Many people call their stash of unpainted miniatures their ‘pile of shame’. I have no idea why that is, I am very proud of my pile. I used to call it my Pile of Opportunity, but that is a rather long word and I do not like the pronunciation of it. So, Pile of Pride it is, and I am determined to paint them all. One day. Not today.
I do have a lot of painted mini’s as well, and I have a nice glass display case in our game-room downstairs. The main reason (apart from bragging) is that I generally forget what I have. If I put away my mini’s in some nice storage system, I will never use them. So, I got the display and that works splendidly. It will be too small one day, pretty soon I guess, but I’ll figure out what to do about that when we get there. I am also working on my picture gallery here, so that I can scroll or search by tag when I am prepping for adventures.
So, that worked for my painted mini’s, and I decided it would also work for my unpainted mini’s. Having them stashed away in some crates did not motivate me to paint anything. And as I already wrote: I am rather proud of my Pile of Pride!
So, I got the same display case as I got for the downstairs mini’s, and filled it with my unpainted mini’s. This resulted in 2 discoveries:
1. I have a lot more unpainted mini’s than painted ones
I have a lot more mini’s than I can fit in the case, there is a crate with a lot more mini’s, a medium sized box, a pile of little boxes the mini’s come in, and I am probably forgetting several.
2. this is really cool and now I want to paint a lot
Yeah, it works, for me at least. I can imagine this could be overwhelming for people, being confronted with all the stuff you still need to do. I know that feeling, I have that with laundry, or loading the dishwasher.
But the thing is, I have the display case downstairs with my painted mini’s, and I can go there and remind myself I do not need to paint these mini’s. That helps a lot with feeling no pressure when it comes to my unpainted mini’s. And it also helps with not having any demands regarding the quality of my paint jobs.
I paint my mini’s because I do not like unpainted mini’s at the table. My eyesight is not great and having to fuss about who is where on the map when all the mini’s are grey-ish just is no fun at all. Painted mini’s also give more color to the table, literary but also adventure-wise, it helps the vibe of the adventure. I do not paint mini’s because I love painting that much. I enjoy it, but I was over the moon when speedpaint came to the shop. And a little upset that I had not known about contrast paint sooner, which is basically the same but a different brand.
So I can paint the bulk of the mini’s with speed/contrast/etc paint, make them look nice enough (okay, and some normal paint for details). The mini’s that I really like and I want to make pretty get more attention, but not too much. I feel no desire at all to spend thousands of hours practicing.
I just want painted miniatures to put on my table during my games.