Kobold Press Bestiary Miniatures: Iconic Races II Catfolk

6-24-24 update
over 1 year ago – Mon, Jun 24, 2024 at 11:39:09 AM

Just a quick note today. I am still shipping the things that I can ship as new models are being molded.

The better part of the last 5 weeks have been spent getting my restaurant open for another season, so I have not made a lot of progress molding more pieces. I am however happy to say that now that we are open and everything seems staffed well enough I have had a few days now of untinterrupted miniature work and have gotten a lot done.

By the end of next week I should have almost everyone who had only small/medium miniatures in their order out the door!

Some of the models that are still presenting fairly serious problems for me are the War Wyvern with the Rider, The Grave Behemoth, The Snow Giant, and the Fey Revenant. Due to the way that they were sculpted, the present some challenges for molding that I am working through.

If you have updated addresses, please make sure that you update them either with me or through Backerkit.

Anyway, back to work and as always thank you for your continued patience and support.  We are rounding into home!

John

May 2024 Update
almost 2 years ago – Tue, May 07, 2024 at 05:21:52 AM

Keeping it short on this one.

Where I am on the project:

Being able to put my eyes fully on this project has caught a few errors that I am fixing. The most glaring of which was just caught over the weekend. In all of the chaos that has ensued over the past 2 years, it completely got missed that the 2 sculpts for the Swordbreaker Skeletons never got completed. The counts sheet that Ed gave to me omitted them and I had not come across an order that had them on as an ala carte option until last weekend!!

I am working on those this week and should have them done in a couple of days.

I have been stalled on molding for the past 2 weeks as I wait for a shipment of more rubber for the SiOCast Machine. Once that arrives, I can begin molding things again.

I have all of the small and medium sized minis, with the exception of the Swordbreaker Skeletons molded. I am starting on the Large creatures as soon as I complete the Swordbreaker Skeletons.

Shipping:

I have had a couple of requests for the number of backers shipped, and TBH, that is not as easy to do as you might think.

 I have a pile or order sheets that I am filling orders from. I am concurrently shipping all of the remaining orders from Tome of Beasts III and Wastes of Chaos as they come in, in addition to the daily shop orders that come in from the webstore. Maybe someone has an easier way to do it, but I don know it, so sorting that all out to get an exact count is pretty counter-productive to me getting more work done on the project as it were. 

If I have to hazard a guess, I would say roughly 1/3 of the orders have shipped, but having said that, the rest of the orders require either the full set of minis, Swordbreaker Skeletons, or Large and Huge creatures that are still unmolded, so once all of those are done, the shipping will go much faster!

Timeline:

With the pace I am going right now, June/July for the bulk of the orders is still in the realm of possibility, but as you all know by now, I am still just a one man operation so you just have to trust that I am going at the fastest pace that I can! 

Pictures:

One of the things that has taken time on this project is that I am correcting things in old models as I go. Initially when Ed and I talked about this project we were jsut going to use the masters that we had from previous versions of these models. The issue is that the bases on all of the old models were not a standard thickness,  some of them were paper thin and some were very thick. Thisthin bases just did not work with the plastic injection, so I quickly had to scrap the idea of re-using old masters for new molds. Since they all had to be re-mastered I decided to make everything a standard base thickness. 

Because I was already at the point of fixing the bases digitally, I decided to fix other issues before I printed the models as well. As an example, that Female Alseid was in 3 pieces originally....and there was no real reason for it because the model in 3 pieces was hard to assemble and even harder to paint, and with a few small adjustments it can be one piece. 

This is a great example of things that had to be re-done. The orginal 2016 version was sculpted by hand and has all of the charm that comes with that. Having said that, the model casts poorly and has a base that is way too thin to do plastic injection with. The new 2024 model casts much easier and is a nice update on the design in my opinion.

I dont stop to take pictures of models all that often, so I only hav ethe ones that I post on social media. Here are a couple more models that have been done for a while and are already in folks hands!

As always questions, comments and concerns can be dealt with publicly or privately if you are more comfortable messaging me directly!

Anyway, that is what I have got for you as of right now. Gonna keep grinding on til we get across the line!

John

March 2024 update
almost 2 years ago – Wed, Mar 27, 2024 at 07:15:10 AM

Greeting Backers!

As always I have good news and bad news. I will also keep the news part short and give a further accounting below for those that want all of the details. (seeTHE BIG STORY AS IT WERE)

GOOD NEWS

First of all shipping is still going on, albiet slower than I want right now for reasons that are outlined later in this post. (seeTHE BIG STORY AS IT WERE)

I have shipped 62 packages so far mostly due to those being the ones that I can ship with the available models that are molded and castable.

I still have quite a bit of molding to do as I am moving into the large and huge class miniatures, which all have to be broken up into multiple parts for casting. Please keep in mind I am doing everything I can to make these models as few pieces as possible to keep down on assembly effort!

BAD NEWS

The molding/casting has not had much progress in the last 5 weeks for reasons I will explain later. The upside is that once I explain what is going on, this kinda turns into better news. (seeTHE BIG STORY AS IT WERE)

Everyone loves pictures, so here is a picture!

THE GREAT KOBOLD SIZE DEBATE OF 2024

Here is a picture of the master metals for the final sized kobolds from this project. They are not production molded as of yet, for reasons explained further below. My final decision was to split the difference, so they are a little bit bigger than WizKidz kobolds, but quite a bit smaller than my original kobolds for this line.

THE BIG STORY AS IT WERE:

Three years ago, Ed and I were approached by one of our contract casting clients about purchasing a SiOCast machine to enable us to produce much larger pieces for his line at a much more shipping and material friendly price. We saw a lot of potential in this machine, so Ed and I agreed as a partnership to purchase the machine for roughly $70,000. We financed the machine as a business expense and got it.

Immediately after getting it, we realized that we did not have the power needs at our old shop for all of our new equipment, so we arranged to move into a new facility. In 2021 we moved into the new shop and got everything up and running. Moving into the spring of 2022 money was really tight. We knew we needed to get a Kickstarter together to get some revenue pumped into the business to support all of these changes and the new monthly payment for the SiOCast machine. This led us to start putting together this Kickstarter. I started sculpting a few pieces as well as paying for a few other pieces to get us started.

At the same time, Kobold Press came to us with a proposition to produce miniatures for Tome of Beasts III, which many of you know was run almost at the exact same time as this Kickstarter. Ed and I discussed it and decided to take that on as a business. At roughly the same time I was approached by Res Nova games to produce the miniatures for a re-boot of Warzone which was a fairly popular wargame in the early 90’s. Ed and I talked about it and again decided that we should take the work because…..bills.

Over that summer I arranged for the miniatures for TOB III to get sculpted and started molding those. At the same time I began all of the pre-production consulting on Warzone which was a lot of art directing for their miniature sculptors on how to make good miniatures and this took a lot more of my time than I anticipated. I was also picking away at the sculpting for this project as well as assigning work to outside sculptors.

By the end of that summer, Kobold Press approached us about doing a similar miniature project for Wastes of Chaos. Once again, Ed and I talked and decided that we needed the work. I assigned all of the sculpting work to other sculptors for Wastes of Chaos and figured we for sure had that covered.

Through all of this I had been working on this Kickstarter in between everything else with the intention of Ed and I being able to slam this out in no time.

This bring us to a year ago when the first real problems started with the SiOCast machine. The machine broke if I recall at the end of October of 2022 and was not back up and running until January of 2023, during which time I was molding the first stuff for the Catfolk Kickstarter that you are all part of.

In January Ed came to me and informed me that he would be quitting his “real job” and buying an RV and moving west with his wife so that he would have more of a motorcycle riding season....

Anyway, without beating the issue to death, I was kind of left high and dry to finish everything by myself.

If you are counting, that is:

Tome of Beasts III, Iconic Races:Catfolk, Wastes of Chaos and Warzone:Eternal in addition to all of the other client work that we had on the books as well as the additonal payment for the SiOCast machine by myself with very little income coming in from Effincool Miniatures.

To say this has been the most challenging 2 years of my life would be a gross understatement…Thank the maker that I have a good paying “real job”.

WHERE ARE WE AS OF TODAY

TOB III as well as Wastes of Chaos are delivered or at least have orders trickling in that can be filled with the stock that I have on the shelves of those minis.

This brings us to Warzone:Eternal, which I have put a lot of energy into, but still mostly in a consulting capacity until January of 2024 when we started ramping things up to get into production. This project is very massive by comparison to all of the other things that have been looming over the last 2 years. Mostly to the tune of roughly 75,000 miniatures!

I try to be a person who sticks to their word. It is very difficult for me to back out of things that I have committed to, but by the middle of January I came to the inevitable conclusion that I simply could not continue punishing the backers of this project due to the business decisions that Ed and I made together..and I had to break my word with Res Nova.

I spent some time (quite a lot of time actually) trying to find another company that would be able to take care of Warzone and do as good of a job as I promised to Res Nova. I have spent the better part of the last month pivoting this project over to another company, which in itself was no small task as there are a ton of models. This is a huge part of why there has been so little progress on this project for the last month or so.

If you are still with me, this is the best accounting of all of what has happened in one place, and I hope that it further explains some things that I have been vague about for the past 2 years. It really is down to a one man show, but I will get it done.

With Warzone shifted I now have a clear path for the next couple of months to go 100% at this project without multitasking other things at the same time.

As always, thank you for your continued patience with me.

John

Regarding the sizing of Kobolds
about 2 years ago – Wed, Feb 14, 2024 at 06:24:17 AM

 

Short Update
about 2 years ago – Thu, Feb 08, 2024 at 02:15:28 PM

Hey Backers!

Kinda short update. I am shipping orders (only 54 so far) as I can. It seems that most of you backed for either the full package or the Catfolk and random other minis. What this means is that there is no way to really prioritize how these are molded if that makes sense. 

What I am doing is everytime something new is molded and castable I am searching through the huge pile of orders to sort out what can ship.  That is a tedious process, but it is the only way I can keep all of this straight. I apologize for this but I cant really see a more efficient way to do it.

There has been some concerns about the fulfillment of this project. I want to re-assure once again, that there is no danger that this will not fulfill. It is just going to take the time that it takes. I own 2 other businesses that are very successful, so the actual funding of this project is not really the hold up. Shipping has been brought up as well, but to be honest the rates are not that much higher than when Ed collected the shipping over a year ago.

The problem still once again boils down to time. In order to keep my equipment and building operating I have about $4,500 in overhead per month. $1500 of that being the payment for the plastic injection machine. To do this I have to keep all of my contract clients happy as well as fulfillment from my webstore. When I am not doing that, I am working on this projects fulfillment. I know that does not seem fair, but the alternative is not an acceptable option to me.

I am one man show currently, which means I am the only person molding, casting, quality controlling, clipping and packaging the minis. In addition to that I am also the only person picking orders and handling the shipping. It just does not leave a lot of time to do anything else but keep my head at the waterline even with me putting my own personal money in every single month.

As I said though, I have other sources of income, so this is going to get done, it will just continue to take time. I am thinking realistically taht I can have this out the door by the end of May/June. I know that is not great, but that is the best I can do right now.

Now that that part is over, here is the fun stuff....pictures!!!

In the processing of everything I realized that I never comissioned the Leader for the Barbed Kobold set, so I quickly made this fella. I think he came out pretty well!

In closing I will continue to try to be better about updates and thanks again for all of the patience you all keep showing me!

Also as always, if you want to talk about anything to do with this project, but prefer to not do it on a social platform, please feel free to email me at [email protected]. :-)

John