Guest Post by Black Bear
Keeping It Tiny
I sometimes worry that, over the course of my minor career as a guest-blogger, I am likely to reveal all the levels of my personal nerdiness one by one, laying it all bare on the internet (so to speak.) It’s not so much that I’m embarrassed at my geekery, but I feel I’m losing my mystery, a bit… Anyway, some of you know that I currently work as an exhibit developer in a large museum. But that’s only my most recent career; I spent about 15 years of my life in the hobby games and toys industry. It was a blissful, if non-lucrative, existence—by day, I sold model supplies and role playing games to an unsuspecting public, and by night I squandered my meager salary on my own hobbies. Namely, model supplies and role playing games.
I’ve been painting miniature models since I was about 16, I think. Technically I started a bit younger; every 6-12 months from the age of 7 on I would wheedle my mother into buying me one of those ERTL or Revell Snap-tite car model kits, along with a new tube of Testor’s glue and some paint. “This time,” I’d think, “it’s going to look AWESOME.”
Of course, I was always wrong about this. I’d glue piece A to wheel C by mistake, or mis-read the directions, or get impatient and skip ahead to the part that looked fun only to discover that steps 6-18 really were pretty important after all… and when I reached the painting stage it was a whole fresh world of horror—borrowing jars of paint thinner and crappy brushes from my dad’s workshop, only to spill the paint on the majestic shag carpet of my 1978 bedroom and follow by adhering all attendant decals to my desk, my hands, and my pant legs—anything but the actual surface of the model. Every time, the car would end up looking like a reject from Monster Garage, and I’d swear never to do it again. Yet, a year or so later, there I’d be at the Kay-Bee Toy and Hobby, begging my mom to shell out another $5 for the privilege of cleaning Testors glue out of my hair in a week.
I’d outgrown this by age 16, but found myself drawn to a new form of the same old hobby—miniature painting. Miniature models for hobby gaming come in a number of different forms. Guys (and occasional gals) who do tabletop wargames will build up vast armies of what are essentially toy soldiers in plastic or metal, modeled to look roughly historically accurate and painted to match whatever uniform or look they’re going for.
Roman legionnaires, for instance. And if you want to have a really big battle on your basement ping-pong table, they need to be small figures; these little guys are only about 3/4″ tall. Folks into fantasy and sci-fi, on the other hand, often paint larger individual figures of characters, creatures, monsters, etc…. and it was thus that I found myself entering the model hobby again at the ripe age of I-Can-Drive-Myself-To-The-Hobby-Store-and-Buy-My-Own-Paints.
When I first started, it was pretty much on impulse. I probably had $10 in my pocket to blow; so I spent $2-3 on paint, $2 on a brush, and $5 for a tiny, beautifully detailed little lead-pewter dragon. And here, for the first time ever seen on the internet, I humbly offer you this: my first ever painting effort.
Cute, isn’t he? Feisty. He’s a bit monochromatic, partly because I figured that was how he ought to look and partly because I only bought 2 bottles of paint (dark red and orange red) and then swiped some white acrylic paint from my artist parents to mix lighter shades. Unfortunately, the first thing I learned was that I should have spent a few bucks on primer as well. Unlike the models of my storied past, these figurines take water soluble paint—no more thinner, no more Testor’s enamels. But acrylic paints don’t adhere well to non-porous surfaces like metal, as I learned when this little guy’s paint started to rub off at the edges almost immediately. So my next purchase was a can of spray primer, and some more figures. I was hooked. The guys who worked and played at the game store were unabashedly thrilled that a girl was taking up “their” hobby and so I got painting tips and advice from about a host of different people, several of whom were among the top tier of miniature painters back in those days. (This has all changed in the last decade or so—while women are still an uncommon sight at the gaming table, I would say easily that 6 or 7 of the top 10 painters in the US at the moment are women.) I bought a few more jars of paint, co-opted yet more of my parents’ art supplies on hand, and eventually produced this.
The funny thing is, while I painted this miniature 24 years ago by my crude reckoning, I still find him rather delightful, in an orky way. I remember being very pleased with myself that I got his eyes in the right spots, without blodging orange paint all over his face, and I like the little tear in the knee of his purple pants… it’s a nice touch. Both these miniatures were made by a British company called Citadel, by the way, to give credit where it’s due.
So now I’ve been painting for over 20 years, and painting professionally (ie, for other people who don’t have time/desire to paint their own figures) for 15. I’ve fallen off a bit since I got the museum gig, but I aspire to get back to painting more seriously; lord knows I’ve got plenty of unpainted metal shoved in boxes and drawers all over my house. I’d planned for this post to be a step-by-step tutorial on how I paint a miniature, but I think now I may be able to stretch this into TWO guest posts (you’re welcome, Robin!)* So I’ll leave you with this:
HANNIBAL the HAMSTER GLADIATOR
Sculpted by Sandra Garrity, and painted, with unrelenting sillyness, by me.
* YAAAY. –ed.
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