Resistance is Futile

I should post an update…

what more is there to say?  I print, I paint. of the 64 tiles, theres really only 6 different styles that make up the map.. If you have seen the ones previously, you have seen them. There’s nothing really more to show.

This project is truly a test of endurance, and sanity. the same tiles over and over, in the same paints over and over. I thought the simplicity would make it easy and fast. The monotony is slowing driving me insane, and I am starting to yearn for assimilation, at least then there would be some justification for feeling like a mindless drone, mechanically repeating itself ad infinitum.

When taking time to dig up obscure lines from half-remembered scenes, buried midway through the 5 season of Voyager to use as a title for the update  is seen as a most welcomed and needed break… yeah…

not far now… only 14 left to print, only 4 of the printed tiles not yet painted.

some how, almost unnoticed, this project has gone from a fun Star Trek idea, into a Lovecraftian struggle to maintain sanity.

…ad astra per aspera…

38 of 64 tiles printed

28 fully painted

6 in progress

I had not fully appreciated the dichotomy of hurry up and wait that this project has become when I started. I knew it was going to be done in a series of bursts, as I could paint the tiles much quicker than I could print them.

What I hadnt really anticipated was the monotony. Every hobby session is grabbing the prints from that last few days, throwing down the same two metallics and same three greens, over and over. In many other builds, when I get burned out on painting bricks, as an example, I can break things up by spending a day working on trees, or whatever. Here it is just endless black prints, 2 metallics, 3 greens.

Its enough to really sap the motivation out of you.

But then you take those 4 or 5 finished pieces and add them to the collective (see what I did there?), and suddenly, seeing it all together and steadily creeping towards completion, renews my drive. I am ready to smash out another bunch of tiles! … except now I need to wait a few days until I have more printed…

… resistance is futile…

Making some progress.

printed off a power core to tinker around with, same paint scheme. Painted up disturbingly fast. Honestly all of these paint up super fast. About 5 to 10 mins per tile, depending on how distracted I am by the video/podcast playing in the background.

Printing in simple black PLA, the first print came out fine. For Paints I grabbed a cheap gunmetal craft paint, a basic green, a yellow-green and then a florescent green, and a bronze color to break up the black & green.

A quick drybrush of the gun metal over the whole thing, the base green here and there, a couple of touches of the bronze, and then roughly highlight with the yellow-green, and then wash over all the green bits with the florescent green.

I touched a few spots with some other colors, but when it comes to smashing out a whole 4’x4′ table, that will simply take too much time, just going to stick with the greens, gunmetal and bronze.

Recently LV-247 Designs released their Not Borg Cube terrain, and I have embarked on a mission to build a 4ft by 4ft table. It will be 64 tiles, plus some scatter. In all about 700hrs of print time.

figuring out the layout for the tiles will take a bit, but Im starting on the printing while I plan, as I will need quite a few tiles.