch of ships each with different weird sometimes hidden statistics. Not a fan of that. Also, the interface is only barely usable which makes everything just a bit more janky. I spent way too long on this game which I found to be mostly frustrating but it was free, still gets regular updates, and had a non-zero amount of legit good moments. 

 

Wildermyth (2021): *****

I purchased Wildermyth a while ago at the recommendation of a pal and I had opportunity to take a look at the end of 2025. It as a lot of aspects I really like and not terribly many that I don't. It has the trifecta I look for in indie games: distinctive style, interesting gameplay, good humor. The characters are cardboard cutouts and hop around the map in exactly the same way you would if you were using standees on a tabletop which I can't imagine isn't the intent. The dialog is all character-focused and the writing is good enough that I kind of felt bad when whupping some of the bads. It has a lot of replayability as one might guess from a game that's mostly procedural with the expected gajillion chievos if you're into such things. On the whole, it is well constructed and has a lot of charm. I really liked Wildermyth and if you've ever wondered what a non-grimdark and slightly more tactical version of Darkest Dungeon might be like, give it a shot.

 

Lego 

I hit the typical two shows again this year (BricksCascade in the spring and BrickCon in late summer) which spawned the usual flurry of activity and participated in the annual SHIPtember as per usual. We built a giant collab at BrickCon which showed well at least partially due to my insistence on lighting every ship. As a bonus, due to some very fiddly, fragile builds, we got a staff-selected award for the display. That was dope. I haven't super well documented those because, well, mostly I'm lazy but here's a collage of the shots I did take. You can find more deets at flickr.

 

Hardware Hackery

It hasn't come up super often in these uh-hallowed pixels, but I've been building computers since the mid 90s and have amassed a vast collection of mostly well-loved hardware. As a side-effect of doing a much needed deep clean on my house, thislast year, I re-organized some rooms and ended up with enough space to start tinkering again. Lots of said tinkering done and I've re-cataloged most of my collection and will hopefully be liquidating a lot of it in 2026 which pains me more than I'd like to admit. If you have a need or a want of mid-90s to more recent consumer computing hardware, drop me a line.

 

Furthermore, it's worth noting that the NAS I've had more or less since I moved to WA has been running non-stop plus or minus the (frequent) power outages we (don't) enjoy here. The drives were second hand when I got them and it's been a decade. That makes me nervous. I also ended up doing a bunch of speed tests and re-familiarizing myself with modern hard drives, SSDs, and NAS software. Fast forward a couple months and I've built a new NAS off of SSDs keeping the old NAS for backups, and have updated at least part of my network to (mostly) 2.5Gbps.  Good times.