Spud did a good thing, but he did it badly, so the formerly fun project was made not-fun for those involved, and then it was never really finished, and then Spud shamefully stuffed it under the rug for 18 months.

But I’m going to have to haul it out and talk about it eventually, so I might as well get it over with now.

Behold the potato’s tale of shamefully poor planning. ;_;

In case you missed the banner at the top of the site, I am amazing. I am amazingly smart, and I come up with amazing ideas, and I execute them amazingly well.

Usually, anyway.

Sometimes, though, I find my reserves of amazing running a bit on the dry end. This is invariably a temporary situation, so all I generally need to do is to put the partially-formed idea on the backburner for a few weeks, months, or years, and eventually the perfectly-formed version of the project will bubble up to the surface of my brainmeats.

Usually, anyway.

On some very rare occasions, I find myself without any really inspiring ideas for a project, but with some extenuating circumstance preventing me from simply putting the whole thing off for a while. This usually happens because I need to finish a model in time to play in an event– I need to play the thing one way or another, and I refuse to give up and bring some lesser-quality version that one of you mundane folk would settle for, so I have no choice but to force myself to squeeze out some brilliance on a tight schedule.

I do not work well under these circumstances. Over the years, I’ve developed the capacity to perform production tasks– sculpting, conversion, painting, terrain construction, and so on– under pressure, and as it happens, some of my best work is done in a frenzied last-minute panic. However, this generally requires me to start my frenzy with the concept for the project already fully-formed in my head. If on the other hand I enter Panic Mode without having come up with my brilliant idea at the start, then things start to look fairly bleak.

Which brings us to Crab People.

The last six months of blog posts have been more Tohaa-heavy than I had intended. I generally try to maintain a mix of different types of projects from month to month, but for most of this year, general life chaos and egregious personal irresponsibility have nixed most of the side projects I was intending to work on, and left my output fairly narrowly focused on the Space Artichokes.

It is to this same well that I return today, but fear not, for there is light on the horizon. Today’s post is a roundup of the final work I recently undertook to get my Tohaa army up to a playable, painted 300pts, which means that after this goes up, I will once again be free to bounce from project to project in the manner that my ADD so fervently demands.

And if nothing else here interests you, you can always scroll to the bottom and ogle the Asparagus Hedgehogs. It’s okay, I’m not here to judge.

I have a tendency to do a lot of conversions and scratch sculpts for my various wargame armies. Sometimes I’m creating differentiation between duplicate models, sometimes I’m fixing problems with the original model, and sometimes I just feel like I have a funny idea that needs to be made flesh.

However, this will largely not be the case with my new Tohaa army. With a few exceptions, the Tohaa models simply work for me. They have great costume designs and good poses, and given the insane level of detail on them, I feel like most of my efforts to modify them would simply make them worse. The Tohaa do have a small number of models I find quite ugly, but these all happen to have game profiles that don’t interest me at all, so it’s quite easy for me to simply not buy them and focus on other models.

So in the end, not a lot of modification is being done with this army. Sure, there’s the one big custom project it all started with, and I’ll be doing some minor work to differentiate two duplicate models I bought, but the majority of my Tohaa models are just being assembled, cleaned up, and painted in their natural state.

There is, however, one model that I really wanted to include in my army, but couldn’t leave in the condition CB shipped her. I am speaking, of course, of Neema Sataar, the pole dancing bikini princess of the Tohaa Ectros Corps:

I don’t love my format here. I like documenting my work, and I like sharing how I make things, but still photos frustrate me. I can’t take pictures while I’m working, so all I can do is put my tools down when I advance part of a model and take a photo of its current state. Work a bit more, put tools down, take photo.

It’s frustrating because the stretches BETWEEN those progress states are the only parts anyone can actually learn from. But I can’t work and take still photos at the same time, so I’m kind of stuck.

Or… maybe not?