Gnollathon week 1 (2021 week 28)

I've been looking for new ways to speed paint and recently I ran into this video by Marco Frisoni using oils and gurdurnnit I haven't painted in oils in a long time. (This one's good too.) What would make that better? Gnolls! This week we kick off a new theme in a big 'ol batch for use in my every-other-Saturday game.

These are ten Frostgrave Gnolls, the first ten of whom were painted about a gajillionty years ago (ok, it was actually late 2018).  I love these figs and some day when I don't have a pile of potential in the four digit range, I will buy another box. These guys are supposed to be a speed paint. I feel like I type that a lot. Instead they were an experiment and I think it's turned out well.

We start, as usual, with a prime, shadows from below in Payne's Grey ink, and zenithal white from above. In a video I watched recently, someone noted that you want to zenithal that reads white from above.(Marco again? Can't remember). This matches pretty well with a thing that I noticed doing glaze speed painting--that my highlights aren't super bright. So for these guys I switched back to a white ink, Daler Rowney, like the Payne's Grey. This did seem to fix my zenithal problems but I pretty much painted over the whole thing anyway.

Next up I did a flat basecoat which is not normally a thing I do. I'm either starting with a Pro Acryl transparent base or a shaded basecoat which I like a lot better. Both of these add contrast cheaply and easily which is a better set up for the typical acrylic many layers method that I've been doing since, well, January, and it felt very, very wrong. I used an ancient pot of blue Reaper Pro Paints that I bought just after the turn of the millennium and a Vallejo Game Color terra cotta that I like a lot. The browns were played by my old (and terrible) Army Painter paints with backups in white from an off white Vallejo Game Color and metallics by Vallejo Game Air Chainmail Silver. In this case I was painting some 3d prints in the batch which fight with the normal Vallejo Metal Color Steel that I might otherwise prefer.

Now things got crazy. Re-activating my prepared oil paints, I cut up some makeup sponges, pulled out my q-tips, and found my eyeliner sponges (something like this and boy does my Amazon purchase history look weird). I slopped down an oil wash mostly in the right colors on the first fig and then wiped off most of it with the aforementioned wipey team. This mostly worked. The yellow and brown mix did not play nice with the blue mix as one might expect and the result was a mess but I soldiered through and even did some minor highlights. Every figure from there on out was washed in variations on the same color with a mustard-y wash for the base.

This was fun and they got better with each gnoll. There are three vectors to control here: the thickness of the paint, the length of time on the mini before wiping it off, and the color of the wash. I experimented with all three and by the tenth one I think I finally got it. Ten to fifteen minutes is what seemed to work the best for me in a relatively humid and slightly warm environment. This was just enough time to slop paint on three of them (the last three in this case) before going to wipe off most of the paint. You want to avoid pressing too hard on the fig even if you want to take off most of the wash, say, on their adorable gnoll-y faces, and if you don't let the wash set for a bit, capillary action will pull most of it off into the sponge. The consistency that worked well for me is around halfway between a well mixed Army Painter paint and a Vallejo Model Air. For the color, lighter colors were fine but the darker colors seemed to work the best, even on the blue base.

The last step was highlighting which I also did in oils after a day of paint drying on the figs. I'd considered waiting a couple days and finishing details with acrylics but wanted to do some sweet, sweet oil blends since I had them out. I also futzed around a bit with edge highlights but I don't think those turned out super well. Probably my paint was too thick.

This has been a fun return to oils and I suspect there will be more of these shenanigans in the near future. These guys were prepped in right around fifteen hours including assembly and painting was completed in around twelve of those hours. That seems good given the outcome and that I did a bunch of experimentation along the way. Next time should be faster! 

2021 finished mini counter: 158/100

A thing a week 2021, week 27 (desert forest)

And now for something different. My current every-other-Saturday game is in a desert and I didn't feel like deciduous trees would cut it. Turns out, it's really hard to get models of date palms and other desert trees. What you can get is coconut palms and most people wouldn't know the difference. One of my players is from Guam and does know the difference. I've sworn him to secrecy so we should be fine.

These are literally the least expensive coconut palms I could find on Amazon. Notably, today, I've found some less expensive ones but I didn't find them when I ordered mine. They are not great props but they'll work and they were inexpensive so here we go. Step 1: scrape mold lines. They're made in very soft and cheap plastic as one might expect but that results in some pretty heinous mold lines. I didn't bother trying to deal with the mold lines on the leaves which come off in separate pieces but dealing with the trunks wasn't hard.

Step 2: base them. This was slightly harder than you might imagine. The larger trees are large enough to want to fall over pretty commonly. I weighted the larger 32mm bases with some steel nuts I had lying around which make them almost stable. The larger ones are still a mess. These were all hot glued down to a base and textured with Vallejo texture paste which is my current go-to. While I'd normally throw some grit down on the wet paste to give it some variety; these guys are terrain and don't really warrant such steps.

Step 4 is washing the trunks. The leaves pull off so this wasn't hard. Step 5 is painting the texture paste. I didn't bother priming because I didn't think it was necessary and still don't have the airbrush control to not get it all along the trunk. Step 6 is black rimming the base and that's what we see in the "glamour" shot. These do break one of my rules: avoid obscuring the battlefield, but they're thin enough that I'm not super worried about it. These work and I'm counting them as "buildings." Maybe I should rename the requirement as "terrain" or something. Next year I guess.

2021 finished buildingterrain counter: 5/5

A thing a week 2021, week 26 (cheap & easy painting)

Not all weeks are filled with high effort art. Sometimes, just sometimes, I spam out some of the crap I've had sitting around on my desk as quickly and cheaply as I can. (I like to pretend that this makes all the other painting I do all that much better.) Remember: just because it's cheap, doesn't necessarily mean it's crap.

These are two sets of Reaper Bones Bags and Jars and looking up the link took almost as long as it took to paint these. They count two to a pack for reasons I don't fully comprehend but they're done and that counts for something. These are zenithaled as normal (yes, I verbed that again) with Daler Rowney Payne's Gray from below and Pro Acryl Ivory from the top. It's a simple set of glazes with brown and terra cotta. They're highlighted minimally (which shows) but they were done to the tune of like fifteen minutes. I might feel guilty about padding my mini count if I weren't already over my goal. 

Next to them is an orby platformy thing, otherwise known as Tiny Terrain Seer's Stone. It's drybrushed and washed and re-drybrushed and re-washed ad nauseum. It's been on my painting desk for a while and I don't like that I can see the striations from the original print (it's a resin cast). I went back and forth with how I wanted it to look but I settled on a not-subtle-enough OSL over dark grey stone. All I know is it's the best color: painted.

Next up we have a Legend of Drizzt board game Handmaiden of Lolth. If I'm honest, I mistook it as a Roper and was all ready to lazy-paint it in a stone scheme. Well, joke's on me! Instead, the candle-like dirty yellow is mostly played by a mix of Pro Acryl transparent yellow and brown over the same zenithal above. Highlights were played by that with some random yellow and some random white. Because I (still) didn't want to spend a lot of effort on this fig, I only did highlighting around the eyes, top of the "head", and top of the tentacles. It's really obvious when you compare the front to the back. The eye is glossed with a Reikland Fleshshade Gloss which I use infrequently enough to forget that it'll pull up white paints. This was to avoid painting blood vessels but still keeping that bloodshot quality because again--lazy. Done in about a half hour, I'm not unhappy with this result.

This is a Sealed Sarcophagus that arrived with my Bones 4 pledge. It's the usual zenithal and anti-zenithal followed up with a wash and drybrushing. It's hollow which means I couldn't magnetize it but I figure it'll kick around with my other similarly sized terrain. I might hit it with  dullcoat if the paint starts to chip.

This scary thing is the other half of Harrowgate Shrines from week 23 and you can probably guess what's going on here. The only difference is the flesh to magenta to purpley color drybrush over the top. Why so many colors? I couldn't decide what I wanted and was having fun dry brushing. So there ya go. 

A thing a week 2021 halfway milestone:

• 148/100 finished minis
• 2/5 pushing high quality
• 2/5 serious attempts at OSL
• 4/5 "buildings"

A thing a week 2021, week 25 (double sided hex tiles)

If you tuned in last week you know that at long last we're playing in person again and for this campaign we're playing fully painted. In the campaigns that came before, just about any cheap-ass, stand-in, or bodged-together terrain was fine--nothing really looked good anyway. Of particular offense was my old 8"x8" hex tiles. They're stacked cardboard with a poorly-chosen tiling ground fill overlaid with a slightly squashed hex grid. They've always been a fiddly and they slide around on the table in the most annoying way and don't really want to fit together because I wasn't super precise when I cut them. Well now, I want slightly better and while we're at it, let's make them slightly more user friendly.

These are a play off of my last set of tiles back in week 13 just on a larger scale. They're a foam-core sandwich of single ply cardboard which end up at right around a half inch tall so they match the height of most of my other tiles. Like the week 13 ones, these are also magnetized in pretty much the same way. Two sides have ferrous roofing nails and two sides have magnets. Despite putting extra effort into precision cutting, cardboard and foam core just aren't precision-friendly materials and they're all slightly off. This means that the magnets don't hold super well across all tiles but they work well enough.

I still wanted hexes since my game was built for them and I'm not confident in my ability to freehand hex patterns over 640 square inches of tiles so instead of flocking & painting like I'd originally intended, I printed out some better chosen images and pasted them to either side. I think I would have liked the flocked/actually textured tiles better but a) flock gets everywhere no matter how well I've tried to seal it and b) grit on the other side isn't friendly to my very expensive gaming table. The gluing didn't go as well as I'd hoped and the PVA buckled the paper. 

I think these worked out OK. They're much nicer than the old ones even though they're basically the same kind of thing and the magnets are a nice value add. They don't entirely work since the placement of the magnets was rough and cardboard really isn't a precision material. Having ten instead of eight means I can do a 3x3 or 2x5 setup which is nice. The textures work OK though I'm not completely happy with them but the good news is that pasting over them won't be hard when I get tired of them, so I got that goin' for me. 

2021 finished "building" counter: 4/5

A thing a week 2021, week 24 (new campaign characters)

I started a new campaign in the every-other-Saturday slot not terribly long ago. The last one in that slot ran for just over a year and started the first weekend of lockdown. We thought we'd be playing in Roll20 temporarily but little did any of us know that it'd be more than a year until we could go back to playing in person. Well, that time is now (well, yesterday). Among other goals for this campaign, I want to play fully painted so here we go.

First up we have Akoroi, Ork skald played here by Nolzur's Human Cleric. This is not a great sculpt and like many of the Nolzur's figs, it's not a great mold either. I got most of the awful mold lines off but not all of them and more importantly, it was super clear that the person who sculpted this figure wasn't a painter since lots of the fig are hard to reach. This started as a wash->drybrush->glazes operation but quickly sidetracked to normal wet blending and layering. As a player character, I expect this fig to get a lot of screen time so figured it was worth the effort. I could have put more effort into the metallics but I'm not unhappy with this result in about three-ish hours of effort and if you're wondering why he's fleshtoned instead of green-y, it's because this is how he looks in his online key art.

Next up we have Muchasi, Athari shaman played here by Nolzur's Aasimar Paladin. Another player character and one fairly well distinguished by vibrant plumage, this fig also embodies the Nolzur-ness issues. An additional grievance was the wings which were molded in clear plastic that did not want to stick to paint. The saturated colors were played mostly by Pro Acryl and lightened by Daler Rowney inks. That's proving to be a pretty dang good combination since both are highly pigmented and both are thin. Everything else on the character is suitably subdued and done in another four-ish hours of effort.

This is Vheela, Elven scholar and another player character played by Reaper Bones Ostarzha, Elf Cleric. Like a lot of Reaper Bones figs, this is a good sculpt let down by not stellar molding. I did what I could to clean the mold lines but didn't get all of them, the worst of which were on her hair and chin. This is about a three and a half hours of effort about half of which went into her face. The sculpt has really big eyes which is great! I love painting eyes and this gave me an opportunity to put a colored iris, pupil, and well placed reflection point. The leather bits were adequately handled by Pro Acryl Transparent Brown and while I could have cleaned them up some, I didn't feel the need. 

Kyeh of the Waves is a waterbender and yeah, I made my own world and borrow all kinds of stuff. She's played by Nolzur's Female Human Wizard and the first of two NPCs we'll look at today. She was painted over three days in about eight hours, a lot of which was on her face. Nolzur's figs tend to be more realistically proportioned than heroic and such they have very, very small faces. The flowy bits are a mix of Pro Acryl blue and green  (or just blue) highlit with Pro Acryl Turquoise (iirc). The brown bits were mostly Pro Acryl brown and that's it and I thought they looked good enough to leave like that. The waterbendy piece is a layered wash/drybrush with Pro Acryl blue and my ancient pot of Reaper Pro Linen that is almost out. I think she turned out good enough to count her as my second high quality fig of this year.

Last up we have Rokoru the Blade, bestest kitty NPC in this campaign. So far. He's played by a 3D printed cat rogue which are again really hard to find after the fact and featured way back in week 50 of last year. Poor Obeng fig never got to see play in person but I suspect that Rokoru will. This fig is pretty small and I tried to match the key art I've been using for online play. There are freehand stripes on his shoulders which pretty much don't show and despite spending a lot of time on the shading on his clothing, I don't think it shows super well. He's not a bad paint job squeaking in right around four hours all told.

2021 finished mini counter: 140/100, 2/5 high quality

A thing a week 2021, week 23 (misc figs)

This week we're back to painting and we have "figures that I had on my desk that didn't fit a theme." Also, because I'm a dummy, I forgot to shoot and post this yesterday. I've cleverly back-dated it to hide my mistake. I've got quite a lot of figs on my painting desk at any one time and while I don't plan it out this way, I usually end up with batches like this. Also, I'm really trying (and failing) to take better pictures. Some day.

These two guys are old figs from Earthdawn, one of my favorite RPGs of the 90s that no one played, and yes I know they're still developing it. I won't go down the halcyon path of talking about what a Horror is or what space these guys fill in their pantheon of badness, but these are a pair of Wormskulls, not to be confused with numskulls. If I recall correctly, I bought these guys circa 2004 or so at cash-only sale at a game store that was shutting down. I would have likely bought more if I'd had more disposable income at that point. These metal figs were made by Heartbreaker Hobbies & Games in the mid 90s and I have a few of their figs. These are not great paint jobs but they are done to the tune of a couple hours and that counts for something.

This guy is the cooper from Bones 4's Townsfolk III set and he is also a pseudo-speed paint. He was mostly painted as glazes over zenithal and his blister-mate, Ben Franklin look-alike was featured way back in week 1 (the milkmaid will be along at some point). Knowing I wanted to play the glaze speed paint game with him, I hit him with a dark wash and a drybrush first and then he sat around for many months until today a couple weeks ago when I finally got around to finishing. I think he turned out OK to the tune of a few hours though I can't say that with certainty.

Hailing from Townsfolk II, this Friar Tuck look-alike had been on my desk primed for quite a while and was also a speed paint. Like the cooper, I'd intended a glazes-over-zenithal job but ended up doing a lot more. I especially like the green cloak action which is an ancient pot of a dark green Reaper Pro paints lightened with a light fleshtone that I had on my wet palette. He was done in like two hours at the end of doing some other work and for that expenditure, I think he looks pretty good.

The tall one is one half of a Reaper Bones Harrowgate Shrines and is the epitome of lazy painting. After priming, we anti-zenithal with Daler Rowney Payne's Grey which is rapidly becoming my favorite anti-zenithal ink. After that it's a zenithal with an off white (Pro Acryl Ivory in this case though I think I like Pale Yellow better for this application). Next we get a homemade grey wash and a dry brush with a light warm grey and we're done. The little token-y things are tokens that came with spider figs that I can't be bothered to look up. They'd been sitting on my desk for quite a while but now with various levels of dry brushing and washing and generally taking up space. Well, this is the time and now they're done!

These last two are 3d prints of a free STL and boy is it hard to find these after the fact. They're scaled roughly to 28mm which, after many difficulties, is starting to be my scale of choice. They were printed at the end of last year (yes, I record this stuff) and like many of the figs sitting on my table, I painted bits and pieces of them as I was winding down with paint of the right color on my palette having finished with something else. It's interesting to note that my normal go-to for metallics, Vallejo Metal Color, didn't perform super well. I think it has to do with the tiny ridges left by the printing. The thinness of these paints which I usually prefer mean that they don't fill in the gaps and thus, the surface isn't as shiny as I'd expect. 

2021 finished mini counter: 135/100

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

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

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

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

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

(c) me 2021

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

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

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

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

2021 finished mini counter: 128/100

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

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

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

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

2021 finished mini counter: 123/100

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

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

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

2021 finished mini counter: 118/100

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

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

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

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

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

2021 finished mini counter: 113/100

A thing a week 2021 (week 17): cheap & easy painting

This week we have one of my favorite kinds of painting: lazy painting. That's not to say that the results aren't good, just that these don't take a terribly large investment in time. 

First up, we have three ghostly guys are hypnotic spirits from the Legend of Drizzt boardgame. I painted the two that on the left because their magnets had fallen off and needed to be re-glued. I didn't think to look for the third guy so they don't look as close as I'd like. It's basically the same as the ghosties I did way back in week 4. Notably I washed the last guy and still had the same paint-sticking issues. Not sure what's up with that. I think these guys are serviceable and probably should have colored the base rings.

These two are Hellhounds from Pathfinder Deep Cuts. Despite my dislike for these types of figs for their terrible mold lines and questionable priming. These have none of those problems being made of harder clear plastic. They clearly went through a lot of trouble making these transparent and I didn't want my paint job to completely mask that so I started with Pro Acryl yellow transparents and walked up drybrushing darker and more opaque from there. I don't think this sells very well and notably they didn't shoot very well. They look OK.

These last three are hell hounds from Reaper Bones 4. Unlike the Pathfinder Deep Cuts hell hounds, these aren't made of hard, clear plastic, but they were painted in much the same way. I wanted more contrast than I got with the other two so I took extra effort to start with a bright yellow in the cracks moving out to hull red darkened down with coal black at the end. Afterward I picked out their eyes and nostrils with a white and tinted it again with yellow to really sell the heat. I also took extra time to prepare some 32mm bases with crackle medium which were painted the same way. I think these three look a lot better and are much closer to where I wanted to get.

Overall these eight figs took maybe three hours all told and I think for that investment, they look pretty good.

2021 finished mini counter: 108/100 

A thing a week 2021, week 16 (stone and wood cabin)

My love of half-timbered buildings stretches pretty far back, really, since I discovered them several years ago. This is not one of those, it's instead a wood and stone cabin which you may have guessed from the title. As an additional challenge, I wanted to experiment with different techniques for getting the same results, namely, using cardboard for walls and chipboard for roofing. Spoilers: this worked out OK with caveats.

Construction was done in chunks over a couple days and finished up in maybe hours all told. The inner walls are single thickness cardboard with a footer of half inch XPS. The planking on the walls is a lot like the planking on my liftships, i.e., roughly 1/16" planks of various widths textured and glued to the structure. 

The roof is made of medium weight chipboard which is way easier to cut and glue together and both more rigid and more thin than the more typical Readi-Board I usually use. Down side: its thinness means that the front fascia has less to hold onto which made gluing them down harder. Overall, I think there's good and bad with these amendments and while I'm glad I experimented some, I don't think this will be my preferred method for future buildings.

Just like last week, the top floor is held with magnets while the ground floor is held by friction fit like my other buildings. Also just like last week, we start paintage with Mod Podge plus black craft paint. For this paint job I didn't want the planking to be super duper dark unlike the inspiration photo I worked from. I started with a fairly light brown drybrushed with an off white. After that I hit it with a couple layers of wash with the terrible brown craft paint wash I made years ago + Liquitex Raw Umber ink and the same terrible wash + Daler Rowney Red Earth Ink for the roof and top floor. Every time I use it, I'm struck by how wood like the raw umber ink is over a brown + light highlight. 

Probably this building wanted to be darker. The inspiration picture was much darker, anyway. I don't think the roof is quite as nice as last week's and the wood seems newer and is lower contrast than I think it should be. I like the re-addition of the chimney (notably missing from many of my buildings) and despite wanting tighter shingles, they ended up the same size I usually make them. So there's that.

The bottom windows and door are glued into the walls without transparency. There's a piece of yellow post-it behind the granny grating to pseudo-stand-in for a lit interior. In retrospect, I should have painted them instead. The top floor's windows are cut out but with the same granny-grating and post-it construction. The intent was to have translucent window pains to show a dollar store tea light through. Well, it turns out that under normal lighting conditions, the tea light isn't strong enough to show through. That's how we learn--by tryin' stuff. I might redo the windows on this building sometime in the future. Watch this space!

2021 finished building counter: 3/5

A thing a week 2021, week 15 (half-timbered building)

I haven't built a building for a long time. In fact, the last one was way back in May of 2019 in the first iteration of A Thing A Week Weekly Challenge. By the time this article goes to print it will have been nearly two years. Also, future perfect tense--triple sentence score! I've learned a lot about working with foam in that time so it was instructive to revisit the topic. Note that buildings take up a lot of space compared to miniatures and I'm going to need to rethink my storage solution.

I had two goals and (spoilers) I got both. First, I wanted to experiment with magnetizing the different floors which would sidestep some difficult high-precision crafting with low-precision materials. This worked out OK. Second, I wanted a curved roof.  This was less OK than I would have liked but that's how you learn, right? Construction was pretty typical and was completed within a couple days. Painting stretched out for the next couple days but wasn't particularly difficult.

The base is a piece of Readi-Board foam core hit with a texture roller and glued to piece of chipboard. I couldn't work out how to get either a magnet or a nail into the base without a mess so I kept the friction-fit build. The walls are a quarter inch by two inch tall XPS textured with a ballpoint pen. The windows and modular portals are cut out with an exacto. The second floor is the same foam core hit with a different texture roller. The walls are reinforced with craft sticks and I was not super careful when gluing them together so they're not as square as I'd like.

The magnetic mechanism is basically short roofing nails driven into the corners of the second floor. They attach to small 3x2mm magnets glued into the second floor's surface. I started gluing stuff together with PVA with the intent of keeping the seams tight. This was a mistake, though I did need to use PVA to glue the magnets in and for shingles as per usual. Once I switched to using hot glue, everything sped up and generally things went better.

The roof was by far the most complicated part of this build. I had the two roof surfaces cut to size already. I settled upon throwing a beam at the top pretty quickly and settled upon freehanding curved A-frames from drawn patterns on foam core. To these I glued XPS chunks for attach points and glued the roof surface to it. I wasn't as careful as I needed and the place they meet at the top isn't straight and there's a very noticeable bow in it. I probably needed a larger beam since it doesn't hide the tops of the shingles. The fascia on the front of the roof surface is also not straight though it's a lot less noticeable.

Painting started with the typical coat of black craft paint + Mod Podge and was followed by a basecoat of craft paint. I also drybrushed more starkly than usual with craft paint but instead of using my normal lousy ancient stinky washes I used real artist inks this time. Nutmeg brown + antique white drybrush hit with a coat of Liquitex Raw Umber look convincingly like preserved wood. I also used

Daler Rowney Red Earth and Daler Rowney Indigo for the mahogany themed floor on the second story and the blue slate on the ground floor respectively. 

Overall, I think this is a good building and a good reprise of some skills that I haven't put into use for a long, long time.

2021 finished building counter: 2/5

A thing a week 2021, week 14 (corner organizer!)

This week we have something completely different and I didn't enough about what I was doing to take proper WIP pictures. While I'd like to count this as a building, that'd be a stretch even for me so instead it'll just be a weekly entry without progress toward other goals. So WTF is it?

Several weeks ago by the time of this posting I saw a thing online, a thing that I'd like, that would bring my messy painting table into something resembling sanity. This would be that thing. It's a corner piece for a modular hobbying organizer and one that I might have bought and imported from Poland if they hadn't run out. Instead, I built my own.

Construction is about as dead simple as you can imagine. It's about $1.50 of black Readi Board from a nearby dollar store which is my go-to for this kind of light construction. It doesn't need to hold a lot of weight and doesn't have many moving parts but it does need to sit between my home-made paint rack featuring prominently in week 31 of last year and the much nicer wooden one that someone gave me a couple jobs ago that takes up more space but holds fewer bottles. That space and the surrounding area have accumulated a pile of unsightly junk most of which doesn't get used super often but that I still want handy and there isn't generally that much of it.

The hardest part of the operation was cutting out the L-shaped pieces one of which is the bottom and one of which is the base of the top. The cutouts were used as the two risers and everything was more or less glued together. I got fancy this time around and made the little drawer-y things which have already proven their value. And by moving some of the paint from the nicer holder on the right, I could consolidate some stuff while opening up space to hold extra paint holders made up of 1" dowels. 

I like building tools--I'm pretty sure I've said that here before, and this is no exception. I like even more organizing things and this piece hits both. Besides which, I've opened up space for more paints...and I love buying paints!

Nostalgia, it's a thing

I've spokentyped here about a few of the handful of things I've got nostalgia for. They're few and far between but for me, like I imagine a lot of you, they're special. Space Battleship Yamato, Star Blazers in the States, is one of those things. Some of my earliest memories of a childhood long in the rear-view are of watching this on the small screen in the early 80s. It colors how I think of sci-fi, epic fantasy, and ship design, and it shows in many of the things I build even today. "Is that from Star Blazers?" is one of the comments I fish for with my designs, right up there with "I can't believe that's Lego."

I've been told that 2199 was really good but I'd been disappointed at how poorly the original had aged when I re-watched it about a decade ago. At that time I'd moved hundreds of miles away from anything I cared about and it stood in stark contrast to Robotech which I'd revisited around that same time which had aged well. So I was hesitant and as usual, got swept away in a sea of other concerns. I purchased the complete series of 2199 on blu-ray months ago and for reasons I can't sufficiently explain, the box containing the discs sat unwatched on my desk. 

Star Blazers 2199 is almost everything I'd hoped and dreamed. It's the Star Blazers I'd always imagined existed but was in doubt ever did. It's the spiritual successor of the original but updated and embellished with some 21st century sensibilities. I finished the last episode about 30 minutes ago at a time that I desperately needed it without realizing it. It is a beautiful thing and by no means perfect but then again, what is? I expect to watch it again in the near future and I desperately want more. 2202 discs are on their way to me and by God I need it to be as good as 2199 is. 

Years ago when I started my Lego journey, I knew I wanted to build the Yamato but I also knew that I didn't have the skill yet to do so. In much the same way that the original Mass Effect pushed me to build my SR1, I feel that same compulsion now--a compulsion to do right by a thing that means a lot to me in ways that I can't adequately express. I think I have the skill and resources to feasibly do this now which would mark a thing off my bucket list. I'm hoping that in the months to come I can share that journey, one that I expect to be as meaningful as my first steps into the Lego world, and with a subject that I truly love.

I suppose that's the power of nostalgia and I hope it will carry me through to completion. Wish me luck.

A thing a week 2021, week 13 (dungeon tiles!)

Now for something completely different.  My hobbying, the painting and building parts of it anyway, begin with making dungeon tiles circa 2016.  I knew I wanted to play with minis so I bought a bunch and I knew that I wanted a tactical game.  Problem:  aside from my handy vinyl hex maps with hexes that were too small, I didn't really have much terrain.  I certainly didn't have any building stand-ins so I either printed out hex maps on my black and white laser printer (since deceased) or drew on my vinyl maps with wet-erase markers.  That is, until I discovered dungeon tiles (cue dramatic music).  

I probably got the idea from either Wyloch or Black Magic Craft but somewhere in the heady days of 2016 I printed out some crappy maps on my black and white laser printer (now deceased) and pasted them upon multi-level cardboard disasters that roughly matched the shapes.  This would become more refined over the years culminating with these from April of 2019.  These are 4" x 4" x 0.25" chunks of XPS foam hit with a Green Stuff World texture roller (pavement).  With Wyloch's interlocking chipboard mechanism, they fit together acceptably though not reliably.  Once together, they're nice, but they're kind of a pain to work with.  

Well, these are the latest incarnation, iteration five or six or something--I dunno, I lost track.  They're the same 4" x 4" but half an inch thick and I milled them when burning through some of my stock last year.  They were always intended as double sided but by design they also match the height of the last iteration even if they won't lock with them.  I noodled a lot on the attachment mechanism.  I knew I wanted to use magnets but didn't want to have to deal with terrible polarity issues.  First up:  tacks.  They didn't work because of their curved tops.  So then I thought nails and walked away with a $10 box of ferrous roofing nails.  If there's one hint I can give any aspiring tabletop crafter, it's that you can save a lot of money by using stuff you can get at the hardware store.  Pro-tip:  if you're looking to use magnets, bring one with you when buying materials to test against whatever you hope it'll stick to.  

There are basically three nails on each of two sides and three 3x2 mm magnets on each of the other two sides.  They stick closer together which is nice and they're textured on both sides.  One side is Green Stuff World flagstone and the other side is textured with a ball point pen and wire brush as wooden planking.  They're primed with black craft paint + Mod Podge sealer and painted first with crappy craft paints and then with crappy washes I made several years ago adulterated with far more expensive inks and mediums to make them work correctly.  Turns out, you can learn a lot in a few years.  

I am super looking forward to using these sixteen magnetic, double-sided dungeon tiles in person whenever it is we can do that kind of thing again.  These will count as the first of my five "buildings" this year.  

2021 finished "building" counter: 1/5

A thing a week 2021, week 12 (Spiders!)

As threatened at some point last year, I printed out a bunch more spiders at a slightly larger size--sixteen of them, even. They came off the printer at slightly low quality and were painted similarly. I have no illusions that his was in any way high effort painting but they are indeed painted. For this go-around I improved (slightly) on the original set. They were primed and washed and then drybrushed as if by zenithal.  After that some details were slopped on in an off white before hitting them with a Badger Ghost Tint candy coat. The bases were finished very simply in black. They'll count 2:1 because it's my challenge and I'm comfortable with this ratio of almost no effort.  

When I started out this year and was setting goals, I had no expectation that I'd land at 100 in March. I'm still short on the high quality and OSL goals but I'm not super concerned with getting those in at this point. I'm going to do now what I did last year at roughly this time--switch gears to doing other stuff. That'll also give me space to get some effort on one or more more of the missing try-hards.Watch this space!

2021 finished mini counter:  100/100

A thing a week 2021, week 11 (filler!)

This year so far has been a big year for mini painting, following from a strong 2020. Because things are going so well, I'm pushing this week's normally scheduled programming to bring you this news flash:  it's minis. That's right.  Minis. This mini-mini theme is brought to you by "random stuff I have prepped on my painting table."  

This is a Bones 4 Lowland Owlbear which is distinct from its often mistaken cousin, the Highland Owlbear which is renown for its love of dry whiskeys. I prepped this guy sometime last summer because he looked cool and then I didn't get to painting him...until now. Well, honestly, it was a week and a half ago because these posts roll out later than the actual event. This was my favorite kind of painting:  slap some paint around and focus on a couple details. That's more James Wappel shaded basecoat action over top of a zenithal-anti-zenithal-sandwich-plus-some-actual-airbrush-basecoating. I painted him as a cross between a grizzly and a great horned owl and any particular resemblance to either creature is a coincidence since I didn't look up reference for either. Other than the funky smell from the chocolate brown craft paint wash I'm trying to use up, I think it's a good result for the not-even-an-hour that I spent on him. Probably the spikes on his back are too stark but meh.

These four penguins are from, you guessed it, Bones 4 and available for purchase as Penguin Attack Pack.  These are also not exceptionally difficult painting though the dire penguin (the one with spikey bits) did have a few more details. I'd hoped to paint them mostly with the airbrush but forgot that they're counter-shaded and had to work a little bit harder. They landed in a couple hours for all four and even though I could have pushed the contrast more, I'm not unhappy with them. Not sure why my camera felt the need to blurrify these shots. 

This is a pig, also from Bones 4. The cart, if you're wondering, was last seen in week 45 of 2020. This guy has sat on my workbench for many months partially painted. I wanted to practice my brush blends but that's way too much work. Instead, he's about 5 minutes of easy airbrushing and maybe 5 minutes of additional detail work for his trotters and eyes and such. I'm not going to pretend this is high art or anything, but it's painted and that's something.

2021 finished mini counter:  92/100

A Lounge of Lizards part 4 (2021 week 10)

This has been a good theme:  four whole weeks! In actuality, these were finished some weeks ago in the middle of February. It's been a really good traipse through my backlog and some figs that I really like even if they don't get a ton of screen time. Being able to use the airbrush a lot more was a real boon despite having to wrestle with the dang thing so much. Additionally, I'm trying to take better pictures. I mean, I bought this expensive camera, I may as well get to using it better.  

This first guy is a Snakeman Warrior from Reaper Bones. I don't remember why I didn't paint Mr. Snakeman in orange and with the last batch, but I'm sure I had a reason that wasn't "make my life harder," but there ya go. I like this fig and I spent a little extra time on him. Like the other figs in this theme, he was mostly painted with my cheapo airbrush. Most of these green folks have brush-painted bellies/details and drybrushed and washed and completed quite quickly. I spent not quite enough time on the shading of his metallics and not quite enough time highlighting and shading his excessive gear. So there's that. I think it's an OK result.   

Reaper bones show prominently on these un-hallowed pages and I've had these Nagendra prepped on my desk for quite a long time. These particular guys are Nagendra Swordsmen and mostly airbrushed with some basic effort to shade their metallics. I'm not 100% sold on the turquoise runes on their weapons but they work OK. Airbrushing sped this whole batch up quite a lot and even though they were a speed paint, I think the quality is higher than the effort I actually spent on them. 

Next up we have Nagendra Warriors who (quite obviously) follow the same scheme as the other folks in this batch. The texturing on the bow and haft of the polearm (a pudao, I think) looked good and I decided to paint them in the same bronze as the armor of the other folks. In retrospect, I don't think a bronze bow would actually work so it's, um, maaaaagic. Now that they're done, I'm fairly sure they'll get some screen time when we can play in person, whenever that happens.

This heavily armored guy is one half of Nagendra Leaders and I really should have spent more time on him.  His armor is a mix of Vallejo Metal Colors gold and copper with a candy coat of Badger Minitaire Golden Yellow like the hoplites from last year. This year I'm making a real effort to highlight/shade my metallics and this guy didn't really get enough of that. I like the yellowy-bronze but it's still really flat. The volumes aren't picked out correctly which was admittedly lazy. I don't  particularly like this figure which is part of why I didn't expend more effort. It's a soft sculpt and despite my best efforts, his swords are still awfully bendy...but he's done now. Overall the greenies here sans the last piece were done in roughly ten hours total which seems quick for me given the results.  

I don't think the leader holding the fireball makes any sense (lizards tend to have neither mammaries nor birth canals) but I did like advantage of the situation to hit up some OSL on her anyway.  For this application, I revisited James Wappel's techniques which start with a very rough initial application slapping paints on in roughly the right places and refining in further steps.  I like painting this way and I really like painting in OSL even though I'm terrible at it. Taking a closer look at the photos, I may have overdone it--probably the light is too stark. Despite this, I think the results are good for maybe a couple hours over a couple evenings.  

This is going to finish off A Lounge of Lizards 2021 and these folks were done in roughly five hours total which seems quick for the results I got.  Handy airbrush using?  Check.  Drybrushing highly textured figs for good effect?  Check.  Focusing on the right details and a gratuitous use of OSL?  Check.  I'ma call this one successful.

2021 finished mini counter:  86/100, 2/5 OSL, 1/5 high quality