Toward the end of 2016, my long-running Pathfinder group got bored with our campaign and decided to try something else. We’d been interested in dipping our toes into 5th Edition D&D for a while, just to see how the game had changed, so my associate, Rich, volunteered to run the first published campaign, which is titled “Something Something Dragons”.

I’m pretty sure that’s it.

Anyway.

D&D characters are basically the only things Spud enjoys drawing, so I’ve spent the past month giddily scratching out illustrations for our four brave looter/arsonists. And because I knew I would need to squeeze a blog article out of the exercise, I recorded the colouring process to produce time lapse art videos set to thematically appropriate music.

So, let’s meet the new family!

Spud did a good thing, but he did it badly, so the formerly fun project was made not-fun for those involved, and then it was never really finished, and then Spud shamefully stuffed it under the rug for 18 months.

But I’m going to have to haul it out and talk about it eventually, so I might as well get it over with now.

Behold the potato’s tale of shamefully poor planning. ;_;

In case you missed the banner at the top of the site, I am amazing. I am amazingly smart, and I come up with amazing ideas, and I execute them amazingly well.

Usually, anyway.

Sometimes, though, I find my reserves of amazing running a bit on the dry end. This is invariably a temporary situation, so all I generally need to do is to put the partially-formed idea on the backburner for a few weeks, months, or years, and eventually the perfectly-formed version of the project will bubble up to the surface of my brainmeats.

Usually, anyway.

On some very rare occasions, I find myself without any really inspiring ideas for a project, but with some extenuating circumstance preventing me from simply putting the whole thing off for a while. This usually happens because I need to finish a model in time to play in an event– I need to play the thing one way or another, and I refuse to give up and bring some lesser-quality version that one of you mundane folk would settle for, so I have no choice but to force myself to squeeze out some brilliance on a tight schedule.

I do not work well under these circumstances. Over the years, I’ve developed the capacity to perform production tasks– sculpting, conversion, painting, terrain construction, and so on– under pressure, and as it happens, some of my best work is done in a frenzied last-minute panic. However, this generally requires me to start my frenzy with the concept for the project already fully-formed in my head. If on the other hand I enter Panic Mode without having come up with my brilliant idea at the start, then things start to look fairly bleak.

Which brings us to Crab People.

When I started this blog, I had a very simple philosophy in mind: rather than pushing for frequent updates, I would concentrate on posting only a consistently high quality of work. My vision was that someone who paged through my catalog of posts would only see a string of detailed posts about my best work, with no blatant filler to skip over. That guiding philosophy is why I average only one blog post per month– I only produce one nice thing every month, on average, so that’s how often I have something to write about.

Some months, however, I find myself not having been as productive as usual, and thus I have nothing to write about when the vague monthly post deadline comes up. Occasionally I can dredge up an older unpublished project to fill the gap– and I actually do have a really fun one from about 14 months ago that I never got around to– however, this month I’m just not feeling it. Due to personal life events and global tragedies alike, my reserves of creativity are running fairly low at the moment. But rather than let the month simply slip by with no post, I’m going to make a one-time exception and go against my core philosophy.

That’s right, folks: it’s time for Spud to post some absolute garbage. 😀

The last six months of blog posts have been more Tohaa-heavy than I had intended. I generally try to maintain a mix of different types of projects from month to month, but for most of this year, general life chaos and egregious personal irresponsibility have nixed most of the side projects I was intending to work on, and left my output fairly narrowly focused on the Space Artichokes.

It is to this same well that I return today, but fear not, for there is light on the horizon. Today’s post is a roundup of the final work I recently undertook to get my Tohaa army up to a playable, painted 300pts, which means that after this goes up, I will once again be free to bounce from project to project in the manner that my ADD so fervently demands.

And if nothing else here interests you, you can always scroll to the bottom and ogle the Asparagus Hedgehogs. It’s okay, I’m not here to judge.