I’m really smart and talented and attractive and I succeed at most things I try, so sometimes I like to set myself absurd goals just to break up the monotony of my relentlessly successful life. About six months ago, I posed myself just such a challenge: to make a foamcore terrain design SO SIMPLE, that even you– yes you, the less smart, minimally talented, and honestly rather homely masses— could build it without parental supervision.

I of course did not succeed. As always, the fault lies with you; I vastly overestimated the average human’s patience, hand-eye coordination, and capacity to sit next to a bottle of glue for an hour without ingesting any. But if you imagine yourself to be among the more skilled apes and want to risk crippling injury attempting to follow my instructions, I invite you to click the new “Papercraft” link in the menu above and see what doomed misadventures await you there.

I even made you a TV show so that you could absorb the instructions in a more format to which your adorable brain is more accustomed. After all, words are hard.

If, on the other hand, you worry that you would come away from such an endeavor with fewer than the factory count of fingers, you can just keep reading here and watch me make pretty red shapes in Photoshop instead.

*condescending head pat*

I’ve never been a gum-chewer. But in the last year, the gum needed chewing, so I got down to business.

That isn’t a metaphor.

About a year ago, someone offered me some gum, and I was intrigued by the vessel it was offered from— not a metallic bubble pack, but a plastic jar with a very interesting lid.

The lid is a truncated hemisphere, but the flat cut of the top isn’t parallel to the base– instead it’s angled, creating an interesting shape. The flap at the top is a separate piece that can be (permanently, and destructively) removed, and there’s a satisfying row of parallel indentations around the edge. As it tends to do, my brain took in the shape of this lid and filed it into the Terrain Scrap Archives, a filing system in my brainmeats where I track “stuff I’ve seen that could probably be used for terrain, someday, maybe”. I didn’t immediately know exactly what use the lids would have, but I knew in my core that there was a piece of terrain somewhere inside it.

A year ago, I painted up an Onyx army for my friend Tom. Afterward, we discussed the fact that we had forgotten to include an HVT in the army, forcing him to use a variety of off-theme civilian models alongside the army for the past year.

Obviously, this travesty could not continue.

We chatted over the possibilities for a Combined Army civilian, and one that made us laugh quite a bit had a pretty simple concept:

Cross this…

…with this:

Aaaaaand that’s the entire concept. Sometimes the simple answer really is the right one. 🙂

Like many new Infinity players, I spent a lot of time before and after picking up my first army ogling Corvus Belli’s extended range of models. The aesthetic style was a really refreshing change from the Warmachine models I’d been building for the last ~7 years, and I was frankly awed by the talent on display by their artists and sculptors. While the model range has, of course, its share of duds, I would put the best Infinity models ahead of the best from any other gaming minis line. The character designs were great, the poses extremely dynamic, and the sculpting unbelievably crisp. Stand-outs from these early browsing sessions included the Sepulchre Knight, the Geckos, and Scarface; models with gorgeous detail that make cool little movies play in my head when I look at them. 🙂

I don’t have any projects ready to blog about this month, but I did put together something y’all might find interesting, so let’s take a quick look at that instead. 🙂

Someone on WGC Infinity asked for tips on sculpting the mechanical muscle underlay that powers Heavy Infantry armor. I’ve sculpted quite a bit of it over the years, and it’s actually a fairly interesting topic, so I spent an evening recording a demonstration for him.

Hopefully someone finds it useful. ^_^

Aaaaaand that’s it for today. I’m finishing up a small army for Adepticon at the end of March, so I should have some cool stuff to show off next month. 🙂

-Spud