How it Started

In the mid eighties I had a fairly brief stint painting miniatures for my Dungeons and Dragons games. As I’ve mentioned before, I was first made aware of D&D through an article in Dynamite magazine from 1981 that prominently featured photos of kids playing with painted miniatures. That same year the 1981 JCPenney Christmas catalog had an intriguing spread of D&D paraphernalia, including pictures of the Dungeon! boardgame, Moldvay Basic, the 1e Player’s Handbook with Trampier cover, and the contents of Grenadier’s Dungeoneers and Monsters Action Art boxed sets, including a striking bugbear. These images made me forever associate the game with miniatures.

The game books, however, made clear that miniatures were strictly optional and I spent the first few years happily playing without lead figures. But once I had a chance to buy minis with my own money, I jumped. I first started collecting and painting figures around 84 or 85, a tumultuous time for D&D licensed miniatures: the Grenadier license ended in 1982, then TSR produced their own miniatures in 83 and 84, then Citadel had the license in 85 and 86, before Ral Partha won the license in 87. As such, my small collection of vintage miniatures contains representatives from all four of these lines.

I didn’t do much gaming during college, and so my collecting and painting of miniatures ceased altogether. Even after I resumed running D&D games, everything was theater of the mind until Wizards of the Coast launched their Dungeons and Dragons Miniature Game in 2003. The plastic figures, which came in random packs, were relatively cheap, highly portable, and best of all, pre-painted. I amassed a good collection over the next four or five years. My buying steadily fell off once I had a decent selection, and as prices rose and quality dropped. By the time Wizards discontinued the line in 2011, I was buying hardly anything except singles on the secondary market to fill the holes in my collection.

On August 11, 2012 I pledged the Reaper Miniatures Bones: An Evolution Of Gaming Miniatures Kickstarter. I hadn’t painted miniatures for over 20 years, but I was between D&D games and wanted to pick the hobby back up. I received my pledge in 2013 and the very first miniature I tackled was this Sandra Garrity hydra, and I expressly chose it because it was a nice large sculpt, seemingly a simple starter model. I had to relearn many lessons forgotten over the intervening years but at the time I was fairly happy with the results.

My initial goal, and the one I still strive for, is to produce miniatures for the tabletop that are at least as good as the pre-painted options. I’m not looking to win any Golden Demons, but I do want something respectable that I can use in my games.

That said, I look upon this hydra ten years later with no small amount of cringe. The brushwork is sloppy and heavy, the color scheme boring, and there’s no shading to speak of. And to be fair to myself, the initial line of Reaper Bones were a little rough: many of the casts were blurry, flashy, and marred by mold lines. I also followed the advice that “Reaper Bones don’t need to be primed,” which, in my experience, is a lie. Even with a thorough scrubbing, I find that most base coat colors do not adhere well to the original Bones material, which leads to overpainting. A thin layer of gray primer would have done wonders for this hydra.

I’ve continued to back each and every Kickstarter since, and bought additional unpainted miniatures from WizKids and other companies. This next hydra is from the Reaper Bones 5: Escape from Pizza Dungeon Kickstarter, and the Greek Odyssey Expansion pack. It’s a great sculpt by Julie Guthrie, clearly inspired by Ray Harryhausen’s design from Jason and the Argonauts (1963). It was also cast in the newer Bones Black material, so the details are crisper and sharper. I primed this with Army Painter gray and used the airbrush for the base coat, then spent much of the time with inks and highlighting.

I’m sorely tempted to strip the original hydra and start over, if only to see what I could do now. I’m glad that my skills have improved over the last ten years, but I’m under no illusion that I am anything but a middling painter: Painting the Bones V Hydra by Bird with a Brush shows what a real painter can do with this same model. That said, I’m happy with where I am at: I find painting a soothing, enjoyable pastime that helps clear my head in between other projects. New skills and techniques continually beckon: I want to get better with my airbrush, and I want to try out wet blending.