About a year ago, I sculpted a model. It was a very simple joke:

And we all had a good laugh. In the closing notes for that writeup, some thoughts passed through my mind:

An interesting thought occurs to me in the aftermath of this piece. Sculpting and painting the model took a grand total of like… a week? And I was procrastinating pretty hard (specifically, playing a whole bunch of X-Com) throughout a lot of that time. But given that time as a base unit, in theory I could do an entire 10-model army of similar chibi Infinity models (i.e., adapting canon uniforms over a cartoony body) from scratch in like two or three months.

I have no idea what to do with that realization, exactly, but it’s interesting to ponder.

“Hrm”, mused the potato.

I pushed the thought away for a few months to focus on other priorities, but my brain kept coming back to it. During a particularly conference call-heavy week at work, I found myself scribbling out fun pose ideas on sticky notes:

And like… I really started liking the idea. What if I did do a whole army of these silly bean-headed folk? I’ve honestly never been that huge of a consumer of other people’s chibi art– it’s fine, but in and of itself it’s less interesting to me than traditional real-scale art– but I’ve always found it a pretty entertaining scale to draw and sculpt in myself. The huge heads and cartoony style give you a huge canvas to play around with expressive faces and dynamic poses, and the scrunched body proportions minimize the exact parts that tend to be boring and annoying without adding much interest– namely, legs. Also, one of the fundamental challenges of sculpting is usually fighting with clay’s desire to be soft and round, and laboriously working to force it into sharp and hard-edged shapes. With chibi, that initial roundness is actually exactly what you want, so you can skip most of the refinement. So in the end, working in chibi scale just ends up being “normal sculpting, minus the misery.”

My next article will be very good. This one, less so.

I recently ran a Randomizer Tournament where all participants were required to play lists generated by the glorious Infinity Random List Generator. I played NeoCanada at the event, and one of my random lists included a Garuda. I’ve proxied the Garuda DropBot once or twice, but never added one to my army because I couldn’t think of a funny Canadian conversion for “air drop robot”. However, time pressure is a uniquely helpful inspirational catalyst for me, and when I sat down to think about how to approach it, the idea hit me almost immediately: I just made hundreds of patches featuring a Space Mountie and her irritable bird companion.

I’ve already made the mounties, but I was at that moment shamefully birdless.

Wellp… guess we’re doing this.

Observation: Spud has not blogged in 3 months.

Plausible Hypotheses: Spud has died. Or is having family drama. Or doesn’t like Space Men anymore. Or was kidnapped by Swedish terrorists. Or– and bear with me here– has died.

Actual Explanation:

Credit: Incendavery

UUUUUUGH FINE I’LL BLOG SOMETHING. >_<

People always seem a bit confused when I make fun of the Knights of Montesa, but this is because most people have not read the Military Orders fluff section of the original Human Sphere book from N2. Behold the storied history of this noble order (emphasis is mine):

In short,

1. Nobody wanted them to exist.
2. They’re only operating on a temporary pass.
3. They’re slightly worse than other knights.
4. They struggle to prove their value.
5. There have been repeated attempts to shut the order down.

Or in even shorter, BAHAHAHAHA THE OFFICIAL FLUFF SAYS THEY SUCK. XD

I’m working on a terrain project that isn’t quite ready to show yet, but I didn’t want to miss my monthly bloggerating, so instead I’ll show off some art I made for the project:

It’s an O-12 Kappa! In a very odd pose! We’ll get to that in a sec!

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*