Black Friday Stuff, Lizards, and more! BTS #104 (Patreon)

What up, mini family?! We're quickly approaching Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving here in the United States. It's quite a shopping bonanza so I like to have at least 1 new merch/product item for the occasion because it ends up being a considerable chunk of my yearly revenue. I wanted to make a really awesome hoodie for winter so I teamed up with our local clothing vendor and we found a really awesome tie-die hoodie! The graphics were drawn up by @Noirfade on Instagram and he did an absolutely killer job.

Here are some close ups of the individual graphics! This is the front left pocket print. 

And this is the glorious back piece!

He also did up a little logo for me that looks awesome!

The next item has been, admittedly, long overdue.

Cutting mats! With a new design on one side too! Just like the last one I did many years ago, this is double sided with a metric grid (red) on one side, and an imperial grid (white) on the other. It's 3mm thick with a black core, and is self healing. Oh, and it's A2 size, so it's nice and big! I hope everyone is excited for these!

Last week I mentioned how I was working with a carpenter to create a Trapped Under Plastic sign for the background of the podcast. The logo we use for our podcast is pretty cool, but it needed some work.

You can see how when you remove the surrounding sprue, the letters just seem a little awkward. We could try to remake the entire logo in a more "sign friendly" format, but I feel like that would be kind of challenging with the amount of 3D detail in the illustration. So, I came up with this simplification.

I took the high-res file from the illustrator, converted it to paths, sharpened up all the lines/corners, and made some modifications to some letters so that they would puzzle-piece together more closely. The letters will be cut out separately and the grey sprue-thing will be one piece that they all attach to behind it. The letters themselves will have some LEDs behind them, and then actual sprues (donated from viewers) will get attached behind the grey support structure filling out all the white space. The whole assembly will then be attached to the wall behind us. It's going to look so cool; I'm excited! 

The carpenter I'm working with already got started, woohoo! Lastly, this week I painted up my first ever Seraphon mini!

The purpose of this model is actually three-fold. A friend of mine had a bearded dragon who passed away recently and I wanted to paint this as a memoriam to him. Also, it's that same dude's birthday so it's a gift for that too! Finally, the Sepulchral Guard patrons and myself have a monthly theme we try and follow for our meetings and this month's is VIOLENCE so I made this lizard extra aggro. The hair was sculpted with green stuff, and his shoulder armor is supposed to be thigh armor but I sculpted some little green stuff roped to make it seem like they're tied around his biceps similar to his pre-existing armor. The video for this process should be coming out soon!

PAINT MORE MINIS!

Scott