Category: Interviews

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This episode I talk to a dude named Tim and who’s instagram handle is @bonus_action. Tim is an artist and designer and he produces for Instagram and his Patreon materials for use in Dungeons & Dragons, specifically custom magic items, traps and flavor tables. We have a fun conversation about both running and playing D&D, about being new to the whole thing, we talk about being creative and we actually laugh quite a bit during this one. He’s super cool, produces interesting content and has some great insights from his perspective about playing D&D.

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This episode I have a conversation with your friendly neighborhood party nerd! That’s right, Twitch streamer, miniature painter, Dutch daddy insomniac Reiner72! Steve is a fantastic miniature painter, you can check his stuff out on Instagram of course, but to get the biggest bang for your buck, you can catch him a few times a week live on Twitch where he’s gone out of his way to cultivate a decent respectful community that is always happy to have new members. We chat about that streaming life and mental health and anxiety, we discuss airbrushing and airbrush maintenance, brush holder stencil painting, burnout, community building, role playing games and even mixology! I told you, he’s the resident party nerd!

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This week I have a conversation with a guy who is a bona fide adventurer (he might dispute that) and a bona fide artist. He goes by the Instagram handle TheRealBrokenFingers and yeah, that name ain’t facetious. His work on Instagram is Warhammer 40k oriented and he creates massive dioramas, you gotta see ‘em to believe ‘em. He goes out of his way to evoke the gothic grimdark atmosphere of Space Marines in their eternally war-torn environment and on top of his excellent paint work and terrain model-making, his photography is fantastic as well. We talk about sailing the high seas, broken appendages, cinematic photography, world-building with models, chiaroscuro, coffee table books and of course fabricating, painting and displaying amazing dioramas!

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This week I interview the wonderful Shoshie of ShoshiesMinis; she is a miniature painter with a mission and a classical art background. She’s also a highly respected commission painter. She’s super fun to talk with and she’s also great fun to hang out with on Twitch where she chats with viewers and works on whatever personal miniatures she happens to have in her queue at the time. Today we discuss all kinds of things: from Kingdom Death to painting for yourself instead of judges to miniatures as fine art to her tools of the trade, and even pond fishing! That’s right! Catch and release … catch and release, that’s like a motif for this podcast … huh.

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This week I interview the awesome Kelsey Dionne of the Arcane Library. The Arcane Library is a publisher for best-selling Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition third-party content and printable card-based gaming aids. Kelsey is the writer of the Arcane Library’s D&D 5e adventures and it’s her writing chops and layout skills as pertaining specifically to D&D adventure modules that made me really want to chat with her about Dungeons and Dragons and her writing process. One of the things that impresses me about her adventures are the way they are graphically laid out and I would recommend downloading at least the free adventure from the website (Temple of the Basilisk Cult) so you can see what I see while we chat. During the interview we talk about her writing of course but we also talk about Dungeons and Dragons the game in general, how she runs it herself and my favorite section is probably when we discuss “why D&D” … air quotes … and a few topics relating to that like dungeon master advice and some D&D tips for low level players.

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This week’s episode is a pretty interesting conversation that did not go at all like I thought it was going to. The conversation I have with miniature painter and music producer MalevDaShinobi flows, kinda like music, from one topic to another and back and intertwines different threads and all in all I was totally surprised at the sort of depth we explored on topics that I thought were going to be fairly technical but ended up being more philosophical than anything else, all driven by Malev himself. Some broad highlights from our conversation are: discussing his music and how poetry and music and miniature painting all kind of flow together while trying to produce an emotional response in people; we talk about freelancing and making a living as a commission painter and how that feels relative to working a “9 to 5” type of gig and we talk about the psychological impact of viewing insanely good top-tier miniature painting works of art at contests like the Crystal Brush. All of that in addition to chatting about his paint style and his twitch streaming and tabletop gaming.

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This week I’ve gone all the way down under to chat with a gentleman about a table. Not just any table and not just any gentleman. He goes by BenSquig on Instagram and his gaming group is rad_heim – also on Instagram. And rad_heim is how I first discovered these guys and their crazy gaming table which when I encountered it was all about pirates and tropical island plateaus with jagged cliffs, half-submerged buildings, rope bridges everywhere and gibbets, tons of gibbets. Oh and skulls! A skull for every boy and girl I think. I mean, there’s a lot of skulls on this board. The pirate theme really caught my eye and the vast scale of what these guys do was just so inspiring! But once I started talking with Ben it became apparent pretty quickly that there was a lot more to their gaming and terrain and warbands than I initially thought – and even to the spokesman himself! Turns out he worked on White Dwarf for a while, the hobby magazine produced by Games Workshop! There’s lots of surprises in this one!

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In this episode, I have a very special guest, he’s an artist of extraordinary talent. I met him briefly at San Diego Comic Con a few years ago where he had a pile of his sketch books at his table and I was able to just sort of stand there and flip through actual cracked and worn leather bound volumes of his work, some of it casual, some of it inked, some of it finished, all of it mind-blowingly cool. We have a great conversation about art and about his working habits, how he learned, what he does professionally and even some general stuff about loving the fantasy genre.

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In this episode, I am super stoked to bring you a wonderful interview with a wonderful tabletop artist, this gentleman has perfect Rally English, he dreams in grim darkness and he hails from IronSleet … dot com. Also, he hails from Finland. Kari is his first name, I shall not butcher his last name out of respect for the man and his family. He’s a brutal force of a miniature painter, he’s crazy when it comes to building one-of-a-kind, totally immersive, nightmarish terrain and he’s a self-professed flagellant scourging himself at the alter of Nottingham – he’s a true Warhammer fan boy and we both mean that in the best of all possible ways!

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In this episode I interview my very good friend John Hoffman, the guy I went into the Hollywood special effects industry with and who still to this day manages to work in film and television as a model maker. He’s worked on films from James Cameron’s Titanic to the stop-motion Kubo and has even worked for Disney Imagineering! In this podcast episode he talks about various models he worked on in the last 20 years as well as his original Star Wars lightsaber prop and even some tips on how one might get into the commercial craftsmanship trade today.