Face Your Fears! Painting Minis Edition

Two years ago life was kind of shit for me, which interestingly, made it a great time to examine all sorts of things about my life. One of those things I looked at was my assortment of large and impressive minis that I hadn't dared to start because I wasn't good enough to do them justice.

I knew I'd never think I was good enough. So I challenged myself to paint them anyway, and I settled on a challenge to paint 3 dragons in my collection, Ebonwrath, Kaladrax, and Nathavarr from the Dragon's Don't Share 2 set, and I posted about it here.

Well, things took longer than expected, as always, but I did it. Ebonwrath is finished. Kaladrax is finished (though I still need to paint Hyrekia). And now the DDS set is just about finished.



Are they perfect? No, of course not. And there are things I wish I'd done better. Dealing with mold lines for one thing! But I learned a lot doing it. For one thing, painting can be a marathon rather than a sprint, especially when painting bone after bone of Kaladrax's tail, or scale by scale with Nathavarr. I learned that scenic bases can be a lot of work, and a lot of cleanup (see Ebonwrath's swamp base) but the end result can be amazing.

Such a huge mini!

The number one lesson I learned? Not to be afraid of big impressive minis, cause they're going to look big and impressive when they're done anyway!! And if I somehow screw them up, it isn't the end of the world. It isn't even wasted effort since it's guaranteed that I'll have learned something in the process, even if all I learned was "don't do that again."



Now that I'm wrapping up my 3 Dragon Challenge, what's my next challenge? 2 Big Ass Spiders! Specifically Games Workshop's Shelob and Reaper's Cadirith.