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.

#6MMRPC Goals for Round 2

One of the ways that I motivate myself is to give myself goals... That's part of the reason I joined the 6MMRPC! Not only does it give me the framework to set my goals into, it adds the accountability factor of publicly stating "this is what I'm going to do, and here's my progress so far." But the 6MMRPC doesn't actually set a specific goal. That's left to the individual participant to decide for themselves.

I said in my last 6MMRPC post that I hadn't decided what my goals/projects were going to be. I think I've settled on what I want to do... and it's not little. In fact it's the opposite of little...

Dragons!

Specifically 3 different dragons, presented here from smallest to largest:

Ebonwrath


Kaladrax & Hyrekia (not pictured)


Dragons Don't Share

Technically Kaladrax is bigger than Nathavarr, the dragon from Dragons Don't Share, but I'm counting the whole set as part of my goal, including the 5 adventurers and the castle ruins.

Why dragons? I've held off on painting them because "I'm not good enough to do the minis justice" for long enough. Seriously: Fuck That.

Is it going to be as technically good as any of these pictures? Probably not. But it'll be my work, and it's going to be fantastic!