Journey to the World of a Small, Resin Squidman
A Weeks-Long Adventure of Art and Accomplishment.
“I didn’t know you painted little miniatures, Josiah.”
“This is the first little miniature I have ever painted.”
It’s an exchange that I’ve had no less than three times during the past few weeks. It seems like each time I applied paint to my two-inch cephalopod canvass, someone wanted to know all about a hobby I didn’t actually have.
So what was I doing painting a squidman miniature?
It’s a long story that starts with my friend Arron. Aaron has a mind for game design and a vision for world-building. Recently, he’s applied these talents to creating his own, highly-sophisticated, fantasy roleplaying game.
I’d never really roleplayed before—the art of rolling dice and imitating wizards always seemed too complex for my tastes. Nevertheless, Aaron’s project interested me, and I volunteered to be one of his play testers.
Apparently, it’s fairly typical for roleplayers to use little miniatures to represent their characters. In Aaron’s game, the miniatures don’t serve much purpose, but they add to the ambiance: Aaron likes to move our characters around a hand-drawn map as he explains what happens next in the game’s story. Aaron owns a literal army of miniatures, some of which he made available to us, the play testers.
My character was a squidman, though. And Aaron (understandably) didn’t have any squidmen miniatures. So I got stuck with a placeholder.
When it became clear that our group would be meeting semi-regularly to keep playing, I decided to investigate whether I could find a way out of using a grouchy looking man as the symbol of my character.
My character is a squidman monk who fights with magic. I named him Alcibiades, after the bloke who Socrates claimed to love too much in the Gorgias. As you may have gathered by the fact that I’m devoting this artilce to him, I may have a similar problem with my Alcibiades.
After an afternoon of hunting on the internet, I found a miniature that captured the way I wanted Alcibiades to look:
I met this lovable face on eBay. Confusingly, the description specified that the miniatures was prepainted and that it came unpainted.
I wasn’t sure what to do with that.
After some consideration, I decided to buy the thing and hope for the best. It was only $4.00, including shipping, so no one was going to beat the price. And the picture suggested that, if it came prepainted, I would have a nice-looking squidman.
It turned out that it came without paint.
At this point, I had a choice: I could use the unpainted miniature or I could beg Aaron to teach me how to paint miniatures. I begged Aaron to teach me how to paint miniatures.
Aaron was more than helpful. He supplied me with brushes and paint, and brought one of his own unpainted miniatures to demonstrate painting techniques on.
We had talked color schemes earlier, and I had explained that I wanted Alcibiades to use primarily blues in his outfit (and his skin). Aaron brought two shades of blue and one canister of shimmering silver paint.
The first lesson I learned: don’t let your paint clump up too much. If the paint is not well spread, the miniature looks lumpy and awkward. If you spread to thin, you can always add another layer over top. Much easier than chiseling off excess dried paint.
Aaron explained how it helped to push the paint into little nooks with my brush. He taught when to use which brush size, and how to clean brushes between colors. His cardinal rule: you can always paint over your mistakes. And extra layer covers over an multitude of sins.
For all this instruction, I did manage to clump the silver paint a bit—it was deceptively thick for paint. But I came away from that first meeting with an armful of borrowed paints, and a sense that the process didn’t need to be difficult.
I spent more mental energy than I deem strictly healthy trying to decide how exactly to manage the color scheme. Should the inside of the robes be the same color as the outside? Should the robes be the same color as the tunic? What color should the staff be? These were the big questions a wrestled with.
Fortunately for Alcibiades, I came down with a cold at this critical moment. Calling in sick to my appointments freed up the time necessary to see the painting through to completion.
I decided on a deep sapphire color for the robes. To get the fullness I wanted, I had to paint five (or was it six?) coats of paint over the robes. The resulting color looked great when contrasted to the silver I used to paint the trim.
I decided to make the staff match the trim on the robes; I painted it silver too. But after the first layer, I noticed that the white resin was showing through under the texture of the staff. I liked the effect, so I left it like that, rather than painting over with more silver.
The tunic I made a blue-purple color — almost like a dark periwinkle. I had originally meant to have it match the robe, but I decided it was not appealing to paint everything the same color.
I used blue-grey for the base. The grey fit because the base was sculpted to look like a stony road. The blue tint just helped keep the overall color scheme together.
I could not find a color for the skin I liked. Aaron offered a sky blue. It wasn’t quite what I wanted, but the results still looked good.
This description suggests that I painted each section one at a time. Nothing could be further from the truth. Each time I painted a new item, I had to repaint everything around it. I got dark blue on the tunic! Repaint it! Whoops! Now there’s purple on the robe—guess I’ll repaint that. And now there’s dark blue on the tunic again…
The eyes were especially troublesome. I had to repaint the face four times because the black paint intended for the eyes kept escaping and running wild over Alcibiades’ tentacled visage.
Still, the misery entailed in constant repainting was a small price to pay for the feeling of satisfaction upon completing the paint job. Almost three weeks after ordering the miniature on eBay, the finished product was ready.
It’s not a perfect paint job, obviously, but I remain immensely proud of it. Watching the gradual evolution of the figure from the blank resin slate to the blue-robed squidman filled me with excitement. I don’t often work with my hands (besides typing, of course), and the strugle to move my fingures precisely enough to paint this tiny figurine made the final product all the more rewarding.
I enjoyed painting Alcibiades. It’s good to have something that’s physically and mentally challenging without being physically or mentally strenuous.
Given the chance, I’d love to paint another.
