The practice of writing is just that - practice. It takes time to find the right ideas and the right words and the right venue. I have ideas all the time for new stories. They're not fully developed, but they're a spark. It's the practice that cultivates the spark into a nice warm fire that dies in a pile of pulsing embers breathing wisps of light into the cool night air. It's the practice of communicating clearly that allows the author to most eloquently spin the tale.
When Dungeons and Dragons was first published, it was all storytelling. Okay, that's not entirely true because it was a game with mechanics for battle, but still it had a strong storytelling element. That overtone has changed with time. The storytelling still exists, by all means, but it's no longer just a part of one's imagination. Today one can purchase an entire dungeon tile set to build the environment in which dungeon masters will take their players. Minis and accessories of all types and sizes can fill out the shadowy lairs. Since roleplaying games are mostly played by men, I'll say it's what dollhouses used to be for girls when girls played with grand-scale miniature dollhouses. There's some controversy over the use of miniatures. Some argue that they replace the need for imagination and "dumb down" the creativity in the game, that the use of miniatures has overwhelmed actual game play and is a device of game companies to sell more stuff. Others argue that game mechanics require pieces for maps and for calculation of distance and travel, so why not have cool pieces that help tell the story. I see both sides and when I game I tend to borrow minis from others. But as my game group has continued and our party has grown closer, I decided that I'd like a mini of my own (one that preferably wasn't a half-naked woman) to help represent my parts of the story when we played. And so, I purchased a mini and have burgeoned forth into the world of mini building, because little did I realize they don't come finished when you buy them!
My burgeoning started today. Today I spent the day building and painting a miniature for my 2nd edition D&D adventure. Minis aren't much when they first arrive. They come in little plastic boxes with the arms, base and sometimes other key parts detached. They are made of plastic or lead and essentially come in this naked form, a little rough around the edges from the mold. They require shaving and glue before you can even get started with the painting.
The pictures that are used to sell the minis are ones that have been created by artists or art renderings of what they should look like. For anyone who has ever painted models - planes, trains, automobiles or whatnot - it's a similar thing. Painting, I find, is cathartic. On the minis, it makes your eyes go crossed if you don't wear magnifying glasses, but it's still an enjoyable process.
There's a beauty working with a model that's not like working with a canvas. When painting on canvas, you prime the canvas. You add a base texture or you add the texture as you go depending on what desired effect you're hoping to achieve. With the minis, the texture already exists. In the painting process you want to not only add color, but find ways to create contrast that enhance the shape and intricacies of the piece. You can't paint too specifically because you are painting to the scale of the model. The model is the size of a person or object standing 40-50 feet away from you. What do you see from that distance? How do the colors look? Artists, and I mean true artists not people like me who paint for the fun of it, understand the muting of colors across space. They understand focal points and highlights and lowlights and how to pull it all together so your eye not only recognizes the tiny features but amplifies the features so that the minis look exceptionally detailed even when they may not be.
I spent three and a half hours today building and putting together one mini. And it's not even finished. I worked with a friend who has been creating models since he was a kid. He oversaw my handy work and gave useful tips. The biggest of those being layers. One of the first things you'll learn as a painter is that white is not truly white. It's a series of lighter colors that distinguish themselves from the rest. White may have a hint of yellow or blue or gray or red or any other color or all of the above, but white is never truly white. And because white isn't white, it's one of the hardest colors to paint. So you approach painting like you do the color white, in layers. There are the layers of colors, and in the case of the mini, the layers of the body. You start from the inside out.
Properly glued together I finally primed the mini in black. Black primer creates a dark base and the shadows that are good for covering up spots you might miss. With black, the colors will have a deeper undertone. Next, I painted the flesh, the most inside part of the body. I layered on a dark flesh color that looked red in its bottle. When applied to the character it came out as this rich brown color much like a couple of my friends. Then I layered on a mixed bone and pink color, followed by a bone, blue and yellow color. (I happened to be painting an Asian female.) Finally, I added a dark wash that sunk into the grooves and added contrast. This wash is a key element to the overall look and quality of the higher end minis versus those that people just throw together. After the flesh, I moved on the pants and blouse followed by the boots and leather breast plate and then the cuffs. Inside out.
Three and a half hours, multitudes of layers, crossed eyes, and the mini still isn't done. But after another session like today, she should be. That's when the real storytelling can start. You see, she's just a placeholder. She's a representative of a slew of different stories. I don't actually need her for these stories, but she is something I made and connect to and can envision broadly. She represents my characters as we move around the maps and have grand adventures. She's a little piece of art that I created. She has become part of my practice of storytelling.
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