Nipponpalooza part 2 (2021 week 6)

This week we have the mounted soldiers which look unsurprisingly a lot like the foot soldiers.   Like I mentioned last week, horses do count toward the total since that's how I've got them recorded in my master list.  

These guys were a mess to assemble.  Because I bought them as bare sprues, I didn't have instructions and I fiddled with them for a long while before hitting up the intertoobs in frustration.  That was better but they were still awfully fiddly.  I didn't end up including most of the extra swords and other bejangles on these guys because again, this was supposed to be a speed paint.  

For this week I put extra time into the horses a) because I could, and b) because up to this point I'd never painted horses before.  I was helped by the fact that the riders were already painted as part of last week's festivities.  As part of my time-saving planning, I painted them all in the same pattern (Bay) with no other distinctions.  I haven't done the homework to know what's appropriate for this time period and breed and in general know very little about horses.  Someday I'll fix that, probably the next time I go out of my way to paint horses, but not today!

At this point I had horse flesh, barding, and other bejangles left to go and I got more paint on the bases for good measure.  The horses themselves were mostly painted with Daler Rowney Red Earth and Liquitex Raw Umber inks highlit with a light fleshtone, in this case, an ancient pot of Reaper paints.  I knew these were more transparent than the normal acrylics I'm used to and boy howdy were they ever.  Despite many (many) layers they only mostly cover and once I brought it all together at the end with a glaze, all of my careful highlighting evaporated.  Notably, these dry considerably darker than when they go on which was a surprise and they dry glossy which wasn't unexpected.  The barding which I only noticed I'd painted incorrectly when they were nearly complete was done with more normal acrylics with a wash throwing on some final highlights and metallics at the very end.

The bases, if you're curious, are potting bark glued to the round with texture paint and flocking to make it look less like what it actually was and they might sell better if I'd chosen less bark-like colors.  They were painted with some random palette sludge and mostly highlit with the same random fleshtone I had laying around.  This worked way better than I expected even after Vince told me that fleshtones were a good basing highlight color.  I assembled everything with the horses pinned before priming and I'm super unhappy about the leaping horse having a paper clip through its belly.  I've seen this fig on its two hind legs but the sculpt really doesn't look correct that way.  If I were bringing these guys to a higher quality level, I would have painted the riders, mounts, and bases separately and assembled them after the fact but this wasn't the goal.  

Overall, I think these guys are acceptable.  If you add a couple hours of fiddly assembling plus the six-ish hours I spent painting the mounts, we end up at 33 hours for the batch of 27 which feels reasonable given where they landed.  None of these guys are going to win any awards but that wasn't really the point.  I learned a lot about batch painting with my terrible airbrush and I'm certain I can speed this process up.  I may manufacture such an exercise later this year so watch this space!

This concludes Nipponpalooza 2021 and I'm confident in saying that I'm well ahead of both my goal and one fig per day so far this year.  I don't expect to maintain this pace but it's good (for once) to be ahead right out of the gates.

2021 finished mini counter:  56/100

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.

That's a whole lotta figs

Most folks have a rough time with numbers.  I can say I painted 226 figs this year but when you lay it all out, it's much more impressive.  

That's a whole lotta figs.

2020 Crafting challenge wrap-up

The end of the year marks many things, two of which are gluttony and year-end wrap ups.  This post is the latter.  Almost exactly a year ago I wrote this post talking about all of the things I made for my inaugural "a thing a week" challenge.  This post would be this year's write up.  

As crappy a 2020 has been overall, it was a good year for hobbying.  I think I did well on this challenge, finishing up officially in the middle of August and blowing past all of my original goals. Working from home 3/4 of the year helped with this in no small way.  Officially:

• 226/50 miniatures painted
• 8/5 miniatures pushing quality
• 3/1 serious attempts at non-metallic metals
• 6/5 "buildings" of reasonable size pushing detail and quality

2020 Kickoff
Week 1:  paint rack #1
Week 2:  Nolzur's Human Female Ranger (crossbow variant), high quality mini #1
Week 3:  Reaper Bones Highland Heroine, high quality mini #2
Week 4:  Cedarwood neighborhood map
Week 5:  3 sketches
Week 6:  Cedarwood Playset (take 2)
Week 7:  2 sketches
Week 8:  Ending a Campaign (article)
Week 9:  Concept art categorizer program
Week 10:  Counter & chip holder, sadly unused
Week 11:  Four deck Golden Sun liftship token
Week 12:  Single deck Knarr token
Week 13:  Single deck Skow token
Week 14:  Single deck War Cog token
Week 15:  Three deck Cutter token
Week 16:  Five Warlord Games Viking Bondi in green
Week 17:  article on Bannerlord
Week 18:  Five Viking Bondi in blue
Week 19:  Five Viking Bondi in red
Week 20:  Five Viking Bondi in brown
Week 21:  Drow Wizard, Orc Smasher, Artemis Entreri, Deepwood Sentinel, Shield Maiden
Week 22:  Skow and Warcog liftships in foam, "buildings" #1 and #2
Week 23:  Immeril, 2x mimics, chest, stump, Seething Knight, Royal Pikeman, 2x Amazon Blademistresses, 2x Nightblades, Leech Medic, Liege Knight
Week 24:  Single deck Knarr liftship in foam + magnetized masts and Skow #2, "buildings" #3, #4
Week 25:  Three deck cutter, four deck Golden Sun, "buildings" #5, #6
Week 26:  Gauth, Gwyddis, 3x Gernadier Fighting Men
Week 27:  Bases, Hellhound, Hajad, Kogo, Dijoro, high quality minis #3 and #4
Week 28:  Dragonman, Juliette, Deladrin, Wererat Stalker, Wererat Assassin
Week 29:  Kelainen, 2x Wraith Slayers, Wraith Lord & Bodyguard, 2x Wraith Duelists
Week 30:  Dungeon & Lasers scatter x15
Week 31:  paint rack #2, painting rod holder #1
Week 32:  2x Clerics with Staff and Warhammer, 2x Thieves with Shortsword and Sling
Week 33:  painting rod holder #2, oil paint bottles
Week 34:  Mal, Shadoweyes, 11-010b paladin, 42-081d Frankish Command Set, 12-050a Elf Warrior
Week 35:  4x Dark Dwarves, 2x Giant Maggots, Animunar Winterbeard, Wizard
Week 36:  Dracolisk, 3x Drow Duelists, , 4x Nolzur's Ballista
Week 37:  2x Wrath of Kings Whitemane Duelists
Week 38:  Magic items video, Adventures in Mini Painting #5 and  #6
Week 39:  4x Macedonian Phalangites, Greek Hoplite Command (warrior & dual flutist), Bril Le Anti footsoldier, 2x Tabaxi Rogues
Week 40:  8x Greek Hoplites
Week 41:  13x Stark Sworn Swords
Week 42:  12x Viking Bondi
Week 43:  2x Landsnecht Command Frames, 2x War of the Roses fully armored chaps, 2x Reaper Bones Caryatid Columns, 1x Reaper Bones Gravestone of Protection, printed stump
Week 44:  7x printed skeletons
Week 45:  3x Nolzur's spiders, Bones 4 vegetable cart, 4x Caesar's Legions Command Sprue, 2x Imperial Romans:  Plastic Scorpion crew
Week 46:  printed elfdwarf archer, 2x Reaper Bones Town Guard, Aina, Justina
Week 47:  9x printed skeletons
Week 48:  15x small printed spiders, 4x printed knights, Sir William the Peacekeeper, Dark Dwarf Striker
Week 49:  4 sets of 6x small scatter, 3x Reaper Bones Bandits, set of small scatter
Week 50:  12x broken columns, 4x color coded levers, 2x printed Cat Rogues, 3x printed Night Cult Soldiers, Marine from Chainmail
Week 51:  Osprey v2 in Lego
Week 52:  3x Grenadier Fantasy Personalities, Vatanis Maggotcrown Warlock, 6x Graveyard Finials, Iron Maiden, Skull Candelabra, Iron Golem, Mono and Duodrone, 5x armored goblins, 5x color coded knights, 2x Nolzur's xorns and an abyssal maw from Chainmail

A thing a week 2020, week 52

And we're home!  This is the penultimate post of 2020's crafting challenge but fear not, you'll be getting a wrap-up and a new challenge for 2021 which I goddamn hope is better than 2020 (the year, not the challenge, but dare to dream).  

These three are from Grenadier Fantasy Warriors Personalities, specifically 5611 Barbarian, 5612 Fighting Man, and 5613 Foot Knight which I couldn't find a link to. I'm pretty sure they came three to a blister when I bought them which might have been in the mid-90s or the mid-aughts--I've had a lot to drink since then. They came with three polearms only one of which was ever found so the non-knights got spare spears that I had in my bits box. For all three I tried to push the contrast a little more than normal but all three required different approaches. The skin tones on the barbarian followed the same scheme as the marine above. I did some "sculpting with paint" to make up for some of the mold's misgivings. Like I talkedtyped about last week, a lot of the highlighting was done with a Vallejo Model Air light skintone at Vince's recommendation.  The foot knight was lazy-painted with an airbrush with a bunch of manual shadows and highlighting with metallics and Badger Ghost Tints respectively. All three weighed in at around four hours total though it's hard to put a real number on it since I've been bouncing around the pile of stuff on my workbench.  Oh, and if it looks like the spears don't actually fit in their hands, it's because they've been superglued many, many times over the years and I was too lazy to scape it all out.

I have very mixed feelings about this Vatanis, Maggotcrown Warlock from Reaper Bones. I purchased this figure to represent a player character and did not do anywhere near enough homework before I did so. That was late march when it still looked like we might play in person at some point. Mold lines on this particular figure are awful and they run over all of the difficult details, details of which there are way too many of most of which I don't like. He feels busy for busy's sake and I don't approve. He sat on my workbench for months until I finally got fed up enough to finish painting him and not particularly well, I might add. I should have worked the blends more. I should have been more careful with the washes and shading. I should have done a lot of stuff but I didn't and he's done and I'm not going to be sad about it. I wouldn't hazard to guess how long I spent painting this guy but it was way too long for where he ended up.  

Finishing out my Bones 4 pile of random collections of samey things are these six Graveyard Finial:  Skulls.  Given the problems I had with the last few of these sets, namely that paint didn't want to stick to them, I super washed these before brush priming and still had a lot of trouble with these.  Maybe because they're small they were hard to toothbrush but I scrubbed at them real good.  They were mostly drybrushed and washed like most of my bone things but I really didn't spend a lot of time on them--I just wanted them done.  

This stylish candelabra would be at home in any wizard's arcanum.  It's from the Dungeons and Lasers kickstarter and sat on my desk for most of the year.  With it is a Wizkids Deep Cuts Iron Maiden which was a gift from a pal a while ago.  This was fun because a) it isn't a thing I'd normally buy, and b) it gave me a real fun opportunity to weather and rust some stuff which isn't a thing I often do.  The candelabra is from Dungeon & Lasers kickstarter and took up space on my workbench for most of the year picking up paint when something appropriate was unused on my palette.  It's basically Vallejo Metal Color Gold covered with Badger Minitaire ghost tint.  

That brings us to Wizkids Deep Cuts Cage and Chains.  These are also things gifted to me that I normally wouldn't buy and super took advantage of lazy airbrush painting followed by fun weathering.  The base is detachable and was lazy painted in brown with a wash.  After weathering I did a slight drybrush in a lighter silver color to pop out some of the edges that might get hit more often.  I had a lot of fun with these--turns out that weathering stuff is really fun!  I suspect we'll see more of that next year.  

These three are the last gifts in this batch from the same pal.  When I had the airbrush out and metallics in the cup, they got paint too.  This is a Nolzur's Iron Golem and basically follows the same pattern as the Iron Maiden above.  The two gold fellows are Nolzur's Monodrone and Duodrone.  They're anti-zenithaled with purple which didn't go on cleanly but it doesn't show super well on the gold dudes and was mostly covered up with additional shadow work on the golem.  Beyond picking out details like cracks and eyes and whatnot, there wasn't much going on with these guys.  I was surprised to learn that I didn't have a golem before this guy because it's a monster I use quite a lot.  I'm not sure if I'll use the Monodrone and Duodrone in play but they're fun enough models that I'll be looking for a reason to do so.  All told the three of these were done in around four hours.  

These five are armored goblins, part of a pack of 6 with one featured at the end of last year unbeknownst to me.  More specifically, they are Armored Goblin Leader complete with Giuliani dentition, Armored Goblin Spearmen, and Armored Goblin Sworsdmen.  These didn't get painted at that point because they were in parts!  I'm not used to gluing Reaper Bones together and they proved more fiddly than I expected.  I painted them up as hobgoblins because it's a monster I use a lot and it felt more proper that hobs would actually find, keep, and use real armor more than normal goblins.  These were airbrushed in metallics with a purple anti-zenithal.  More shading on the armor and other details were done with brushes notably with Badger Ghost Tints Purple and Engine Oil, the latter of which I'm starting to like a lot more than Nuln Oil.  All told we're talking maybe six hours for the five of them including assembly.

Much like the hobs above, these five are from Bones 4 and required assembly.  They were also fiddly and airbrushed with a base coat of metallics and an anti-zenithal of purple.  The teal knight next to the black knight doesn't read super well but all of the other ones landed pretty much where I wanted them to.  I put extra time on their highlighting and shadows especially on their armor which mostly doesn't show in the photos.  These guys were a lot more fiddly than the hobs but I had some time to spend and knocked them out in about six hours total.  I think they work even if they're super big.

These rocky looking dudes are D&D xorns.  Two of them are Nolzur's and like most of the line look nowhere near as nice in person as they do in the renders, and one of them is from the Chainmail Box set and for some reason called an Abyssal Maw.  I might not have painted these guys yet except that a) they were prepped and ready to go on my workbench, b) they don't require a ton of effort, and c) I was close to breaking 225 and I'm all about over-delivering.  They were anti-zenithaled and the abyssal maw was zenithaled since he was primed all over.  The first coats were mostly a brown coat provided by Pro Acryl Transparent brown + some random palette sludge green and whatever I had laying around to give them more visual interest.  Some drybrushing, a wash, some details on their teeth and eyes and a candycoat on the eyes got them here.  This is fairly lazy painting and they took maybe a couple hours with another one thrown in as prep for the abyssal maw which had to be assembled.

That's going to do it for A Thing a Week 2020, folks.  Tune in soon for the wrap-up and A Thing a Week 2021!

Final 2020 finished mini counter:  226/50

A thing a week 2020, week 51

One more to go after today for 2020 which honestly can't be done soon enough.  In breaking with recent tradition, we're not talking minis today.  I'd feel weird holding a completed miniature done this year but counting toward next year so since I've got time off right now and I'm doing a lot of painting, we'll blow out 2020 with a flurry of hobbying...and some setup so that 2021 can start stronk.

This is a rebuild of a ship I built way back in 2020 which is a design from the comic I drew in the mid 90s.  It's interesting to think about all the stuff that's changed since then.  I'd only built three SHIPs, been to one show, and won one trophy (currently fourteen, ten, and eight respectively).  I've moved three times and changed jobs five times which is more of a reflection on the volatility of the games biz more than anything.  I've re-kindled my love of tabletop RPGs, built four-ish full systems (some variations) and finished three multi-year campaigns.  All of my mini painting this century is between these two points as is all of my BBQing and coffee roasting.  Seems like a lot when I writetype it out like that.

The original build was awfully fiddly and really didn't want to stay together at all.  I think I brought it to BrickFair VA 2011.  For the next four-ish years I've thought I should rebuild it.  In fact, when I moved to my current home in the Pacific Northwest and got my Lego area sorted sometime in 2015, I did try to rebuild it.  Badly.  I put maybe twenty hours into it trying to get the angles right and experimenting with getting the right proportions.  I may have gone through three iterations of different construction methods before chucking the thing with most of my dark blue collection in a bin and hiding it under a table.

Another five years would go by before I revisited the project.  This year has been demonstrably crap and my work from home desk is my Lego desk.  SHIPtember probably wasn't happening this year but it really couldn't without a real space to build.  My second table in this room is smaller and has been a dumping ground for Lego related stuff for years now.  Among other things, I made a concerted effort to clean it and low and behold, the Osprey prototype turned up.  I'd really like to build another SHIP, a really big and complicated one, so right around Virtual BrickCon this year, I got back to it.

Another twenty-ish hours in small chunks over a month or so solved most of the biggest problems I had.  It sits at an angle to reduce the weight on the wings which sags noticeably if the ship is horizontal.  Also, it looks like it's taking off which is cool.  I'm glad to have this guy complete, not just because it frees up quite a lot of brick in a color I quite like.  It's more that it isn't hanging over my head anymore which counts for something.

A thing a week 2020, week 50

This week...minis.  No one should be surprised at this point, I suppose, but first:  some housekeeping.

I forget when these columns were painted but the date on the source photos is from early May.  I'd also forgotten that I'd taken the pictures so imagine my surprise to find out that I indeed had these to show for this year.  These are assorted Tiny Terrain columns which I'm pretty sure are resin casts of a filament print.  These were washed and drybrushed as much of my stonework and I feel comfortable counting these as three toward my 2020 numbers.

These four color-coded levers are from the Dungeon and Lasers kickstarter from last year. I quite like these and expect to use them in my in-person games quite a lot when that's a thing we can do again. Not much to say here; they're pretty straightforward and spent most of the year sittng on my workbench picking up random bits of paint when it was available. Best guess for total paint time is a couple hours for all four which seems really slow.

These two are 3D printed cat rogues.  Well, at least, I hope that's obvious.  As has been established previously, there are a lot of cat people in my games and this guy's STL was free which is right up my alley (no pun intended).  These guys had several challenges that mostly went OK.  His fur is black which is already rough, but his coat was also supposed to be black with a yellow shirt.  I wanted to differentiate these two as warm and cold greys but I think I over did it.  He reads as a blue cat wearing a purple cloak.  The yellow is played by yellow ochre.  Everything was pre-washed with Pro Acryl transparents and finished off with other Pro Acryl paints.  I've been spending a lot of time painting with terrible paints so this was a special treat.  In all, we're talking around five hours for both of them which I'm not unhappy with.  I'm pretty sure I'll print these guys again so next time around I think I'll try to desaturate the dark colors a little more--they're a bit stark.  

These three are 3D printed night cult soldiers I also got for free.  I think they go to a wargame that I don't play but they were a) fun looking, and, b) free so I picked them up, printed, and painted them.  I didn't need them to be all the same color so they aren't, though I'm a little disappointed in the level of details on them.  That said, I think they turned out pretty well given the time spent and I could see printing a few more to represent cultists or something.  They were a speed paint done in around three hours for the lot of them, blasting past my extended-extended 2020 goal.  One notable experiment with these guys is that they're highlighted with a blend of the base color and a light skintone as recommended by Vince.  This works amazingly well even on the ochre color and I'm really starting to prefer this to highlighting with warm off whites.

Right around the turn of the century, Wizards of the Coast reached back into their backlog for a thing to capitalize on. Chainmail is arguably one of the foundational works for all of tabletop roleplaying. It was a set of miniature wargame rules from a time when miniatures were a) primitive, b) limited, and c) made of lead. This buff lad is the marine from the starter set. He's painted not particularly well but then again, I don't particularly like this figure. Best way to get yourself killed in a real fight? Don't wear sufficient armor. At any rate, this guy's been sitting on my workbench for a while and I need to clean up some space for the beginning of next year's festivities. I experimented quite a lot with his skin tones which worked out OK even if my color choices were poor. All told, he was around 3 hours from start to finish.

2020 finished mini counter:  202/50

A thing a week 2020, week 49

Welp, on the week I was working on this, somewhere in the middle of November, I was trying to get the point that I could clean off one (really, both) of my hobby tables.  As part of this exercise I tried to work through the veritable army sitting primed and shaded on my workbench.  I've also been really busy so I'm bummed about having finished most of my lazy painting figs already.

These six...whatevers these are Reaper claims to be Graveyard Finials: Mystic and came through Reaper Bones 4.  I think they look like lumpy globes but I figured they were magic so I painted them thusly.  This was mostly a speed paint through the months as I had the right color paints around.  I wouldn't hazard a guess to the painting time if I'm honest but for some reason paint beaded up off of them even after priming twice.  I'll probably use them as puzzle pieces if we ever get to play in person again.  Bones 4 counts the six of them as one fig so they'll count one toward my total.

These six are clearly gargoyles and also came from Reaper Bones 4 but I can't find a link to them.  In actuality they were painted forever ago but I need to stop pushing quite so much of a bow wave since we're running out of year.  These are the epitome of lazy painting:  basically primed + wash + drybrush and *blam* stone, or at least something that passes for it.  I toyed with the idea of tinting them but ended up not and they also only count as one toward my goal.  Curse you Bones 4 mini counting incongruities!  Painting time for these is probably counted in minutes.  

These six, similarly, are Graveyard Finials:  Orbs and similarly six linkless flamey pots. These guys also had the seriously distressing feature of paint not sticking to them even after serious priming.  I have no idea why but it was super annoying.

I did the same color coding as the finials above for the same reason:  painting them all the same color seemed lame and also as stated above, I have need of color-coded tchotchkes for various puzzles and markers I use in my games.  

Next up we have scatter from Dungeons and Lasers kickstarter from last year. Stairs and other scatter showed up in week 30 and these were painted, photographed, and forgotten about right around then. The two statues were painted just like the gargoyles and the barrels were drybrushed then glazed.

The sword and the stone (minus the metallics which came after) and the dragon skull were washed and drybrushed like the statues.  The hardest part was the coffin, especially since the lid fits on it and I couldn't super easily drybrush the skellington within.  There's no good accounting for these but four toward the goal seems appropriate.  

These three are Reaper Bones Brigands from...yeah, you guessed it:  Bones 4.  These are also very cartoony figures but I like these a lot more.  I paid quite a lot of attention to detail and really wanted to push the contrast on these guys.  The green, an ancient Reaper pot, was highlit with a Vallejo Air Beige which did some real work lightening the dark green.  I'm not great at layering but this one was awfully fun as the highlights built up.  Next, I took the browns and tans of the rest of the fig to a relatively high contrast. I think this worked OK.  The faces were actually done first as I'd done a "facing" pass on many of the figs on the work bench.  All told these three less-than-savory creatures were done in around six hours total.

2020 finished mini counter:  193/200