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.

Being as super-smart as I am, I have lots of ideas. Too many, in fact. Even eliminating the 30% unworkable, 20% uninteresting, and 20% probably-just-not-worth-it ideas that I have for various modeling projects, I still have to face the fact that my remaining pool of good ideas has to somehow fit into my practical production schedule. At any given time, I usually have at least 3-4 potential terrain projects, 10-15 sculpting projects, and 2-3 new army projects rattling around inside my skull, all of which I’m excited to someday find time to squeeze out into reality. It’s a difficult process to decide which of those projects are going to see fruition, and which will remain only as figments of my imagination for another year.

This is the main reason I say no to almost any project suggested to me by friends and associates. People come to me fairly regularly with suggestions for a conversion they think would look good, or a terrain project that they’d love to see, or a drawing they think would be funny. My answer is usually “no” before I’ve even heard the details, and is definitely “no” if they do manage to get through a full pitch. I say no partly because I just don’t like to set a precedent of being available for commissions, but also simply because I do not need anyone else’s ideas. Lack of ideas is not a problem I have. I do not sit around in a state of unmotivated boredom, wishing someone would inspire me with just the right idea. And I’m not alone in this. If I may quickly make a public service announcement on behalf of your talented betters:

Ideas have no value. Basically no creative person ever wants your ideas. We are very smart and talented (also handsome and charming), and have plenty of our own ideas already, which we think are better than your ideas. If you want your ideas to be executed, go figure out how to do so yourself, because we’re busy with our own stuff.

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:

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.