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.

2019 Crafting challenge wrap-up

As 2019 winds to a close, my self-imposed crafting challenge was a success.  A week was enough time to do some reasonably sized stuff but spaced out enough that on super busy weeks it wasn't too big of a commitment.  If I have a regret, it's that it felt like too many of these ended up being video-only weeks.  I'll probably do something similar next year, too, so watch this space!

Week 39 interesting goblin minis
Week 38 horde of goblin minis
Week 37 Elethar map
Week 36 Thriemar map
Week 35 mini peg board
Week 34 mounted tree props
Week 33 a danger of kobold minis
Week 32 Eridani blueprints
Week 31 Lego Envoy and Barracuda
Week 30 dungeon stacker stackers
Week 29 Lego gunships
Week 28 Lego Pelican tanker
Week 27 video only
Week 26 video only
Week 25 video + SHIPtember
Week 24 video only
Week 23 video only
Week 22 video only
Week 21 video only
Week 20 video + 5 skellington minis
Week 19 video + Lego Eridani
Week 18 video + Kelldra map
Week 17 video only
Week 16 video only
Week 15 video + Regault battlepods
Week 14 video only
Week 13 video + Veritechs
Week 12 video only
Week 11 video + giant spider minis
Week 10 video + Oriens blueprints
Week 9 video only
Week 8 video + cobblestone tile repaint
Week 7 video only
Week 6 L-shaped building
Week 5 Lego freighters
Week 4 Lego gunships + mecha + alcohol article
Week 3 cobblestone tiles + dwarven brother minis
Week 2 Ezren, Rogan, female human ranger minis + coinage article
Week 1 Rolling box
Kickoff

Crafting challenge, week 39

Squeaking in just before the end of the year I hit my 100 figs painted with these four goblins.  These were the interesting ones in the set from Bones 4 and in a better world I wouldn't have rushed some of the details.  I think they'll be fine on the table but don't work under scrutiny.

I'll do a longer wrap up in a couple days in my increasingly non-award winning year in review post but I'll say a few things here since I'm thinking about it.  Even though I hit my goal, it feels like a hollow success.  I tried some new stuff out and learned a few things but feel like I ended the year only slightly better off than I started it.  I bought a lot of gear and got gains out of that but feel like everything this year was rushed to hit a deadline.  While I went faster, I feel like I did so at generally lower quality overall and I'm not sure that's a good trade.  I'll write more about this later.

2019 finished mini counter:  102/100

Crafting challenge, week 38

These are most of the goblins I've been working on over the last few weeks.  There have been good days and bad days and I tried a bunch of new stuff.  These and took somewhere in the range of 30ish hours over the 24 of them at fairly low quality--under table top quality which I am not happy with. 

For my own historical records, here's more or less what I did:

• Kind of cleaned mold lines (looked better while I was cleaning but the figs are white plastic)
• Primed, zenithaled with the airbrush
• Home-made wash + drybrush value sketch
• Green skintones put down with airbrush (painfully)
• Wet blended the different color coding; everything else was normal base + highlights
• Picked out some small details, pulled up some highlights
• Ruined everything with badly applied washes

These are in no way my best work but get me to within striking range of my goal.  I've got the four more interesting characters for next week as they're already mostly done.  

2019 finished mini counter:  98/100

Crafting challenge, week 37

Slightly filler-y entry this week because I've been really busy and burning hard on my small army of goblins.  This is another of the neighborhoods in Cedarwood and one that some stuff will probably happen in when we resume the campaign in the new year.  There might be another one of these next week because of typical holiday stuff.

So.  Goblins.  I'm at 74/100 for the year which is super disappointing.  There are 28 of them maybe just over half done given most of a day of painting yesterday.  I figure I've got eight to twelve hours left to finish them so there's still hope.

Crafting challenge, week 36

This week I've been super busy but ended up making some maps for Saturday's game.  I've made several of these this year and this isn't the first one to show up here.  We don't always use them but then again, they aren't hard to make, either.  The advice I gave in that post still stands:  GMing magic happens in the spaces between and every time I've filled in all the blanks I've been sad about it.  As usual, (c) 2019 me but feel free to use in your home games.

In other news, my goblins are going really slowly.  Despite batch painting being overall faster, the number of them makes it seem more daunting than it actually is.  I don't get many blocks of 3-4 uninterrupted hours and I have a hangup for not finishing a step completely.  Luckily, Vince gives this advice which I'm going to experiment with as soon as I can get back to the painting desk.

Crafting challenge, week 35

If there's a thing I like to build other than spaceships and buildings (and games...and stories...and probably other stuff) it's tools.  But before we get to the main event we need some background stuff.

I'm in the process of moving furniture around.  Earlier this year I moved my crafting area from downstairs to a small bedroom upstairs that also contained a bunch of office stuff.  While this was an improvement, it was awfully cramped.  While this house is significantly smaller than my last, I'm offended that I've been using the space so badly.  This round of moves frees up the large master bedroom complete with its own sinks which will be the new crafting/office/misc stuff room.

When I moved the crafting area upstairs, the first thing I built was a pegboard for storing mini blister packs since I have so many.  This didn't get logged here for...reasons (I can't actually remember why).  It was one of my old painting blotters with some bamboo skewers hotglued to it.  While this worked OK, the hot glue wasn't strong and couldn't hold much weight.  I had to move stuff anyway, so I took the time to rebuild it.

Instead of the janky "this was a paint blotter" pattern that was on it, I primed it with one of my ancient cans of mini primer.  I also poked holes at an upward angle to a) keep the blisters from falling off, and b) to allow for a stronger connection.  These were then glued on front and back.  So far it's holding but hopefully it won't need another go around.

I'm also painting a passel of goblins but they're going very slowly.

Crafting challenge, week 34

This week we have a late post more because I got super busy cleaning and moving furniture and less because I had nothing to show.  Granted, there isn't a lot to show but here you go.  These trees were purchased months ago and replace the low-rent Lego trees I'd been using.  They're hot glued to bases and are surprisingly sturdy though the bigger ones probably still want a washer or coin glued to the bottom.  It's been on my list for a while and I finally got around to sort it out. 

Crafting challenge, week 33

This week I've got kobolds.  Lots of kobolds.  A danger of kobolds.  There are seventeen of them here, some of them very poorly molded (the dudes on the right).  My painting has not helped this. 

The dudes on the left are super fun in all kinds of super fun ways.  I spent some time experimenting with finer details than I'd normally capture because these sculpts were so fun despite the fact that I really wanted to crank through them so I could hit my target of 100 this year.  If I had it to do again (and I might) I'd possibly spend more time to get a better result.

So next up we get some orksgoblins.  there are 26 which, if my basic arithmetic checks out, means finishing those puts the 2019 total at 102.  They're already primed, zenithaled and value sketched.  I'm going to experiment base coating with my super cheap airbrush because a) I like using it, and b) this's supposed to faster.   We'll see.

2019 finished mini counter:  74/100

Crafting challenge, week 32

I'd hoped to have more but things didn't work out the way I wanted them to.  The image over there is the schematics for the Eridani pictured somewhere.  I rushed through it if I'm honest but I don't think that's too big of a problem. 

This is probably too big of a thing for running actual fights but it's pretty useful to establish fictional positioning.  Also, good for catastrophes.  Feel free to use in your personal games and for non-commercial purposes.

In other news, the thing I hoped to put up here is a painted danger of kobolds.  Yes, that's the plural for kobolds according to me.  They still need a couple layers of washes but otherwise the 17 of them are done.  That would put me at 74 total.  With seven weeks remaining in the year I gotta finish like four per week to make it.  It's looking unlikely at this point. 

Crafting challenge, week 31

It will come as no surprise that this year also isn't my year to do nanowrimo so I got that goin' for me.  Instead, I'll throw some lego builds here.

The Envoy is the last of the bulk freighters I'll do for now as a variation on the Pelican earlier.  The other bulk freighters (Mule, Zephyr) had containers port and starboard.  The two newest have containers dorsal and ventral.  I don't know which of those is actually better--it probably depends on the configuration of the stations they're loading/unloading at. 

The Barracuda started as an engine table scrap I liked so I kept going.  I liked the engines a lot and got up to the guns and realized that it wanted to be a lot bigger than I wanted it to be.  There's a better ship in there, I think, and if I get some time this week I'll try to find it.

More design work as well this week but as usual, nothing to show yet.  Maybe a screenshot of the character sheet will find its way here if I can get the bugs shaken out.

Next week:  video?  If not next week then I'm feeling good for the week after.

Crafting challenge, week 30

I finished off my dungeon stacker stackers this week.  Well, my second try at, anyway.  The first ones were built too small and wouldn't fit on top of the stackers.  These are supposed to be ancient light stone constructions that have been left out in the elements for millennia.

The wall tops are Readi-board with the paper pulled off of one side and textured with a Green Stuff World rolling pin.  The walls are XPS with the smaller sections textured the same way.  The larger piece intended for gates was hand-textured with a ball point pen and rolled up foil wad.

If I had it to do over again (and I might) I'd probably draw on the bricks like the big gate piece since that looked the best.  The texturing on the smaller pieces is weak and the wash didn't pick them out as well as I'd expected.  I probably should have started with a darker base coat in either case.  The only piece that looks reasonable is the big one so I might have another go at these.

This week I also did a bunch of design work but there isn't anything to show there.

Crafting challenge, week 29

This week marks the first in five months that I haven't done a video and I might not make one next week, either.  I made it through 22 consecutively which is its own accomplishment and looking back, I probably made six or so that I thought were OK (the rest were crap).  I'm not going to miss the stress of figuring out what to say, how to say it, and then shouting into a microphone for several hours each week. 

Instead, I've been doing other creative things.  The ships shown here are more bits from the post-BrickCon excitement.  We're planning a collab hopefully to be shown at BrickCan 2020 if all goes well.  I've got a lot more to build but there's time yet so other than my pals crushing it in the "build ships for a collab next year" department, I'm not in any particular hurry.

Also this week, I started building some dungeon stacker stackers because we're going to have some wall combat action sometime real soon, maybe next weekend, and I like to be prepared.  They're built and primed but painting will be a couple days yet.  Unless something goes terribly wrong, pictures should land here next week.

Last but by no means least, I've started redesigning my fantasy game.  I've got some ideas on how to make it work better and honestly, I can't leave well enough alone. I'm pooling my learnings from the Sci-Fi game I mostly built earlier this year and additional learnings from Fate and Blades in the Dark to hopefully streamline some stuff even further.  Part of me wants to wait until I've had time to study Genesys but given the size of that book, I figure that's a ways off yet. 

So far, the new system looks a lot meaner and a lot leaner.  Combat and other resolution rolls should be streamlined and some of the last corners get knocked off of the majority of mechanics.  As an added bonus, something akin to aspects in Fate should replace the normal belief system that players find so hard to wrestle with.  I'm not 100% sold on it yet, but it's also in its infancy.  If all goes well, we can trot it out sometime soon--hopefully in time for chapter 2 possibly in a couple weeks' time.

Crafting challenge, week 28

I am starting to be stupidly busy (again) and it's way past time to wind down the video a week thing that's been such a rollercoaster.  At the very least I'd like to not have a release when my Saturday game runs because I feel like the quality of the game is dropping because I'm thinking about it less.  This week's video is here.

Last week was BrickCon and one of the things I like best about going to cons is all the ideas and excitement that they ignite.  The problem is that I'm usually suuuuuper tired and by the time I've recovered I'm busy with something else or the excitement has died down.  This time I made a conscious effort to build right after the con and here's the first postable result.

In other news:  we're looking pretty doomed to finish 100 minis by year's end.

Crafting challenge, week 27

This is a video-only week (here) but mostly because BrickCon ate up most of the time.  And for those of you who noticed that I post-dated this one, it's because I forgot to publish it amidst all the BrickCon festivities.