Pinselwut, miniature painting by Solmar

Hey there ladies and gentlemen, dear painters!

Today i will again talk a bit about "them feelings", as i experienced my first "i give up" moment on a miniature. So what was going on?

I painted the priest from Raffaele Piccas range "Forged Monkey". The miniature itself ist really nice, sculpted very well and the cast was near perfect. So we see a good foundation for painting a good mini here, do we? My plan was to convert that little guy into a jedi knight, yeah! I wanted to settle up a story very close after a fight where the jedi just destroyed a droid, it crashed into the ground near him and there are 2 parts of the droid cut off by his light saber.

Painting wise i wanted to achieve high contrast through cold-warm colors (blue OSL by the light saber and brown colors on droid and robe). But the quality-goal was not to bee top notch as this was going to be a relaxing piece after GD competition.

So let´s first look at the pictures and then we will examine why this is bad and what happened.

So now we talk about what i don´t like on him:

The OSL effect is pretty much a mess, it is chalky, it is not smooth it just does not look right. On the ground, i like it. On the robe.. well no! But the main point i dont like here is the face. Holy cow i had a huge struggle with the face, i made it 3 times and it still sucks!

Don´t get me wrong i KNOW how to fix these things! Soft blendings out, making things smoother, building up highlights in the face. But i just could not do it.

So let´s look at possible reasons:

- The mini and me were not good friends!
So what does this mean? For me it starts with the "purchase-reason". At all of my minis i have the feeling that i have to get my fingers on it BADLY! Like i really want to have it. With this mini it was different. I was at a workshop, the mini was there, the price was low. Easy buy. But no mini i would have purchased in normal circumstances (not downrating the mini here, it is still great!). So we might have a first motivational flaw here. Then a problem occured most of you might know. The mini looks great but you have less joy while painting because because you don´t get familiar with the sculpt. You can not do anything against it.

- The quality goal was not top-notch.
I realized this on tabletop projects. If i want to do a mini "quick ´n dirty", it just looks like shit. It is not easy for me to pace my work up and maintain quality. And that is what you see here. The mini is probably 8 hours of painting and it looks crap. The lesson i learn from this: in future i stick to my way of putting everything i can into my actual project (wich also is the reason for improvement on every new mini).

- I have "more exciting" projects on the horizon i really want to start with. Maybe this was also a demotivating factor.

So finally i said to myself: Okay, stop here. Head on to the next project and give this miniature the status of being the first one i gave up upon. This jedi now stands in my cabinet, telling me that i am still a young padawan and have much to lear about painting and about myself. :)

Cheers to you guys!