Loose Ends and Crown & Skull Session 0

Successful Print Day

That’s a full successful print for my Quartz Trench Crusade models!

The Pixel Art Easter Egg

I’ve been working on my website and wanted an Easter egg. Of course I thought of the toad—the chaos toad from Miscast. I opened up Aseprite and started vibing out.

I learned this program to make Perler bead sprites many years ago, probably in high school. My only advice is to keep doing it over and over—you get better at it. I start with the outline first, then color in the inside. Once you have the outline, it’s a lot easier.

Crown & Skull Character Creation

This is a tool I built myself—running it locally. It has all the options for custom spell building that aren’t in the free kit. I’ll try to reach out to Brandon to see if I can share it.

You start with 50 points and build things out. I based my character loosely on Silena—built a custom blizzard spell that’s a mix of her abilities and Snow Squall. Also made a custom greatsword.

What I like about Crown & Skull: you can really adapt anything you want into it.

Building Silena

I started her at 100 points, then bumped to 150 so I could make the two cats as companions instead of separate characters. Normally you’d start at 50 points.

Since I’m playing solo, this won’t be cheesy because I’ll control it. I want her to be a legend—my plan is to play out this solo campaign, and then these characters become NPCs for when I run campaigns with a full group.

The Party

• Vyar: The repair guy and support. Armorer, medical, can repair skills.
• Helmet Guy: Climber, outdoorsman. Helm, cloak, plate mail, rope, climbing gear.
• Dual Wielder: Glass cannon with two greatswords. She can take about five real hits and she’s out—definitely need to protect her.
• Silena: Stealth, evade, take aim, scout. D10 damage bow with upgrades.

Getting the Airbrush Working

I always wanted one of these cleanout pots—finally got one. Did maintenance to get everything back to pretty much brand new.

The airbrush isn’t 100%—there’s something in the internals. Maybe there’s a way to take it apart from the bottom. But we’re primed! That’s all we needed.

The Turning Point

Tomorrow for real is day one of the new painting journey to get as good as possible. I’ve got a lot of thoughts on this—it’s a big turning point, like starting the next chapter of my life. As ridiculous as that sounds, it’s a lot deeper than just deciding I want to paint better.