Archiving Clutch: Part 2

 Hey so it's been a moment right? I've been reaching out to quite a few more book companies, same loop as last time, I either get ghosted or have to politely decline absurd prices. So the lowest I've managed to find someone willing to scan my books for is about $465, which isn't too bad, and it's leagues better than the $5,000 price I was given my another archival company.

So I'm sure no one is asking, but I'll give it anyways, here's all the prices I've been hit with! (In $USD)

$3,000, $5,000 by one company stating that their order minimum was that absurdly high, $600 (leagues more affordable than a lot of the others), and again, $465 which is the best offer I've been given so far.

So this cuts me down just a little over $100 from the previous best price I was given, does that mean it'll be archived soon? Unfortunately not since my job currently pays me in pocket lint, and I have to save up for college and college supplies regardless. Before anyone brings up my Youtooz post, I had specifically set aside those funds since the September leak so that doesn't count B)

I've also tried reaching out to friends and friends of friends to see if anyone I may be very loosely connected to has a book scanner and would be willing to get it archived. I have a sneaking suspicion that book scanning is only supposed to be this expensive for large scale projects, but for some reason I must be looking in the wrong places.

So this whole journey has been a bit of a nightmare for me! I'm not giving up on releasing this book (yet) despite the fact it's been a month now of scrambling to get this out there to no avail. Maybe a few more book scanning and document archival firms later, we'll finally see a light at the end of this miserably long tunnel. And for now enjoy this photo of my kitten that I accidentally sent one of the firms when they asked for photos of the book:

This is Francis. Say hello to Francis.

And that's all I have in terms of updates on this book for now! Let's hope we see some good news soon...

Archiving Clutch: Part 1

As my friends and Skylanders modding community know, a month back, I came into possession of an authentic copy of Clutch, the Skylanders Superchargers developer art book. And ever since then I've been on a bit of a wild goose chase just trying to find an affordable way to scan this thing.

Now let's start back at the first point, me coming into possession of the book. For anyone reading this that doesn't know the significance of Clutch, this book was only ever given out to developers who had worked on the Skylanders games. Which means this book was never available for retail sale anywhere, making this one of the most highly coveted pieces of Skylanders media ever. And as the self-proclaimed #1 Skylanders fan, I found a way.

Some people might already know about the already existing archive but once you look at it, the photos are blurry, incomplete, ordered incorrectly, and some pages are missing as a whole. In total the book has 310 pages while the archive only has 287, which include photos of the special sleeve it's included in.

So my goal over these past two months off and on, has been trying to find a suitable way to get this book scanned, full pages and full color, once and for all so the art can be archived forever, and other fans can finally have a good look at the contents. Sounds easy enough!

It's not. It's really not.

Over the time I have been spending looking into the digitization of this book, I've contacted a few book scanning companies, and each time they either flat-out ignore me (that can't be good for business...) or I end up getting smacked in the face with absurd prices.

All prices shown are in USD

That costs much more than I paid for the book, mind you!

So far I've been Sierra Oscar Lima... (That's pilot speak for shit outta luck.)

In the meanwhile, I can't even truly afford a large-scale digitization project due to the fact that I'm trying to save up for college, and my paycheck doesn't really cover much. So now what? There's a second method I could go for, destructive scanning. It's a lot cheaper and hell, I could even do it at home for free, but I am adamant on not destroying such a rare book at the moment, and I would hate to see the spine ripped out.

I'm intent on releasing everything in this book to the public, but at this rate, it's going to take a while. I've been racking up small amounts of money from art commissions but it's not really enough to cover anything. I flat refuse to pay $650(USD) to scan a book that didn't cost nearly that much, but if push comes to shove and in a few years time I can't find any other solution, I might just have to bite the bullet.

It's a bit rough putting in the effort to preserve this book properly. Right now I'm taking the full cost of the project. The book, the time spent researching these scanning companies, and probably the scanning cost too. I've been wondering time and time again if it's even going to be worth it, I am not receiving anything in return, which I don't care too much about really, but when it comes to the fact that I'm shouldering huge costs and sacrificing time to release a single book, it's a bit disheartening.

Still, at the time of writing this post, I'm sure I won't give up just yet. I've been reaching out to a few more book scanning services, document firms, and the like. Maybe I can get Clutch into the clutches of the Skylanders community, but unfortunately, that won't be anytime soon.

Spitfire

I should really get working on getting my fanart collective page up and running huh?

This is finally a post of another recent piece, except this one isn't even a month old at the time of me writing this! Maybe it'll be a month old by the time I post it... I keep a backlog of posts at the moment, so every week or so, even if I don't feel like writing, I can get something up on the blog.

For this work I mainly experimented with how to draw fire and lighting from multiple sources. I didn't really focus on the rocky texture all that much...

My more primitive method of drawing fire

Some stuff that I haven't posted elsewhere though except to friends, some screenshots of me working on the piece. At first I was actually just going to draw fire the way I usually do, but ended up wanting to improve in that area, so I started to look up guides to drawing realistic fire.

Early stages of drawing fire

I learnt to start with a layer of the darkest parts of the fire, and slowly work up in brightness with more layers in Color Dodge. I don't know what color dodge actually does, but it looks a lot better than what I would have made without it. Another useful tip I picked up, was to make the pointy parts of the flames blurry, it better sells the illusion of movement.

Working out shading

The lineart is still there in the final work by the way, all I did in the end was blend it with the rest of the art. I like having my lineart remain in my works, (since I usually work without color,) since I feel like it really keeps me tethered to having one thing be consistent about my art, when everything else changes all the time.

Almost every part of the fire was drawn separately from each other, the arms and hands were separated groups, the body and wings are separated groups. Though this new method of fire cost me a lot of storage space, with the file easily going over 2GB with 108 layers. The drawing itself was also too big of a file to send on Discord without being compressed...

I'm glad to try improving my art, learning more specifically how to draw more realistic textures at the moment... I'm not sure if I favor this piece or the Jawbreaker piece, I don't feel like either are good enough to be honest.

Endless Model Ripping Shenanagins

Now as you may know from some old posts, I really love ripping 3D models from games, well...

Here we are.

Grave Clobber is the first Skylanders Imaginators model ripped, uploaded June 20, 2024

Doom Stone is the last Skylanders Imaginators model ripped, uploaded May 7 2025

Yeah you read that right, a 10 month timeframe just to rip every Skylander. In all fairness when I did my first Skylanders batch it was small and I quit for a few months to work on other games...

(Said 'other games'. Neopets: The Darkest Faerie, and Prey the Stars)

After I worked on a few other projects I came back to Skylanders Imaginators back in December.

Chop Chop, uploaded December 13 2024

To be honest when uploading the Skylanders I did it in a completely random order, just uploading whichever ones I wanted. Though all the swappers I did last (except for Free Ranger) because they're such a pain to work with. They keep their parts in separate files.. 

Ex: Free Ranger is stored as

• legs_stormbird
• body_stormbird

Which is annoying to deal with. It means I have to extract two separate files, run them through my scripts, stitch them together in one folder... You get the point.

Two files, two sets of textures to extract too, which is such a huge pain since I have to do a lot of the texture stuff manually, which honestly I think was the longest part of my model ripping process. Though I feel like the singlehandedly worst model I've ever had to deal with in my life was Fake Crash.

Fake Crash, uploaded December 16 2024

He had... An absurd amount of textures. It still haunts me... In total, his final .zip file (before the split I'll talk about later) contained 34 textures.

There was also one, teeny tiny roadblock that came up during model ripping. And by "teeny tiny" I mean this took me several weeks to fix. You see, The Models Resource primarily accepts .DAE models. The problem with this, is that I didn't know that Blender didn't automatically make paths relative. For those reading this that don't know what a relative path is, basically when you open up a model, you want all of your textures to be applied to it already, right?

What you're supposed to have in the file would be:

• Texture.png

But what Blender thought would be funny to do, with no way to automatically do this whatsoever, would be to have all of my textures be stored like this:

• /D:/MySkylandersFolder/I have a ton of folders here lol/more text to illustrate how bad I am at organizing folders/ColorMap,textures@!actors!Skylanders!Character_C`tga,111out.png

Which. I feel like shaved years off of my life actually. The ONLY way I could fix this, would be to manually open the .DAE in a notepad editor, find the texture path, and correct it by deleting all of the folder names at the start. Oh, and by the way, that also didn't fully work. Because of all the absurd characters in Skylanders texture names. I would have to take ColorMap,textures@!actors!Skylanders!character_C`tga,111out.png and shorten it down to character_C.png which also couldn't be automated in any way, so I had to go through about 60 finished rips at the time, and manually change, every. single. texture name. And I had to go through every single model, every prop, every weapon, every effect, and manually change the texture name in the files there too.

Also, from that point on, I had to make renaming every texture a habit while ripping models.

And I did this, with every single model. Not to mention, textures wouldn't be automatically applied to each model either! I had to manually look at, and apply the appropriate textures to every single model I ripped. Ripping one Skylander would take be about 20 to 30 minutes. Multiply this by 181 and you get...

Well, I averaged it to about 25 minutes per model, and that brings us to 4,525 minutes, or in better terms, about 76 hours of my life was spent in total working on Skylanders models alone. Not including me fixing the texture paths, and not including the split.

I wish I could tell you I stopped there, I really wish I could. But at this point, this has gotten personal, this game hates me. Imaginators truly hates me and I hate Imaginators. This was a war.

"Frog Man" rip, uploaded May 8 2025

That's right, I couldn't stop at just ripping every Skylander, could I? No, this was a war I couldn't win, but I scrambled anyways, I fought till my last breath, and what did I get from it?

Nothing, actually. It's not like The Models Resource gives you anything for uploading models. This was all technically pointless. But honestly I did it cause I wanted to. Cause who's gonna stop me? Activision?

Legal disclaimer if you are Activision please do not DMCA me, this is not an invitation and for all intensive purposes, is a joke.

Well. While writing this post I ran into a... mild issue. It turns out I needed to split the composite maps into multiple textures. Which I was never told about beforehand, and had never been an issue in the past. I will now probably have to spend a month of work again just to rezip. Every. Single. Model.

...Again.

After a while of arguing talking with the staff, they eventually allowed me a compromise that I still have to split all the composites, but I'm allowed to keep the original files in-tact.

As of the time of writing this post, Grave Clobber and Flarewolf are already available for use! Since they were the very first two I worked on.

So if you ever wanted to mess around with Skylanders models... Well they're there now, go nuts. Make my effort worth it. Go forth and make cool junk B)

The Return of my Skytubing

 I'm real bad at motivating myself to finish the projects I deliberately start.

I finally finished a new video, and I realized I haven't shared my new channel here yet, so now would be an opportune time. Well, really I finished my video last night but it was already past 11pm by the time the thing rendered and I could post it. So I put off making a blog post to the next day, even though I constantly have the urge to stay up every night until I get to the point that I can hear birds singing out my window.

Also, this video is a speedpaint! So I figured I'd post the drawing here too!

I actually drew this way earlier in the year, I think maybe around January actually? But I recorded a speedpaint of the whole thing, and while doing a video entirely consisting of me doing improv as I read book reviews, I wanted interesting background footage that wasn't just Skylanders gameplay. I think the speedpaint worked quite well! I wonder if it keeps people watching to see the end result too...

I wonder if anyone from any future Youtube videos I'll make will see my blog, that would be nice, it feels like talking to a brick wall in here.

IT'S YOUTOOZ TIME!!!

That's right! The Skylanders Youtooz have finally been released! The about- 8 Month- wait has been so worth it... Now all I have to do is wait uh, 5 more months for them to arrive. Yay!

(Terribly sloppily cropped photo of me watching the countdown, Can you blame me?)

I waited at this page for, well I didn't think about how long I was waiting as I eyed down the counter, but it was only several minutes. The second the timer ran down, I gunned it to each of their pages to throw into my carts, and blasted over to the check out, and watched my bank account balance drop significantly. 

Ouch. Who knew that spending money made you lose it...

This is the total for my order in the USA. It rounds up to about $111 USD. Nice. I don't know if shipping in other countries costs more (although from what I was hearing from other Skylanders fans, it's the same worldwide.) since it all ships out of China. Personally I think $21 shipping is a little bit absurd... Can't you do that package shrinkwrap thing too..?

I think it would be a lot cheaper...

Jawbreaker More Like Wrist Breaker (ouch)

I should start posting about my fanart again shouldn't I? (If your answer was no, why are you on my Skylanders blog in the first place?)

In total this took me about 6 hours, I was really focused on learning how to draw metal properly. I think I did fairly well, at the time when I finished it, I was quite proud about it. I showed my dad, though he just kinda said "cool" and walked off. Which is fine I guess.

As you can tell I haven't really figured out how to draw crystals yet, a friend told me it looks like transparent cheese. Sure I'll practice drawing glass and crystals... eventually.

I just think Jawbreaker is neat. I don't even own him at all. Lol.

The Big Haul

I've graduated college, and am hoping I get hired at my local convenience store this summer for some extra cash, but guess what! We're so back on this blog and I'm finally gonna be posting my hauls again!

So now it's just a matter of what's on the menu since my last Halloween post...

And in order from right to left! We have: 

• Thrillipede (Yes, the GREEN one)
• NIB Riptide 
• Soda Skimmer 
• Buzz Wing 
• NIB Nitro Soda Skimmer
• Series 1 Flameslinger
• Series 2 Zook
• Nightmare Express
• Series 1 Wrecking Ball
• Series 2 Chop Chop
• Wallop
• Skylanders Swap Force 3Ds
• Sea Shadow
• NIB Riot Shield Shredder Life Trap

That's a lot! How did I get the money for this anyways despite not having a job yet? Eheh... Don't worry about that.

I've already rearranged all of my new figures in their proper shelves (at the time of this post I had done it last night, two hours after opening my packages). I've been meaning to do a new collection tour post eventually, since I've rearranged a lot of my stuff and have some new bits of merch to show off too!

With that all being added to my shelves, all I need to finish up my SSA collection are S1 Wham-Shell and S1 Hex! For Superchargers I need Bone Bash Roller Brawl, Double Dare Trigger happy, and the Gold Rusher. I have the Crypt Crusher but it's NIB so I've been thinking to buy a duplicate for display purposes, which is what I did with the Sea Shadow in the photo.

(Psst, they call it the Sea Shadow because it's literally barely visible in my photo...)

And my Youtube channel? Any updates there? Uhh... I'm just a little bit lazy...

Where I have been?

Wow I haven't uploaded at all for over half a year... This seems like one of my usual hiatuses but this time I have some other things I want to talk about. Yes this is a wee off topic from the main Skylanders stuff but this is my blog and I can talk about what I want eheh. 

Today, the day I'm posting this, is the day I graduate from high school.

But I really can't believe it, I started this blog back in my freshman year of high school. It honestly sounds a bit crazy to me. It's so odd to think I'm an adult now. It's pretty obvious that there's a bit of a mental maturity gap with me, since I so vehemently refuse to ever let go of Skylanders.

I've had a lot happen in the time I haven't post. While I'm adjusting to the sudden change dropped on me, I have been hard at work on lots of Skylanders projects. I've been working on several fangames, alongside working on the Quicksilver Vault Skylanders Wiki. I've still been collecting figures slowly. I have also started up my new Youtube channel since my old one had to be deleted, I don't want to go into details with that one.

A lot has happened since I last posted, a lot in my life has changed, and I'm still trying to work out what I'm doing with my whole... existence? It's been wildly stressful, and since I'll be in college I'll probably have less time to post as a whole. I have a laptop now, so maybe I could post a bit more frequently as I move around?

And if you're wondering, from my first ever post, I still do not have the land trophy. It forever eludes my grasp...

Forever grateful for those who read my posts, thank you for being here with me!

Happy (Early) Halloween!

And it's very fitting this time of year that I got my hands on Grim Creeper!

There's a place finally that happens to be a lot closer to home than usual (about 30 minutes away) that has some used Skylanders figures! Unfortunately they seem to be closing down in January of 2025, so I guess my goal has shifted from saving for the Yootooz to trying to get as many figures from this closer place as possible. I think there is a mild flaw in my logic... But the thing is this place has great prices! Every mini is $5... hehe...

I'm going to New York soon too! I wonder if they'll have any Skylanders there...