I’ve gotten to pick up my paintbrush and hobby tools a lot less this year than I would like, in part because my professional life was particularly hectic this year. Combine that with my paint desk being occupied by old computer parts for a few months whilst I was testing them and either fixing them or listing them for sale
An old X-Box that broke sometime back when my eldest was just a toddler has been returned to service (one replacement HDD and one hair-clip fished out of the disc drive and it’s all good to go again). A lot of the old parts I didn’t need got listed for sale online and I’m glad to say I found homes for most of the old parts, freeing up a bunch of space and putting a modest amount of change in my pocket – I even managed to offload some defective items to someone who wanted to have a crack at repairing them. Working through it all was a PITA, but I’m glad I did it this way rather than just dumping the lot and adding to the e-waste problem.
But of course, while this was happening I didn’t have my paint desk to use, and so having freed it up again I was recently glad to be able to get back into painting.
I eased back into things for the first paint session in awhile, starting by finishing up some Hell Dorado Westerners that had been languishing in a mostly completed state for most of this year. Two are now finished up, one is very close and two more are on their way but still need a bit more effort.
Francisco Vargas, ready for battle.Francisco Vargas has a nice capeAnother Arquebuser, ready to goAnd from the backLooking good from the front.Mostly there, but need to work on the hilt of his sword.These two still need a bit more work
Pretty happy with that, and already looking forward to the next time I get to pick up a brush.
I haven’t written much about tabletop gaming on this blog, but as my latest Numenera campaign wraps up after nearly three years and I prepare to start the next campaign with a new system (Invisible Sun) it seems like an ideal time to start writing about it. Don’t worry, I still plan to post plenty of will hobby crafting content on this blog, but this gives me something to write about even when life makes it hard to find time to build things.
The campaign that’s wrapping up has been fun, and has seen the characters rise from neophytes to the kind of massively overpowered adventurers that shape the world (in this case, liberating their home town). The setting and story has been (somewhat haphazardly) documented on in WorldAnvil, and there’s also an in-character journal that one my players has maintained for the whole campaign. I’ll probably do a lessons-learned write-up about it in the future, but for now lets talk about what comes next.
Numenera was powered by Monte Cooke’s Cypher System (it is in fact, the inspiration for that system). But whilst Invisible Sun does draw inspiration from the Cypher System, it’s a much more complex (one might even say baroque) system, with a bit more to understand. We’re still in the character generation phase for our new campaign, so we’re mostly dreaming up ideas and familiarizing yourself with the new ruleset.
The setting is going to be a bit challenging to bring to life appropriately, it’s a very surrealist concept where the everyday world is a mere shadow of the Actuality – a lively, magic filled and very narratively malleable world. I’ll need to figure out the best way to incorporate those elements whilst keeping the continuity and maintaining some kind of internal consistency (because I know my players, and I know that will matter to them.
It’s also designed to be a lot more player led and has some unique ideas that give the players ways to signal to the GM what kind of narratives they’re looking to play. One of the more unusual mechanics is that characters choose a story arc as part of character creation (with mechanics for adding more later). These are tied into how characters earn Acumen, which are just one of the types of experience points the system uses. I’m very interested to see how this pans out with my group of players. I don’t quite know what to expect but it should be interesting.
Because of the more player driven approach to the story, I’m not planning out any big story arcs out the gate. I’m planning to use their chosen arcs to get the story running and let the story develop on its own. Certainly, some of the more memorable parts of prior campaigns were things I never planned, and at this point in my GMing career I’m confident enough in my ability to wing it and adapt to what my players bring to the table.
It looks like I’m in for an interesting journey, and I’m looking forward to it. I’m sure I’ll post more on this as things go on.
Up until very recently , I’ve been hosting this blog from a tiny Pikapod1. That worked fine, and I’d recommend it as an option for hosting your own blog for people with some basic technical skills (mostly DNS) – it’s fairly straightforward to set up and there’s few other ways host a blog for $2/month.
The Australian Posters Union are a social media co-op that runs the Mastodon and Pixelfed instances I’m on. They’re supported by voluntary donations, and I’m happy to be one of their supporters because the only path I can see that gets us away from a social media environment where we are the product is building a social media environment owned and operated by the communities it serves.
Social media co-ops offering blog hosting as well is a wonderful idea. Blogging is a good complement to micro-blogging, it can provide a space to capture the long form thoughts in a more permanent and easily referenced place, whilst more ephemeral and still developing thoughts can be shared on the Fediverse. Co-ops generally already have the infrastructure to deploy blogs on, and for most small blogs the actual load is very small and easily accommodated.
Meanwhile, it can provide bloggers with a good alternative to either the free but ad supported blog hosts, or the more expensive commercial hosting. This gives us another way to start pushing the web away from the tracker ridden, ad infested space it has become.
Pikapods lets you run preconfigured pods for a variety of web based apps. They’re fairly easy to set up if you’ve got basic technical skills and the supported options include WordPress and Ghost. ↩︎
This one is gonna be an older project. I originally posted these photos back when I was still on miniatures.photography (a now defunct pixelfed instance) and it was the first piece of terrain I ever scratch-built. Since that instance is no longer around, I’m posting it here so that it’s still somewhere to be found online.
It was a simple bunker constructed using foam-core and cardboard. The construction was fairly simple and straightforward, consisting of four trapezoidal pieces of foamcore (two for the ends, and two internal ones for rigidity), and three rectangular pieces that formed the top and sides. Hot glue was used to glue the whole structure together.
Details were then applied using some cardboard (2.4mm thick ‘box board’ sourced from an art supplies store, though if I did this again I’d use something slightly thinner because it was a pain to cut). I also used a few bits of plastic mesh to add grates to the top of the bunker, with the area under the grates being pre-painted in black before the grates went in. Some 3d printed greebles I had lying around were added, as well as a few cut up pieces of zip tie. The cardboard was mostly attached using PVA, with superglue used for the greebles.
Lastly, a second pass of detailing was applied using some thinner cardboard salvaged from an old cereal box. This added a bit more depth to many of the panels, with the aim being for that to show up well when dry-brushed later.
After this I coated the piece in modpodge before I undercoated it with some black spray undercoat from the local “Hammerbarn”1. I did this before realizing I really ought to attach it to a base, I went back and cut an MDF base for the piece, which I glued on aLastlynd textured with spackle, pebbles and sand before spraying it again.
Lastly, it was time to give it a simple paint-job. Since this is a terrain piece I used some simple craft paints. For the base coat I used a mixture of Paynes Grey and blue to get a dark, de-saturated blue. This was then overbrushed2 with a brighter de-saturated blue and washed with a simple black wash before being dry-brushed with a light grey-blue.
The grates at the top received a similar treatment with shades of grey, with a metallic silver being used for the dry brush and a little weathering using burnt umber and raw umber to add some rust.
Overall, pretty happy with this – it looks nice on the tabletop – just need to build quite a few more. The dark browns of the dirt make me think of jungles so I may have to see if I can “jungle it up” for whatever I build next for this set and try to aim for a forest moon of Endor kind of a vibe.
Ok, so it’s actually Bunnings. But I couldn’t resist the Bluey reference. ↩︎
Overbrushing is a simple technique is similar to drybrushing, but with much heavier coverage ↩︎
Quite a while ago, Miniac posted a video where he used a photo as the basis for a colour scheme. Others have also visited the same idea, but it’s an interesting concept and it struck me as a fun way to find interesting new colour schemes to try.
Recently, I had a background ambience video walking through a forest in a northern-hemisphere autumn, and something about the colours was very striking. The orange of the autumn leaves contrasted beautifully with the almost iridescent blue of the rocks, stone and river. The brown of the trees also looked nice, and gave me a good third colour to round out my scheme.
A wonderfully vibrant forest photo, just waiting to become a paint scheme
When it comes to picking paints, I originally expected the orange would start with a brown. But when I examined the photo more closely, I could see that the red tones are surprisingly strong amidst those leaves, so I chose to start with a dull red and shade up through orange.
For the blues I started quite dark, using a very dark blue-black as my base, and shading up to Deep Ocean (a dark teal) . This ultimately didn’t have enough contrast though, so I wound up also using a bit of Marine Teal as well just to push the highlights a bit higher. For the browns I went with a simple range of earth browns to get the colours I was looking for. This tended to be the background colour of my schemes, filling in where it made sense but not really being the focus.
Blue: RMS Nightmare Black (#09280), VMC Dark Sea Blue (#70898), RMS Deep Ocean (#09076), RMS Marine Teal (#09077)
Brown: RMS Dark Shadow (#09040), RMS Muddy Brown (#09028), RMS Dark Highlights (#09042)
Abbreviations: RMS is Reaper Master Series, VMC is Vallejo Model Colour
The Lizardman
The first model I tried this colour scheme out on was a lizard man figure (Degenerate Serpentfolk from Reaper Minis). I went with the blues for his scalemail armour, with the orange used for most of the trim and details. I reserved the browns for the leggings and sleeves (as well as his flesh).
I’m pretty happy with this overall combination. It’s pleasing to the eye and yet a little bit novel. While I don’t think it’s a exact match to the photo, I don’t think I would have thought of this colour scheme if I hadn’t tried this exercise – so I consider this to be a success.
The Pirate
The second model I applied this too was an old Pirate mini that’s been sitting in my backlog for quite some time. From memory he was part of a set I fished out of a bargain bin long ago.
I did end up changing the colour scheme up a bit on this one, mostly because he was wearing a ruffled poets shirt that wouldn’t look right if it wasn’t white. The mahogany went well for his coat and jacket, with the teal providing a wonderful contrast for his hat, sash and pants. The darker brown didn’t end up making it into the composition.
I did put a bit more effort into pushing the contrast with this figure, which paid off and I’m very happy with the result. It definitely helps the mini pop.
The Trooper
The last of the three minis was a sci-fi trooper figure from my pile of old Reaper Bones figures. I again chose to go with the more vibrant, higher contrast approach I went with for the pirate. Whilst that may not be the most realistic choice for a military uniform, it certainly produced a nice result. I do wonder if I could use this scheme for a StarGrave or Space Wierdos crew in the future.
This proved to be quite a fun experiment, and one I’ll probably repeat with other schemes in future. The teal and mahogany are both solid colour results that I’m sure to use in other schemes in the future, and I think I’ve learnt a bit of colour theory along the way.
You’ve probably seen this icon before – let’s discuss what it’s for.
In the olden days, before the internet devolved into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four”1, the web was full of blogs, news sites and other content. And while you could just visit each page to find out if there were any updates, there was enough of them to make it a bit cumbersome to check every site. This was solved through a wonderful old web-standard called Really Simple Syndication (RSS)2 which provided a way for websites to publish feeds that could be pulled together by a feed reader to show users what’s new across all of their favourite websites at once.
In its day it was one of the key ways people kept up with blogs and news across the web, long before we all became accustomed to simply browsing our social feeds to find things. Our social media feeds were a decent upgrade for a while, but as the years went by those feeds began to show us less of what we’d subscribed to, replacing it with ads, sponsored content and engagement traps.
Thankfully, RSS never really went away. Most blogs still support it, as do many news sites. It’s even possible to subscribe to someones Mastodon, Bluesky or Youtube account using it3. All you need is a feed reader – these come in multiple formats, you can have an app, a web based aggregator or a browser extension. All of these do the same thing – add the sites feed to your reader and it’ll handle letting you know about new content as it gets posted. It’s a powerful tool for taking back control of how you consume information4.
Many modern feed readers are smart enough that you can point them at the homepage of a blog and they’ll find the RSS feed automatically for you. For those that aren’t, you may need to look for the RSS icon to get the feed URL directly.
To help people get started, here’s some resources that might help people find blogs that suit their interests.
Blog Lists by Topic
Tabletop Miniatures & Wargaming – I maintain a list of tabletop mini related blogs on this website, you can find it here.
Back in November of 2022, I was just recently migrated off Twitter to Mastodon and was starting to learn about the rest of the Fediverse. Someone called Ari was just starting up a Pixelfed instance for mini-painting called, appropriately, miniature.photography.
My first post on the site was sharing my new portable hobby station. Just a simple MDF kit, but also spray painted to give it extra protection.
An mdf hobby station, fully assembled and painted gray. It looks shiny and new.
I put this together to make it easier to make good use of the rather small amount of hobby time I got (having a young family sure does kill most of your free time). It has its dedicated spot on the shelf which makes setup and pack-up relatively quick and easy.
That station is still with me today, though it now looks a little less immaculate. But it’s served me well so far. One of the minis is even the same in both pictures (for fun, see if you can spot which). I do tend to take a meandering approach to getting figures painted.
The same mdf hobby station, but showing clear evidence of paint spillage and other wear and tear.
Since then, Ari eventually decided that running an instance wasn’t for him. He’s given us all plenty of notice, so I figured it’d be a good idea to migrate some of the stuff I’d posted over there to this blog before the instance goes. You’ll probably see a few more posts where I go back and discuss old projects so I can ensure some of those photos remain available somewhere.
And thank you to Ari. Miniature.photography was my place to share my projects with others for quite a few years, and led to me discovering many other talented painters to follow within the wider hobby corner of Mastodon (frequently simply shortened to Hobbyodon). I could talk more about how wonderful it’s been, for now I’ll share a blog post from someone else whose captured it wonderfully.
Whilst the simplest and easiest way to paint the metal bits on your mini is just to use metallic paints, there’s a whole other effect you can go for using nonmetallic paints to simulate the highlights and reflections. I’ve been interested in giving it a try for awhile.
My first attempt was a couple of ninjas, painted up to look like their blades are catching the moonlight. These were good to start with as the thin katanas made it a lot easier to get a good effect.
Two 28mm Ninja figurines, each painted to look like they’re sneaking through the night with the moon glinting off of their blades.
After these, my next NMM attempt kept the same theme but had a slightly larger surface to work on. For this attempt I focussed mainly on getting the right “shapes” and ensuring there was plenty of contrast. The final result is a bit rough – it looks good at a distance but is a bit messy when inspected more closely.
For attempt #3, I went with a more of a bronze/copper hue, painting both the weapon and the shoulder pads of a lich. My colour plan for this (based on Vince Venturella’s Copper NMM guide) involved using the following four colours:
Vallejo Game Colour Charred Brown (#72.045)
Reaper Master Series Gory Red (#09278)
Reaper Master Series New Copper (#09306)
Reaper Master Series Maggot Green (#09282)
This kind of worked out ok, but the very pinkish hue of the New Copper looked a bit wrong, so I wound up using a thin glaze of RMS Explosion Orange (#09219) to bring back more of a red and yellow hue. My first attempt looked alright, if a bit muddy, but I wasn’t completely happy with it. I then went back in and worked on bumping the contrast up a notch, which delivered a much better result.
The Halberd, first attempt on the left, with the right showing the result after bumping up the contrast
This is definitely just the start of my NMM journey, but so far there’s a few key lessons I can share.
It will look terrible right up to near the end, when it will start to look good (even then, it looks its best from a distance).
After you’ve placed your highlights expect to go back and forth repainting bits until it looks right.
The finished Lich, holding his awesome NMM halberd.
Ive been keeping a list of friendly local game stores (FLGS) that I use to find products I’m looking for because I prefer to order things locally if I can. I haven’t ordered from all of the retailers listed (I generally favour Combat Company and Milsims, for convenience and range respectively).
It may be convenient to just order everything off of Amazon these days, that comes at the expense of local game stores that provide not just our games, but frequently spaces for the gaming community to play and meet.
I’m still setting this site up, and I’ll have to come up with a better name, but it exists. It is here.
I’ll be using it to share the miniatures and tabletop stuff I find myself working on. I’ll probably continue to post WIP shots to Pixelfed, and to do more long-form write-ups here.
If you’re interested in hearing more, go ahead and add me to your RSS reader of choice. If you don’t have an RSS reader of choice, consider adopting one for the sake of the indieweb.
