A thing a week 2022, week 39

Another week in the books and I'm both nearly done and feeling really nervous about finishing. There really isn't any space between those two points as it works out. BrickCon is Thursday so time is limited and I've got other commitments I have to meet. 

I do think it's shaped up well. Not as well as I'd have liked, but well enough nonetheless. Assuming I get things finished and shot, we should get glamour shots and show shots next week.

A thing a week 2022, week 38

A week of effort can make a lot of difference although it doesn't show here. I spent most of the last week pulling the sides in and reworking the internals some. Most of the stuff on the left is also reflected on the right which is also nice. Obviously there's a lot more to do and I pulled in the total length by about 32 studs though it'll still wind up around six feet.

"But wait!" you say, anonymous reader, "100 studs is less than 32 inches! Why is your SHIP so big?!" To this I have two answers: yes, 100 studs is 31.25 inches or about two and a half feet, but why would you stop there? I guess that's a question. Whatever. I am not known for my restraint and I like building at stupid scale. Need proof? Check in sometime next year.

A thing a week 2022, week 37

It's September and that means it's SHIPtember. The goal: a 100+ stud long ship in a calendar month. This offers those of us in the greater Seattle area an opportunity since it ends right around when BrickCon starts and I've brought home a trophy from such efforts. 

I've been mostly unmotivated to take on a big building project for the last two years--mostly (details later). BrickCon was virtual in 2020 and I wasn't able to attend last year due to work which further sapped any impetus I might have had. So heading into this year I knew I was going to finish something and it worked out that SHIPtember would be it. Yes, I'm tempting fate. 

This is about 32 hours in and maybe 1/3 of the way through. There's some serious structure that keeps the spine in alignment and it's about as stable a thing as I've built at this scale. It started as 3x blow up of a buddy's build but as expected it's drifted pretty seriously from the original. Also true: my lousy shot here obscures a lot of the subtle shaping. Tune in next time to see how far I've gotten in another week and if my photography has gotten any better (hint: no). 

A thing a week 2022, week 36: new campaign edition

This week we're back to minis. Truth be told, these were painted out of order since I want to play fully painted and this campaign started in May of this year and it's notably many months since then. These are the sacrifices we make to keep a schedule. 

This is Virgil, otherwise known as El Luchadore Magnifico, otherwise known as the flying magical death lizard. He's a pit fighter from the mean streets of Calacita. The fig is a 3d print from Artisan Guild, specifically Goldmaw Lizard E from this set. and I didn't realize the fig was female before I built the lineup for Ed to pick. Luckily he doesn't know and doesn't read this blog so I think the secret is safe. He chose the color scheme and I think shehe looks good with a minimum of effort mostly painted with the airbrush.

Next up we have Gervitz, a cantankerous religious weasel. The fig is a metal Otter Knight from Dark Sword Miniatures. This is a great fig painted only adequately and I think I primed him with the wrong stuff since the paint is already coming off in this shot. This is the first Dark Sword fig I've painted and I'm super glad I bought a bunch more. Watch this space!

This is Bev, a crazy dwarf soldier from an abandoned fortress named Stabbed Wheel, in actuality, one of my settlements from Dwarf Fortress. The figure is Baily Silverbell from Reaper Bones and we super thought from the pictures that she had two blades which would match the character. Turns out that she's got a crossbow in her off hand. Whoops. I still painted her as the PC right down to the busted up skellington pieces on the base by request, and she still gets screen time in game.

First of the NPCs is Lilya, a bear shaman hailing from the ravaged North. The ravaging part was due to the PCs' bumbling in a previous campaign and the fig is 3d print of Hunter Oathenshard from TigerSkullRPG. This a great sculpt despite me bodging a hammer head rather than the double-bit axe she normally comes with and cracking the base on the dismount from the build plate. I have another less broken one that'll get paint eventually and don't be surprised if I crank out a larger higher quality version someday.

Last up we have Anvil Thricedamned, Evil Warrior from Reaper Bones and I could not find a link from the reaper site. He's not a PC or NPC, but he needed paint and was prepped on my table and had picked up random colors over a few months. I don't recall which batch it was, but I needed to do something that wasn't that batch so this guy got paint. 

2022 finished mini counter: 165/100

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A thing a week 2022, week 34, Dauntless Edition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nord-a-thon week 10 (2022 week 31)

Last week we had team red of Frostgrave Barbarians and this week we have team blue and I probably would have made my life a lot easier if I'd broken them into batches of five rather than seven, seven, six. These guys were a challenge (I can saytype that since at the time of writing, I've completed them). I wanted to do a good job and that added a lot more stress than I expected and doing them in smaller groupings would have made that at least slightly easier. 

For this batch I experimented a lot with GW Contrast Paints which I do like. What I don't like about them is that they're so terribly expensive. Also, I hate GW pots which, like many, I spill frequently. That makes their cost that much worse. I'll probably buy a bunch more in the years to come because they are really good for speeding up base coats but in all honesty, I can't imagined ever running out of paint at this time. I mean, I've completed a lot of figs and I've run out of exactly three pots of paint, one of which was an airbrush paint used heavily for zenithals (so basically every miniature) and one was an ancient flesh wash that leaked all over the dang place. Tune in next week for the thrilling finale of this theme!

2022 finished mini counter: 154/100

Nord-a-thon week 9 (2022 week 30)

Last week ended the middle batch so this begins the late batch, and continuing the trend from last week, these guys are even less Viking than the last. These burly dudes are Frostgrave Barbarians by Northstar and like the rest of the Frostgrave figs I've painted, these have been great. Also, before anyone rushes or shuffles slowly toward the comment section, I am in no way implying that the Vikings were barbarians--I just wanted to keep the theme going!

Unlike the first two sections, this isn't a speed paint batch, though they are still a batch. Last year when I  wrote up notes for the Frostgrave Crewmen (seen in Week 18, Week 19, Week 20, and Week 21) I noted that they probably deserved better paint jobs than I gave them (~1.5 hours per fig) so this time around I spent a lot more time and I hope it shows. We'll go through the entire cycle of these guys in the next few weeks before going back to the more freeform crap that usually happens here.

2022 finished mini counter: 147/100

Nord-a-thon week 8 (2022 week 29)

These guys are not technically Vikings or Nords as far as I know, though I doubt that any non-historians would be able to tell. Like the last couple weeks, they're also metal models and in slightly better shape than the last few. These are Warlords Saxon Leaders - Battle of Stamford Bridge and Saxon Earls & Kings - 11th Century. Had I realized that the Warlord pages had such good reference and if I weren't painting these guys as a speed paint batch, I might have chosen different colors and more details. For those interested in the history, the first batch includes Morcar of Northumbria, Edwin of Mercia, and Tostig Godwinson and the second includes Ethelred the Unready (sorry, no ash on this keyboard), Leofric of Mercia, and Edmund Ironside.

These guys end the middle batch of this theme, the longest I've done to date! They were done at an average of 45 minutes per fig for the 18 of them or about 13.5 hours. They were done in about a calendar week of easy painting while managing some other junk--stay tuned to see that!

If I have a regret about this batch, it's that I didn't spend more time on these specific figs. They will hold a higher quality paint job and I almost regret how plain their shields are. 

2022 finished mini counter: 140/100

Nord-a-thon week 7 (2022 week 28)

These guys are Viking Hearthguards from Warlord and like last week's offering, these guys are metal models. Also like last week's offering, they required a lot of cleanup which I didn't do a great job with. So I got that goin' for me. Also notable, their spears are super bendy since they're the same pewter that the rest of the models are made of and I'm super certain I'm going to break them at some point.

2022 finished mini counter: 134/100

Nord-a-thon week 6 (2022 week 27)

Continuing our batch of Vikings, we have these eight huscarls from Warlord. These are metal models whose sculpts are good but whose molds are bad. There's a half-life on molds and the more you use them the more they start to break down. These seem to have broken down quite a lot so the cleanup was rough and I didn't do a great job. As a reminder, these were a batch speed paint so the paint jobs aren't super high quality.

And of those of you who were wondering what a huscarl is, I'm assuming these guys are the military retainer variety as noted in wikipedia. 

2022 finished mini counter: 130/100

Nord-a-thon week 5 (2022 week 26)

I note that the yellow team's shields look really bad without their intended decals. Some day I'll find them. Probably. (edit: I found them!) These guys will finish off the first round of this multi-batch theme. The 34 of them were done in around 22.5 hours which miraculously clocks in at about 45 minutes per fig not including assembly/priming/zenithal time. Stay tuned next week for the next cycle of (kind of) Vikings!

2022 finished mini counter: 122/100

Nord-a-thon week 4 (2022 week 25)

Next up the purple team. These are also really super saturated and while I could have spent a lot more time highlighting, this is a speed paint. The shields look a little boring but I'd intended to put the decals on them that came with these figs. I lost the decals but hope springs eternal so I didn't do anything fancy with them.

2022 finished mini counter: 115/102
 

Nord-a-thon week 3 (2022 week 24)

This week: green team. When I was gluing flock onto the bases, badly as it turns out, I thought the yellow flock would sell more than it actually does as dead grass. Next big batch I'll get to try again. Maybe I'll blend it or something.

2022 finished mini counter: 108/100

Nord-a-thon week 2 (2022 week 23)

Nord-a-thon week 2 continues our cycle of Viking Hirdmen, this time the red team (obviously). At first I didn't like the super saturated red on these guys but now that they're complete it's kind of growing on me. That'd be mostly Pro Acryl Transparent Red. This will also crest the 100 figure mark in just under half a year (reminder that these posts are scheduled in the future!)

2022 finished mini counter: 102/100

Nord-a-thon week 1 (2022 week 22)

After our mini-theme we have a maxi-theme. I own quite a lot of vikings and they need paint! These would be the first batch off the workbench of the Viking Hirdmen 10 of whom were last seen in Week 50 of last year and yes, we're finishing off the last 34 of them this go-round.

This is the blue team which is hopefully obvious. One or two of these doods in each batch is kitbashed in the way that you'd expect mercenaries or adventurers to scavange usable equipment from...well, wherever they get it from.

2022 finished mini counter: 95

Kitty-a-thon week 2 (2022 week 21)

This week we complete our miniature mini-theme of kitties! I might have a problem.

First up we have a trio of cat rogue 3d prints. These guys have shown up a lot: a pair of them in week 50 2020 and one in week 24 of 2021 who got a lot of screen time in my Saturday game which is in its last few sessions as this goes up unless it's already complete. These are fun. On top of being free models which drives my cost per print down (yes, I include hardware), it's fun to compare paint jobs spanning multiple years. Some day I might even do a side-by-side and I would super expect to get more of these guys next year, possibly in a slightly larger form, to boot!

Next up we have another Skivvara from Twin Goddess Miniatures and the originator of the Black Cat Challenge (TM) from 2021 week 32. At one point I was going to paint her white but forgot about all of that that and ended up painting her tawny like many of the other kitties in the batch. I mean, it's right there on the palette. This fig went through some mess and at one point I snapped her off the base at the ankle so there's a lot of badness there. Her hand holding the bow also broke off a couple times which is plainly obvious if you look at the attachment. These things happen.

Last up we have a pair of Cat Captains from Vae Victis Miniatures who make some of my favorite figs, like this one! On the dark fig, I probably should have pushed the ochre details to a higher highlight; probably a yellow. I think it still works and the desaturation of both the greens and the reds seem to have effectively prevented the dreaded "Christmas Colors" issue. These figs have a great mix of volumes and details and this dark kitty will count as a high quality paint job.

On the other kitty, I probably should have desaturated the orange and punched up the dark spotches. She's supposed to be calico, "Captain Calico" as it were, but it really just looks like I wasn't looking where I put my paint. Possibly additional markings could have sold it better Could there be a Calico Challenge(TM) next year? Mayhaps, yea. I think the desaturated blue of her coat works well with the saturated purple of her corset. Overall, I'm pretty happy with this paint job.  

Last up we have a Reaper Bones Avatar of Sekhmet. This kitty saw a lot of screen time in the first campaign I ran in 2016 and I'm glad to have completed painting her. I can't claim this is a good paint job because it isn't. I also wasn't able to fix her bendy staff and I didn't do nearly enough shading on the many, many metallics. I do feel I improved on Week 16's Anubis Guard's tinted metallics (Pro Acryl Light Bronze + Badger Ghost Tints, if you're keeping score) so that's cool. Done in a couple hours, I'm not unhappy with this paint job.

2022 finished mini counter: 88/100, 7/10 high quality

Kitty-a-thon week 1 (2022 week 20)

This week we have something fun. These are a mirror pair of Tabaxi Dancer 3d prints by Vae Victis Miniatures and in addition to being one of my favorite sculpts (and not just because they're kitty girls) they're also supportless. I've saidtyped it before--supportless for 3d prints is like a super power.

I'm pretty sure I've noted elsewhere that I don't particularly like dealing with folds in fabric. Well, these two have disabused me of that since they're mostly folds in fabric. I struggle with this because I suck at blending and I'm too lazy to stipple (I also don't want to ruin my brushes faster than necessary) so this was really good practice. I can't claim that I've done a particularly good job, but I can claim that I did push well past my usual stopping point. I do think I've leveled up on these two in the skill department, anyway, and that counts for...something.

As an added bonus, these two are variations in similar color palettes. The dark kitty is in split complementary (ochre, blue, and purple) and the tawny kitty is in a reasonable facsimile of triadic (ochre, green, purple). The dark kitty will also fill the bill for 2022's Unofficial Black Cat Challenge(TM) and other than not bringing the darks as low as I should have, I think she turned out well. The tawny kitty is an experiment and gearing up for at least a few more kitties in that same color scheme.

Overall, I have few regrets beyond breaking the dark kitty's foot off when removing her from the build plate. I certainly could have spent more time on them clocking in at about 25 hours for both but that's about as far as I thought I should go. I also probably could have done more with the airbrush, too, but had I done so I probably wouldn't have learned as much. I think these are a good result and I'm counting both as high quality figs. Will I print more of them and paint them at a higher quality at a later date? Watch this space!

2022 finished mini counter: 81/100, 6/10 high quality