Reply To: [unofficial weekender] Finish it!

[blinky465 17028xp 1]

My printer is going BRRRRR again – and it’s brilliant.
Honestly, it’s completely changed my approach to painting minis. Now, even as I take them off the build plate, I might be thinking “some of you are not going to make it”. And it’s great!

I usually print 6-8 minis at a time. I used to try to “make them all count”. I’d pick my favourite six or eight characters, drop them on the build plate, print them out – and then each one mattered; I didn’t want to mess them up (after the discussion this week about preparing miniatures for printing, some of you might understand that spending an hour or more preparing files for printing means I’d either have to reprint an entire plate if anything went wrong, or just not mess anything up in the first place!)

But this time, I just printed eight very similar-looking Space Marine proxies.
They all looked pretty good – I didn’t care if any of them got messed up because the plan was always to print another set of marines and paint and keep just five of them.

That gave me eight to try stuff out on, then another eight to actually paint in the style I decided to use, and even then – like the proverbial baker’s dozen – I had spares in case anything went wrong.

It’s been totally liberating to treat my minis as “disposable”.
But it’s exactly what happens in just about any other art form.
My wife loves pottery. But not every lump of clay is going to make it into a plate or a bowl or a mug. And she’s fine with that.
Not every canvas she paints is going to end up on the wall. Some get painted over – some get thrown out.
And she doesn’t give it a second thought.

I started doing the same with my minis. And now, neither do I.
It’s sooooo cathartic to take an unfinished mini, and drop it in the bin, with the thought “well you didn’t work out, but now you’re no longer cluttering up the place”.