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?

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.

When Infinity N3 was released a year and a half ago, I immediately observed two things about the overhaul of the hacking rules: they were super fun, and they were super hard to remember. To help me keep track of my available hacking options, I wrote a relatively simple web app that could filter the available options down to only the hacking programs that were relevant to the given situation. Originally I made this just for myself and my local playgroup to use, but the local response was encouraging enough that I went ahead and made it pretty enough for general release.

The first 3rd edition expansion book, Human Sphere N3, releases from distributors… tomorrow..? Sometime this week..? I’m not totally clear on the date. In any case, the book contains a large amount of new hacking content, and I’ve spent the past six weeks adding the new options to the N3 Hacking Helper. And since I had the files open anyway, I also decided to overhaul the graphics and add some completely new features to the app.

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.

No blog post this month.

No projects are quite finished, local store’s closing, and old fat dog is being put down.

Not a great month in potatoland.

Should have something next month.

-Spud

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.