Practice Pirate

 Pirates are great.

To practice some more advanced painting, and just for the fun of it, I got myself a Firelock Games kit. Resin models are strange and full of fiddly details that easily clog. At the same time, those details produce a much higher-fidelity figure in the end. I followed this link to the excellent Blood and Pigment site for a guideline. I ended up shading the figure a little too darkly, and so got to practice glazing to brighten up the white shirt. This is also my second attempt at painting eyes, and my first in eight years. I was rather frightened off by the first go at it. They really do help the figure in my opinion.

I may find myself trying Blood and Plunder soon, since I will be in a smaller living space for around two months between larger dwellings. The two-player starter kit seems like a good project to work on while other figures are in storage. Pirates are an eternal fascination with me, from Black Sails and Assassin's Creed to the many, many adaptations of Treasure Island. Just recently I saw the 1986 version with Brian Blessed, and I would highly recommend it.

This current photo setup is temporary, though it may reappear before I can cobble together a lightbox or equivalent.

Space Station 13, Relaystation

 Space Station 13 is my favourite game.

Well, maybe second-favourite. Third on a bad day.

I am going to assume the reader knows about this game. If you do not, then there is little I can do to explain it. Think Town of Salem meets Dwarf Fortress for a start. All the complexity, both social and mechanically, that statement implies comes too with developing for the game. It is open-source, but based in a strange programming language from 20 years ago. I can just about wrap my head around simple bugfixes, and sprite changes are not entirely outside of my power, but my main strength in developing for Space Station comes from mapping.

This is not a map I made. This is Metastation, the map against which all new additions to my chosen server of TGstation are measured. Through rose-tinted goggles and against a legitimately good design, all are found wanting. I remain partial to the defunct Kilostation layout, but that is neither here nor there.

This is a map of my own design, provisionally titled Relaystation. It is a bare husk compared with the feature-complete Meta, but knowledgeable players should be able to pick out which departments are which based on a few key features. This design results from a long-term frustration with the game, where some players are given busywork in the form of research and development fetch quests instead of deeply interactable content. This map has been created without those jobs in mind. The roles left are those with extreme mechanical depth and options, like the circuit-builder system or chemistry. These jobs let players set their own goals and develop unique creations each round, rather than repeating a checklist of actions to progress to an eventual reward. Other roles, like medical officers, have been stripped down to a set of emergency equipment intended to be used by other jobs as needed. 

The station as a whole is much, much smaller than the average. Even with planned expansions to the maintenance tunnels the map is perhaps only a tenth the size of Metastation, with much less population in mind. Often, I have seen maps intended for small crew sizes balloon out of proportion until players are too isolated. The opposite problem, keeping them too close together and therefor insufficiently vulnerable to the dangers of space, presents itself with a small map. But the docking ports visible on Relaystation highlight how the map is designed to encourage EVA work to put players back at risk, especially since there are decompression airlocks instead of the typical in-out system used in TG codebases. I do not know if Relaystation will ever progress beyond this sketch stage, or if I could ever possibly host a version of it, but the simple act of mapping is relaxing enough to be worth it alone.

For now.

Playing Foolish Games

And winning foolish prizes.

 

Liquid Green Stuff continues to vex me. Unfortunately, when hands and feet snap off and the tried-and-true method of more glue fails to solve the problem your options are limited. I salvaged the ankle by washing it slightly red to give the lumps a welt appearance, but the left wrist his not an ideal result. I also need more practice with highlighting fabrics in bright tones, a lot more practice.

I am quite happy with how the fool turned out despite all my whining. I used him as an excuse to practice highlights with more than one layer. One day perhaps I will even paint a figure to an 'eavy metal bare minimum. The bright contrasts and cartoonish pose were a splendid break from more down-to-earth Afghan tribesmen, though only three of those remain at time of writing. If I can recreate the highlighting on the right arm front more reliably then I will be in a better place. The skeleton recipe has remained unchanged, but the skin was a flayed one -> reikland -> flayed one: pallid wytch -> pallid wytch progression. I like the final result, but I want to experiment some more.

On the list of things to fix, my photo setup needs a redux and sooner rather than later. It turns out my regular camera app can produce better looking shots than a special setup.

Where are the posts?

Through a combination of overwork, undereffort, and downright sickness I find myself having missed a week of posting.

 

Blogging will resume following an indeterminant duration. 

April's Fool

 Who is more foolish: A fool or the fool who models him?

Of course, I had been hoping to have this model ready on the first, but time makes fools of us all. The lower half is a Warhammer fantasy handgunner with zombie feet, the torso is a plague monk torso reclaimed from the ratguard, the arms are both handgunner arms, the left hand is from the tempestus scions, the mask is from Blackstone Fortress, the hat and feathers are from the handgunners, and the skull is from the beastman shaman. Both the left hand and the left foot refused to stick on the first few attempts, which explains why there is so much green stuff matted around them. But we can resolve that with the magic of MS Paint.

Much better! This is closer to how I see the finished model. The hood wrapping will be redone in greenstuff to cover the shoulders, and the bulges of greenstuff will be cut down. The base idea is a must, though painting confetti is something I will have to figure out. I will put small bells on his ankles if I can find ones of a suitable size, but I am undecided on if there should be rats below him or fireworks behind him. Even though he has a faceless mask and a skull-scepter I do not believe this is an evil fool. Sinister, perhaps, but not malicious.

Evil or not, this was a very fun and surprisingly quick model to produce. If cleanup and painting prove as fun I may do some more in between larger projects.