When I started this blog, I had a very simple philosophy in mind: rather than pushing for frequent updates, I would concentrate on posting only a consistently high quality of work. My vision was that someone who paged through my catalog of posts would only see a string of detailed posts about my best work, with no blatant filler to skip over. That guiding philosophy is why I average only one blog post per month– I only produce one nice thing every month, on average, so that’s how often I have something to write about.

Some months, however, I find myself not having been as productive as usual, and thus I have nothing to write about when the vague monthly post deadline comes up. Occasionally I can dredge up an older unpublished project to fill the gap– and I actually do have a really fun one from about 14 months ago that I never got around to– however, this month I’m just not feeling it. Due to personal life events and global tragedies alike, my reserves of creativity are running fairly low at the moment. But rather than let the month simply slip by with no post, I’m going to make a one-time exception and go against my core philosophy.

That’s right, folks: it’s time for Spud to post some absolute garbage. 😀

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:

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?