There’s a goofy multiplayer format that we play in my local area. The first time we played it several years ago, someone lazily named it “Murderball”, and nobody has yet bothered to come up with a better name. In a nutshell: every player gets 100pts and always has 3 orders. When you get wiped out, you respawn a single Authorized Bounty Hunter that you can use to harass the players who are still in the game. It’s super fun. 🙂

We’ve used a large variety of proxy Bounty Hunters for Murderball over the years, but I wanted to have some proper dedicated models to use, so I decided to convert a squad of them using random models that I liked, with scratch-sculpted heads and scrounged weapons. And because I don’t want to bury the lead today, I’d like to answer the question in the post title by explaining WHY THEIR HEADS ARE SO BIG.

1. That’s how I draw! An average human being is around 7 heads tall, but I tend to draw most characters closer to 6 heads. I grew up drawing superheroes (who skew toward an exaggerated 8-head scale), and as an adult artist, I’ve noticed myself rejecting the overexaggerated body types I drew all throughout my teens by overcorrecting really hard in the other direction, with more subdued musculature and larger, more expressive faces. People comment on it frequently when I post my art, but at this point in my artistic journey, I’m pretty settled on my preference. 🙂
2. Related to #1: I just like larger heads on my models. 🙂 It’s easier to paint an expressive face on bigger heads, and I would rather have a goofy-looking model with the face I want than a correctly-scaled model that my ham-handed painting can’t make look right.
3. With that said: I messed up. I like bigger heads, but these ended up even bigger than I had intended due to my sloppiness. In particular…
4. It’s a side-effect of the way I sculpt heads. I often credit the sculpting videos on MiniatureMentor.com with bridging me from a beginner to an intermediate sculptor (where I remain to this day! 😛 ). The most influential video tutorial for me was one on Green Stuff sculpting by James Van Schaik, and his technique of (1) creating a skull, (2) putting eyeballs in it, and (3) sculpting the head around that core once it’s hardened will, if not done correctly, result in an oversized head. Recognizing this limitation, I’ve recently tried some experiments in a different head-sculpting technique that isn’t prone to the same problem, with good results. So today’s project may turn out be the last time I make such obviously misproportioned heads. We’ll see. 🙂
5. And finally: It doesn’t help that the models I’m working on top of are ridiculously skinny. As you’ll see over the course of today’s post, two of the models with custom heads are built on top of incredibly skinny female models, while one of them is built on top of a more realistically proportioned male model. And while all three heads are roughly the same size, the one on the male body barely looks out of place, while the two with female bodies look like lollipops. ~_~

So, there you go. Some intention + some accident = bobblehead bounty hunters.

1. Despite all appearances, I am, in fact, still alive.
2. I didn’t post for 2+ months because the projects I started kept hitting walls of various sorts that prevented me from writing them up.
3. It’s all good now, though.
4. Today’s thing isn’t about army men, but it is very cute.

My sister is a better adult than I am. She has a more normal job, does normal human things like go outside and eat different food every day, and much to my relief, she volunteered to do the “family” thing. That last one was particularly appreciated for its effect of reducing certain lines of badgering from our shared mother, and the whole topic will be settled for good in a few months when Sandy provides my mom the grandchild she so stereotypically pines for.

I basically only have one friend, and it’s kind of surprising to me how well that’s working out.

If we were to rewind five or six years, I would be hanging out with quite a few different circles of people– all gamers of varying stripes, but technically still people. I had my D&D group; a handful of Warmachine players I was still close to despite having soured on the game itself; the Infinity group I had just started to poke my nose into; a small group of friends I met with on Tuesdays for cards and board games; and even a group of “my friend’s friends” whom I occasionally joined for random movies and games. In most of these groups, there would be people I enjoyed hanging out with, people who were… let’s go with “inoffensive”… and people for whom I spent considerable mental energy devising plans to avoid having to ever speak with.

Here is an approximate venn diagram of these groups circa 2012:

As you can see, I considered my entire board game group to be good friends, with maybe one or two people from every other group warranting semi-regular communication outside the physical confines of our gaming store. There were certainly positive aspects to having a social circle of this size, however it was also very stressful for me– people usually don’t guess this based on my hilarious, charming, and generally spectacular personality, but I’m actually quite introverted. I can put on a dazzling show for a few hours, but when it’s done, I need to crawl back into my dark cave and shut the world out while I recharge for a few days.

I get a lot of free Infinity models. More than once, people have just handed me dozens of models for factions I was starting, which was certainly appreciated each time as a booster to my developing forces. I have two competing theories about why this keeps happening: either people recognize my self-evident greatness and want to shower me with gifts to express their awe, or the people in my community make bad purchasing decisions and end up with closets full of junk they eventually get tired of looking at.

It’s hard to say which of those two is a likelier explanation, but I know which one I’ll be subscribing to.

I ran a weird event this past weekend. At its core, it was a fairly standard 300pt ITS event (albeit with a focus on TAG-centric missions like Deadly Dance and Show of Force). However, in addition to the standard ITS scores for completing missions, each player was given a checklist of optional TAG-themed achievements that they could try to collect over the course of the event: