Project Detour - Laser and Paint Edition

This week has a lot of detours. I've run the laser 4 times since Saturday. Now I have a lot of items to assemble and complete. I wrote a review and revamped my review page with HTML. I rolled a character for my X2 - Castle Amber campaign and have a piece or two to write on that. Finally, I have broken with Amazon for what I hope is the final time and have a new alternative in the wings. 

Let's go back to front: Amazon disabled my account because I don't generate enough clicks and sales.

Well, yes. There is no solid connection between Amazon and me. I have to dream up really awkward ways to work a link in. I'm not good at sales, and I use that awkwardness as a crutch. It's time to stop. 

What do I have as an alternative? 

Two items and three mentions: 

Awin, an affiliate marketing platform,
Libro.fm, an alternative to Amazon's Audible, 
and finally, Meeden Art, Inc., an art supply company marketing through Awin. 

I obviously love to read. I had hoped to pick up Libro.fm as an affiliate through Awin. They felt I wasn't a good match. I agree. This website is very niche. But I still want to support them and others.  

Let me tell you a bit about Libro.fm. They are like Audible, but their style is different. You can pick from three subscriptions: one book a month, two books a month, and a yearly subscription, with a great discount on 12 books in a year. 

Second, they are totally DRM-free, unlike Audible. 

Third, they allow you to designate a local bookstore as your favorite. When you purchase through Libro.fm, a portion of each membership or individual book sale goes to that bookstore. I have selected Sulfur Books, a glorious little bookstore in Clifton Springs, NY.  (I will come back and post again about Clifton Springs, but not here.)

While I don't have Libro.fm as an affiliate, I can share my membership link like this. When you click that link and place an order, I receive a free title. To be honest, considering the amount I read, that's better than gold. I could not be happier with this deal. 

If you have a website and you like books, maybe you should consider Libro.fm. This is not an affiliate program with approvals and such. It's offered to all of their members, for all users. I love it. 

Awin also led me to Meeden Art, Inc. I am very passionate about painting and drawing, despite not being very good. 

Creating an ad for art supplies is something I wouldn't have to work at. In fact, on day one, I purchased some paints and gave myself two laser cutting projects to support my artistic habits. I overpurchased in the extreme, but I will burn through this paint fairly quickly. 

The reason you are not seeing an ad for Meeden is that I need a tax document to complete the process, and it is tax season. I will be responsible and do my taxes early to get that document. Or, I won't post any ads until I do those taxes at the last possible second. I must roll for impulse control. :) 

Not being too strongly aligned with my TheseOldGames brand, they would be extremely prominent without being an off-ramp. This matches my tactics for DriveThruRPG. I can give you a link, you know what the link is for, and you can partake as you wish. 

And let me thank you and DTRPG again for that support. You and DriveThruRPG easily pay for my web costs. 

Moving backwards, I have created a new NPC for Castle Amber. Her name is Gabriella, or Gabby, and she is a witch. She is trapped just like the party but she has been here for a very long time. If you follow my suggestion and don't completely railroad the party into Castle Amber, you will need links back to your campaign world. Gabby is one of my links to home. 

I will be posting about her in my next run back to the Castle. These links to my Castle Amber series will display all of the posts in that category, so you may go all the way back to the beginning. Castle Amber is an epic module and could take all year to work through. 

In order to generate her, I used one of Timothy S. Brannan's books called Craft of the Wise: The Pagan Witch for Basic Era Games. This is one of a whole series on Witches for B/X style games. I use the OSE ruleset, and we will see how well these books merge with that system. 

This was also an opportunity to refresh my review page with actual HTML. It is so much easier to update now. Let me know what you think in the comments, either here or there. My pages have a comment section, too. 

Let me share the last item, the item I wanted to be the focus of this post, but failed at. I have a couple of items I rocked out with the laser. The first item was a repeat of physical dungeon terrain. This is the collision of art and gaming. I love making terrain and painting figures. 

The dungeon terrain consists of 1", 2", 4", and 6" walls, pictured in the upper left of this image. They are modular and now have a texture etched on them. In the near future, I will stain one set and paint another. I am not sure how I want them to look, so I want to see both styles. 

I will be doing a follow up post on these little bits and bobs. 

The next two projects are obvious for painting. I was able to cut a palette out of 1/8" plywood. It came out nicely. I thought it would be too thin, but it wasn't. I also thought I would need to bevel the edge, but I didn't do that either. It works nicely as is. 

The final item was a color wheel. Color wheels are a self-teaching tool. However, they are annoying to do on canvas. You need 1/8" or 1/4" masking tape to lay out the spaces. I cannot tell you how annoying it is to mask out 135 or more spaces for paint. 

Etching a color wheel is amazingly fast. I could do this on canvas, but I wanted to try a wood panel. It's nearly perfect. Zoom in, and you will see that I dropped the brush in the red/pink area. If I had masked that area with tape, that mark would have been on the tape. 

Oh, well.  

The final thing I will comment on is my intended structural changes to the website. I have nearly finished the Review Page and this simple change makes it simple to maintain. I will need to do more reviews in the future.  

One other change I made was to my post categories. I now have a template so I can post a whole series of articles and link back to them via a single category search.  That is very useful and was a trivia change all readers can see, but it is non-disruptive. 

In 2026, I will be marching backwards and cleaning up articles and posts, mostly for grammar. For all non-game book reviews, I will be adding my Libro.fm link. Once I have Awin and Meeden Art set up, I will also be applying ads to posts, too. 

Thanks for sticking with me through these changes. 

Let's get ready to paint some #mecha

 I do love a good Locust sculpt, but I have a few more figures queued up for painting. 

Usually, I do a light color as the base, but you can see I used black on the Mechs in the back rank. I've never tried that before. The Battlemaster and the Commando will be dark green, with red and white details, along with a bit of silver and gunmetal. 

The jars of dice are my next laser project. I'll be cutting some 3 mm thick lids for them. The next generation will have laser-etched glass, but I need to buy a rotating stand for that. 

#MechaModay for September 2nd - The Archer and The Locust

 #MechaMonday is here and I am leading with my two favorite mechs - The Locust and The Archer. 

It's been years since I have painted and I started right in with camouflage. We'll see how that goes. I'll get better pictures up soon. 

The reason I like these two mechs is you can get a 2:1 movement ratio. Sure there are pairs of variants that do not have this ratio, but you have to look for them. You can start advancing with the Locust zig-zagging while the Archer lumbers along behind. 

Thanks to the variants, you can pretend to be something you aren't by moving slightly slower. This shouldn't work by the rules, but it sidesteps the rules by repetition. If they see you move 8" and 4" every round, they will assume that you will in the future. The rules don't assume for player assumptions.   

This creates many possible attack positions for the pair: 

• The Locust can move in lockstep with the Archer, forcing your opponent to pick between a sure kill on the closer Locust or trying to kill the distant Archer.  
• The Locust can dash through the enemy and end up at their rear or better, a flank. 
• The Archer can dash forward and end up slightly in front of the slowing Locust.  
• The feint is a good gambit, where the Locust moves to one side dragging the enemy around so the Archer can turn to face a different foe or objective.  

This combo is costly in terms of Locusts but you can wreck formations, cut off individual mechs or make fancy powerplays with low-end mechs. Personally, I like the satisfaction of getting the Archers in front of the Locusts because my opponent has to sweat the dice to kill an Archer while worrying about what the Locusts are really doing. Even if they aren't doing anything.  

The Archer Slide Show

The Locust Slide Show

You can pick up a copy of this game on DrivethruRPG, but if you hit up brick-and-mortar stores, you can get the physical copy with minis. 

(Ab)Using What You Got

I like to use random ideas. Generally, I hate spam but spam comments have caused some of my better writing to come to the forefront. In this week's version, "a better life with Spam", I'll post images of artwork based on Artificial Intelligence. 

This was a project I started a few months ago. I like the unicorn but needed to figure out where the rest of it was going. 

Queue up the spam suggesting Artificial Intelligence gets things done more efficiently. Since I was lost on this image, I didn't know how to proceed. I upload it to Deepart.io and the results are lovely. 

I've tried redoing this image in oil paint, but that seems wrong. I think I will try colored pencils, which isn't my favorite choice, but I think it could work. 

On a side note, I generally don't delete spam. Some of it is amusing, such as the guy at a consignment shop that tried to imply that his goods were magic items to tie into my 52 Weeks of Magic posts. Classic. 

Let me take a second to shout out Fat Goblin Games, 3dMakerworks.com, and Goblin Clan Miniatures. These 3d printed products came to my awareness via a spam link. They have suspended their affiliate program, but they are so nice, I can't help but suggest them for your table.  

Having said that, I have noticed an uptick with tech-themed spam which has been deleted. The problem with tech products and spam is they can do nasty stuff with your data. I will implement a policy of report and kill from here on out. If you have noticed missing comments, that is why. 

My apologies, but I can't host something dangerous. 

As always, if you have a product or website you want promoted, post a link in the comments or hit me up at Facebook, Twitter, MeWe, Dice.Camp or Mastodon. I am always looking for new stuff and content for my site, I would love to do a write up on you. 

Mash-up of a Master

I really love van Gogh. I did a couple of mashups of his work for an oil painting class.

Disney Cast Offs

I liked the idea of this painting, but lost interest. I will probably start over.

The last painting is oil paint, but with a knife instead of a brush. I really enjoyed the process despite not liking the results. 

That Horse Has Wacked Out Poo Brains, Part 2

More horse drawings and paintings. I find horses to be fascinating, but daunting as subject matter. The blue horse painting was done a Pinot's Pallet on our 15th anniversary. My wife also made a matching painting. There was no good classes that week, so I came up the the idea of incorporating a heart shape, a copy of a master and a horse. My wife had no idea what she was painting at the time.

Rough sketch for painting below.

Franz Marc style copy of a master.
Acrylic. 

The above painting as it was being worked.
I believe this is my wife's copy. 

A robo-horse from Robotech. 

That Horse Has Wacked Out Poo Brains, Part 1

I like drawing horses. I have collection of Equine themed artwork in a variety of media.

Horse Skull, chalk and charcoal

The waterhorse was for my wife, Kitty, before I gave her the nickname "Kitty". In the front leg of the first image, you can see where I was trying to work in a "J" and an "E". I was flummoxed as to how I would get an "N" in there, so I abandoned that plan.

Waterhorse - in progress. Sharpie .05

Waterhorse - complete. Sharpie .05

Waterhorse - Complete. Permanent Ink and Skin.
The tattoo artist was very good and there were only small changes. 

5 minute horse - completed, oil paint and post processing

Not Working Out

The first is my most recent, a landscape of downtown Buffalo.

Prior to the landscape, I attempted a sky-seascape with a castle in purples. I didn't care for it and painted over it.

Stary Night - Copy of a Master

Several years ago, I tried to copy Starry Night. It was fun, but the end results were lacking.