Last month I posted the first models for my Tohaa army, but they weren’t exactly representative of the paint scheme I had planned out for my army. I owned Tohaa models for a year before I ever painted any, and in that time I went back and forth several times on a colour scheme.

As I generally do when I’m designing colour schemes, I drew a rough paper doll in Photoshop in the shape of the primary troop in my army– the bouncy Kotail Mobile Unit. The studio colour scheme is shown at left, and my first stab at a custom scheme is at right. This maroon-and-lavender scheme was something I thought up a few years earlier as a possible scheme for some Skorne models I never got around to painting, and I thought it looked quite striking on the Tohaa paper doll. However, my first Infinity army already made heavy use of dull dark purples, and while this one wouldn’t be exactly the same as what I used on my knights, I ultimately decided to go with something a bit more distinct for my aliens.

Last year, Corvus Belli released some models that were, shall we say, controversial.

Obvious comparisons were immediately drawn, and the community split into camps: those who liked, or at least didn’t mind, the mild silliness on display, and those who were disgusted by the fourth wall breach that they claimed it represented.

I counted myself among the offended. Not because I objected to an oblique reference to a children’s brand, but because the cowards at CB failed to take this joke far enough. Because you see, while any run-of-the-mill joke may be funny once or twice, the most powerful humour can only be found when a joke is plastered onto the side of a blimp, blasted with floodlights, and then run straight into the ground, rammed through the surface, and pushed further and further until it breaks clear out the other side.

Subtlety, my children, is for chumps.

Let the blimp-ramming begin.

My local game store, The Hobby Kingdom, has run a Christmas Paint Exchange every year for about the last 6-7 years. I started the first one when I was playing Warmachine, and took the tradition with me when I joined the Infinity group in 2014. The basic idea is that each participant drops off an unpainted miniature, which is then handed off to a random person to paint for them. The mini can be anything, but people tend to drop off mercenaries, civilians, and support models as it’s less painful when those types of ancillary models don’t perfectly match your army’s paint scheme.

This past year, I received my random model, and it turned out to be a civilian belonging to local feline tattoo artist Tom, whom you may recognize as the previous recipient of camels and knights and stacking elephants in addition to probably half a dozen small projects that weren’t worth posting to the blog. In other words, I am already way too good to Tom, and he absolutely doesn’t deserve any more of my beneficence. So when I saw the boring-ass model he contributed for me to paint…

…I immediately said “screw that” and started pondering what else I could do for him. Technically I already have a few of his other models that I’ve pledged to convert or paint for him, but even those weren’t really piquing my interest.

So, **** it.

I sculpted him a Boba Fett.

As you do.

So, right off the bat, I want to explain that it’s taken me four months just to figure out how to present what I’m about to share with you. It’s a sprawling project that incorporates narrative fiction, detailed mission writeups, character art, terrain work, web design, and a ton of homebrew rules. I’ve tried to assemble written, audio, and video commentaries to present what I built, but in each case, I found that giving my usual detailed blow-by-blow of the work just ended up being really long and tedious. I keep going back to the drawing board to find a new way to encapsulate everything for you, and I keep coming up with bad solutions.

I’ve been at this for five months, and I don’t think I’m going to have any more success in the next five than I did in the last five. So rather than continue this fruitless struggle, I’m going to concede that I will probably never figure out a way to present the project with all of the context that I would have wanted. It was just too big.

So, yaknow what?

Screw it. I won’t even bother.

Behold the monster that devoured Spud’s summer:

If anyone’s unsure about whether to click that link, here’s a quick FAQ to explain what it is.

I ran an Infinity league at my local store this past summer. An ongoing narrative ran through the five weeks of missions, and that narrative frequently called for battles to take place in fairly specific locations that are difficult to represent with the terrain my store had on-hand. I didn’t want the players to have to play these missions with ill-fitting boards, so in the month leading up to the league, I spent some time creating new terrain pieces to match the environments I was planning to send them into. You’ve already seen one result of this effort in the form of the sewer board. A second one– a modular system of space station walls– was built enough to be played on during the league, but I never finished sprucing it up because I didn’t like how tedious it was to assemble each time we used it. (I may revisit that bucket of components at some point in the future, though).

The third board I built took the most work, but ended up being my absolute favourite. The inciting incident for the entire campaign was an alien attack on a Yu Jing cargo transport over Paradiso, and I wanted an actual ship for the players to play on. I traditionally build my Infinity terrain out of hand-cut foamcore construction with hand-cut craft foam detailing; this technique yields great-looking terrain that is extremely durable, but it takes quite a long time to build due to all of the precise manual cutting. I only had two weeks and change to build my spacecraft, though, so I had to figure out some shortcuts that would let me do more construction than normal in the time I had available.

This conversation happens about once a month, generally at work or at family gatherings:

• Person: Do anything interesting this weekend?
• Spud: Not really. Mostly just sat at home and sculpted.
• Person: Oh, you sculpt? Neat!
• Spud: Oh, right. Yeah, I sculpt little dudes about an inch tall.
• Person: That’s so cool! Do you have any that I can see?
• Spud: Uh, no.
• Person: No?
• Spud: Yeah, I kind of end up giving away every single model I sculpt. I can’t think of a single one that I still have in my possession.
• Person: Oh. Hmm.
• Spud: Yeah. It kinda sucks. I have some pictures on my blog, though.
• Person: Ehh, I guess…

And then I show them my pictures, but I can tell that they’re disappointed, because that isn’t quite the same as being able to hold the model in your hand.

After a decade of having this conversation, I decided to finally do something about it. That’s right, kids: I am sculpting some models just to keep for myself. And what’s more, they aren’t going to be models for any particular game– I just want to draw a cool picture, then sculpt the character I drew, and then never paint the model, and have all of that be okay.