...2015 to be exact.  My career was in video editing for broadcast and digital media, but I've always had a desire to pursue the physical arts as well.  From shield building, to LEGO sculptures and custom Pop! figures, to disc golf disc dying; it seemed l had a constant drive to explore new methods for my creativity...then along came 3D printing!  For simply the desire to see if I could actually do it, I bought a simple, wooden kit printer and built the little thing from scratch - assembling the motors, belts, hot-end, sensors and the such until I had my first 3d printer!  The slicing platforms back then were a bit crude, having a bit of a learning curve to them, especially with no experience with gcode, but I was enthralled by the idea of printing my own creations.  However good my intentions though, it barely worked...but it did work well enough to print what would become the very first Draughtnaut!  I was hooked!  As an avid toy and memorabilia collector, as well as appreciator and creator of custom toy art, this was an obvious calling!  My inner child who dreamed of being able to design my own action figures came screaming out.  One kit printer became six prebuilt machines, one Draughtnaut became dozens, and I realized I needed a greater outlet for this budding universe that was unfolding, one print at a time!

After that first spark, my initial plan for bringing these little miniatures into the world was to create a game based on them.  Something like Warhammer 40k seemed too intense to simulate, but then the raised dot design of the figure got me thinking to use them as replacements to the standard checkers pieces - no additional learning curve just some added character to the rather mundane standard checkers game!  Plus, having a young son at the time, who wasn't quite up to chess yet, he found all of this irresistible!  Adding crowns was just natural at that point, and some power-up accesories to add some more flare to the game.   So checkers...but "Checkerbots" just didn't have the right ring to it.  Turns out, the traditional name for the game of checkers is "draughts" ... and so, Draughtnauts was born!  Not that crazy really, but it stuck!

In 2018 I started the first go at LazArt Studios as an indie game design studio and began hand making the first sets of Draughtnauts in the basement of my house!  With only enough knowledge to print exactly what I needed, I was wading into some uncharted waters, but the machines were printing so that's all that mattered!  I was printing using six, MP Mini Delta's, and at that time each Draughtnaut figurine was made up of 8 individual parts that I had to super glue together...24x per set!  I then made every board for the game by hand, adhering the printed board designs onto carboard and black wrap paper.  All the prototyping though was leading to a wonderful proof of concept, and I was able to get some great game testing and feedback from the community and industry at large, even beginning to work with a manufacturer on a full production run!  But alas...it was not meant to be.  In the end of 2019, a whopping triple whammy of moving houses, a brutal ankle injury (while trying to clean my gutters, trying to sell my house!), followed by a global pandemic with Covid, was simply too much for my tiny, non-business oriented brain to handle.  So, I closed down the business and turned my creative outlets more inward, focusing on finding that right spark again.