The gangThough I have gripes with D&D as a game, I have serious nostalgia for my time in that space, and appreciation for the path I was set on via miniature painting.
The gang
1. The first miniature I ever painted. I remember I got the Reaper Miniatures learn-to-paint set for Christmas 2017, and I have such a nostalgia for where I came from; watery paints and tiny brushes, painting at the kitchen table.
2. Each of the learn-to-paint sets came with 3 miniatures, brushes and paint, and a guide to learn the basic techniques of washes, drybrushing, layering etc. I had 2 of those boxes, and they’re the first 6 images here.
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6. The Reaper Bones line, where most of my D&D miniatures are from, are pre-primed, single piece miniatures that might not be of the highest level of detail, but you could throw them at a wall and no pieces would break off. I remember soaking bits of the rubbery plastic in hot water to attempt to straighten out warped pieces (such as this knight’s sword) to little success.
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8. One of the first (actually, THE first I think,) minis I painted without an explicit guide as to which paint to use for which part. I really like that I remember small details like this.
9. Yep, that’s Loss. The year was 2018.
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11. I suppose I didn’t paint ALL of these, I remember trying to get some friends into mini painting via all of us painting a zombie or two. Low stakes sort of model.
12. Color-coded goblins! I evidently used this a lot while actually runing D&D, goblins are versatile creatures and its easier to say “the blue goblin attacks”, than “that one over there attacks”.
13. Wonderful memory associated with this model and the two which follow: for English class we had to do a project based on Gilgamesh and we ran+filmed a D&D oneshot based on the story. My friends helped out on some of them but I definitley painted this one. Real ones remember Gilgasesh.
14. This model oringally has a sword and an axe, but I bought two of the model and cut up the weapons to give him two axes. Quite a small conversion but as a teenager getting into the hobby I felt like a mad genius.
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18. I definitely painted this one around late 2018/early 2019 (senior year of highschool for me) and I can tell because of the paints used on this model - I was starting to paint Warhammer models then and can generally see whether I’ve painted a model with the nicer Citadel (Warhammer brand) paints or the more watery pre-thinned Reaper paints. Again, this is a weird flex, like being able to taste the difference between wine vintages, but let me have this win lol.
19. This is a Wizkids (official D&D mini) Mimic with some arms and legs I chopped off some Reaper mini, to look like “buff mimic” images that were floating around reddit at the time.
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21. Okay, I didn’t paint these, since I got them at a Free Comic Book Day event, but they’re still cool right? I had to include them for completeness sake. (the middle one is actually another Reaper Mini I bought tbh)
22. A good chunk of these going forward are Wizkid minis, but it’s not that important saying which minis were painted when, and with what paints. What IS a fun(?) annecdote to share is that this mini was birthday-gifted to me by a girl my brother was dating at the time, along with the first Citadel paints I got: Red Yellow Blue Black and White, used exclusivley on this model, and mixed to get other colors. This is a really strange memory I don’t know why I keep it around in my brain.
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24. Mason painted this one! I have a funny snapchat video of him painting it from March 6th 2019, I’ll send it to you if you want.
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27. I did some conversion work with Greenstuff (horrible modelling substance for wargaming you should never use) for this one, a D&D character I played for at most 2 sessions.
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31. One of the big things that pushed me away from painting D&D miniatures is that I would spend hours and hours painting monsters that would never touch the tabletop. At least with wargaming, your entire squad/army gets to be on the table each game, but aside from player characters, I rarely got to use most of these models, and would often represent a person or creature in-game with a scrap of paper if I didn’t have exactly the right model.
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33. The next chunk of miniatures are for my Pirate Campaign I ran in high school, the only D&D game I ran that actually concluded. I treasure the memories.
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35. Captain Flarragn - a Davy-Jones-Knockoff who was a fan-favorite recurring character in any D&D game that took place near water.
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48. In our journey through time, we’ve reached 2019-2020, with this model and others being painted for characters in the game I ran in freshman year of college, before covid hit.
49. Hello Yashas I hope you’re doing well :)
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53. This one, and the next model were 3d printed from designs we made on Heroforge (a site for designing D&D minis). Since I 3d printed it, that dates these models circa 2021-2022, the last embers of D&Ds flame in my spirit.
54. Hello Anthony I hope you are doing well :)
55. I used this mini to practice OSL (object source lighting) to make it seem like the staff radiated light. Really proud of this one, and I remember spending a lot of time building up the layers. I tried OSL on another mini and it didn’t turn out as well as this one so I never finished the paintjob.
56. Last but not least, the Coral Golem! This was one of the final bosses in the D&D Pirate Campaign.