Outpost 206

As of right now, I’m away from my apartment and probably will be for the rest of September. Since I drive a compact SUV and not a semi-truck with a full-sized trailer, I unfortunately didn’t take my multitude of crafting supplies and materials with me. Which means I have an endless list of projects waiting for me when I get back, a few of which I’ll share with you here. “Primeval Frontier” A Sci-Fi Adventure Novel This writing project was one of my early 2021 resolutions to finish. Thankfully, without the distraction of my other hobbies and the fact that I work remotely on my laptop, I can hopefully have more time to focus on finishing the complete draft this month (phase four of my five phase creative writing process ). Currently I’m on Chapter 18 of 36 though I’m always in danger of splitting chapters into two as well as adding new ones as “buffer” chapters and deleting others entirely. Not going to go into any plot details here, but it’s heavily inspired by the Men’s Adventure

Being so wrapped up in other kinds of creative projects, I was beginning to worry that I was falling out of practice with miniature painting, which I attribute to giving me the experience and confidence boost (even though I’m still learning the basics) that I needed to finally try my hand at things like action figure customization . I still have an old cigar box that’s full of unpainted miniatures and I fully intend to paint every single one of them, no matter how long it takes. But the next step in my path to mini painting proficiency would be this Reaper brand Space Henchman mini figure. If you’re wonder why it looks like he already had paint on him, it was because I was messing around and using him to test out various Games Workshop/Citadel paints from a starter set I purchased recently. I liked the sculpt and character design so much that I decided I would strip the paint using nail polish remover on an old toothbrush, wash him off, and try painting him for real. Since I'

Whenever I do customizations/kitbashes on bootleg action figures, I’m not thinking about it in terms of creating a museum-quality piece or even something I would deem saleable on a site like Etsy. Rather, I consider it as a kind of doodling, only instead of a pad and pencil, I’m doodling with cheap toy parts, bits of plastic and spare model pieces, and my ever-growing collection of hobby paints. Though I will say that I'm doodling with a purpose as I always have some kind of a plan or vision in mind (though some visions more clear than others) and with each project in my Fireteam X series , I set out to learn at least something new or try out a different type of paint or material or technique that I didn’t use for any of the previous builds. That way, I at least feel like I’m getting marginally better with every successive project (even if the final product doesn’t always reflect this). Another thing I love about working with cheapo bootleg action figure is that it feels like I’m

During one of my occasional trips to the Dollar Tree (the ultimate source for dirty cheap crafting materials), I found some neat little Masters of the Universe figurines. Like everything in t he store, they were only a dollar so I picked up two Skeletors and would have picked up two He-Mans as well but the only other He-Man they had was broken inside the package. Ah well. They had a Merman too, but I decided to pass because his face was just…hoo boy. I should I gotten it just for the picture alone. At any rate, I knew I was going to do some customizing and the gears in my head started turning before I even got the figurines home. It didn’t take me long to come up with a new color scheme for one of my Skeletors and I knew right then and there that I would transform him into an homage to the now-legendary variant from the 200X MOTU series…the infamous Disco Skeletor ! I highly recommend watching Spector Creative’s video on this history of Disco Skeletor (as well as pretty much all of