So, a few months ago, I made a really bad decision.

Yeah.

When I started playing, I came up with a colour scheme for my lovely new Space People using paper dolls in Photoshop; however, once this conceptual work was done, I then immediately proceeded to do anything but paint actual models for like four months. I drew pictures, I made terrain, I made fancy tokens, I made fancy scenario objectives, I made fancy transport cases… painting my Space Dudes was about the last thing I wanted to spend brainpower on, because for me painting isn’t really a creative endeavor– it’s more of a grudging obligation.

What finally made me pick up my paintbrush was a league my store scheduled for July and August. Someone else challenged the other members to be fully painted by the end of it, and while I’m nowhere near that level of completion just past the 3/4 point of the league, I have put paint on over half of my dudes. Which is, for me, a pretty incredible rate of painting progress. 🙂

People really need to think harder about when they decide to be born.

Gdaybloke, for example, was born right after New Year’s. This was a terrible decision, because it means that when his birthday rolls around, I’m just winding down from my holiday gift model production and in the last desperate weeks of Templecon model production. This leaves little to no time for any additional projects to be added to my docket, and as a result, Gday’s best-case scenario is an IOU; worst case, it’s a “Sorry, maybe next time you should try to hold out a little longer in the womb.”

He wouldn’t even need to wait that long in there– four months would do it. See, Templecon is in early February, and then I usually collapse in exhaustion for a month or so afterward. March is largely spent planning the next year’s project list and attending to various small projects I’ve had to put off for the sake of the November-Through-February meat grinder.

But April? April just works. I’m relaxed from my post-TCon break and not yet buried in brand-new projects, which I generally save for warmer months. If I have a random whim to knock a model together in April, I can generally pull it off with little to no collateral damage to my schedule.

And that is why I must dole out rare praise to my perpetual cab passenger, Tom. By nearly any rational accounting, Tom has proven to be an utter waste of the biological, financial, and nutritional resources his parents deigned to invest in him. To call his long-term and day-to-day decision-making “questionable” would be an act of abject charity. Yet in spite of all that, when it came time to make the one decision that mattered, Tom chose wisely.

Displaying a level of clarity that he would utterly abandon in all the years that would follow, Tom burst forth into the world on a day that would, decades later, place him in the ideal position for collecting Spudgiftery year after year after year. When April rolls around, Spud is feeling renewed and ready to commit unrepentant acts of creation. And Tom, most generously, is always standing there, palm upturned, waiting to receive them.

Every year, I go to Templecon. It’s the only event to which I travel any significant distance– I won’t even drive the 90 minutes to events held by 3rd-Best-Toronto-PG Northblade, no matter how lucrative the proffered bribes.

Because Templecon is my “one big event”, I like to bring something new there every year– whether new models for an existing army, or a wholly new one that I rush to complete in time for the event. The past two years I’ve taken the latter road; last year yielded my orange Legion army full of conversions, scratch sculpts and retina-searing paint. When I built my Legion army, my goal was to build a collection of display models; I sculpted and painted every model to the best of my ability, resulting in an army that took 14 months (on and off) to build.

This year, however, I didn’t want to work very hard.

I don’t help people.

People ask me to do a lot of conversions and sculpts for them, and as a rule, I turn pretty much everybody down. It started out as “no commissions, but I’ll do favors for people I know” because of the sheer amount of time I was dumping into those, but then I found myself agreeing to so many other people’s projects that I was having to book them six to nine months in advance. This made me a terribly sad Spud.

The main problem is that in order to drag myself through the weeks and months of work required to complete a project, I need to be excited about it. I need to think the idea is great, or badass, or hilarious, or whatever other adjective may apply, and be excited to finish it and reveal it to the world. Without that spark of excitement, it’s just too hard to dredge up the motivation to sit down for an eight-hour Saturday of rivet application. And as much as it sucks, I will just never be as excited about another person’s ideas as they are; people bring me projects with a look of glee on their faces, positive that I’ll think it’s awesome and be happy to take it on; but when they explain it, it usually turns out to be based on some inside joke I don’t understand or a reference I don’t think is that funny, and I’m left having to shatter this person’s excitement.

So I just cut everybody off. It’s easier to let people down due to an ongoing policy than to have to tell them their specific idea is f***ing terrible.

Last year at my store, I came up with a neat new idea for a tournament: everybody enters by handing over a wrapped box containing a mysterious painted mini of their choice. The box has three clues as to its contents. Over the course of the day, the games that the players play earn them “present points” that they can use to unlock hints; at the end of the day, players use their standing to swap whatever they’re holding for presents held by other people, using revealed hints to guess the contents of other people’s boxes; the lowest-ranking player swaps first, then the second-lowest, and so on; the highest-ranking player swaps last, letting him or her secure whatever present they want without any chance of having it taken away.

2012’s event was a huge success with a ton of great models entered at prizes, and I was excited to run it again this year (though with the modification of running it as a Thunderdome event; I’ll have more details about this year’s event in my next post). Last year my contribution was a pair of festive Basilisks; this year, I went with something a bit more traditional by making an Iron Kingdoms rendition of Santa Claus. And naturally, the only place such a judgmental enforcer of society’s laws would fit in within our beloved setting is in a high post within the Protectorate of Menoth.

Here, now, is how High Naughtymonger Santa Reznik came to be.

Every year on my birthday, I take the day off from work to do something I normally don’t get much of a chance to do; traditionally this meant drawing, but this year, the one thing I’ve been pining to do more of was paint. Specifically, painting random one-off models just because they look nice. I almost never get a chance to do that anymore, so I was really looking forward to it.

I took a four-day weekend to give myself lots of time to work. On the very first day of my vacation, my website was hacked. I won’t get into the horrible details, but suffice to say that I now won’t need to think very hard to come up with a “worst birthday ever”. Yeah, I know… first world problems. 😛

In the end I only got to spend about one day out of my four-day weekend painting, but in that time, I was able to finish a single model that I’m really proud of: Theodore, the snooty English paladin my fourth-best friend Tom is playing in our Pathfinder game.