Every year, I go to Templecon. It’s the only event to which I travel any significant distance– I won’t even drive the 90 minutes to events held by 3rd-Best-Toronto-PG Northblade, no matter how lucrative the proffered bribes.

Because Templecon is my “one big event”, I like to bring something new there every year– whether new models for an existing army, or a wholly new one that I rush to complete in time for the event. The past two years I’ve taken the latter road; last year yielded my orange Legion army full of conversions, scratch sculpts and retina-searing paint. When I built my Legion army, my goal was to build a collection of display models; I sculpted and painted every model to the best of my ability, resulting in an army that took 14 months (on and off) to build.

This year, however, I didn’t want to work very hard.

I don’t help people.

People ask me to do a lot of conversions and sculpts for them, and as a rule, I turn pretty much everybody down. It started out as “no commissions, but I’ll do favors for people I know” because of the sheer amount of time I was dumping into those, but then I found myself agreeing to so many other people’s projects that I was having to book them six to nine months in advance. This made me a terribly sad Spud.

The main problem is that in order to drag myself through the weeks and months of work required to complete a project, I need to be excited about it. I need to think the idea is great, or badass, or hilarious, or whatever other adjective may apply, and be excited to finish it and reveal it to the world. Without that spark of excitement, it’s just too hard to dredge up the motivation to sit down for an eight-hour Saturday of rivet application. And as much as it sucks, I will just never be as excited about another person’s ideas as they are; people bring me projects with a look of glee on their faces, positive that I’ll think it’s awesome and be happy to take it on; but when they explain it, it usually turns out to be based on some inside joke I don’t understand or a reference I don’t think is that funny, and I’m left having to shatter this person’s excitement.

So I just cut everybody off. It’s easier to let people down due to an ongoing policy than to have to tell them their specific idea is f***ing terrible.

Lava so WARM and RED and WET
It’s Lava
LAVA!

…

…sorry.

Just a quick update today– the question of “how do you make lava” has come up a few times in the last week, and since I’ve made quite a bit of it over the years, I figured I’d toss together a quick infographic to explain my process. Hopefully someone will find this useful.