Have you ever seen a bear riding a bicycle? They manage it, but it looks completely unnatural. That's about the same situation as me with a paintbrush in my hand. I could wrap a muppet-like mitt around one of these slender sticks with a few horsehairs sticking out the end, and even manage to dip it into the paint without knocking the jar over, but after that, it was anybody's guess what would actually happen with that whole "putting the paint on the mini" part of the process.
I had a D&D figure, a half-orc wrestler, that I was repurposing as a character in a steampunk adventure. He was supposed be a sort of Queequeg-on-an-airship, a stranger from a far-off land who served as the mooring-man. It was a bit more of a challenge than I needed, since the mini was bare-chested and I wanted him to be wearing a shirt, but I thought that the selection of colors would get across the sense of his get-up. Of course, the trick was getting the colors on the mini.
As I sat there valiantly struggling, Karmin, with a glass of port on the table, was either painting her own mini, cool as a cat on a fence, adding "texture" and "shading" and "metallic highlights to the buttons on her character's frock coat," or she was helping me with mine, exuding the natural grace of a kindergarten teacher who tells a kid that his work looks pretty good, really, as she examined the mess I had made of a perfectly good pewter figure.
Regardless of the outcome, it was great fun. My mini is a mess, but it is a mess I will be happy to game with, since it's my mess. And who knows, maybe I'll paint another one, and it'll be a little bit less of a mess than this one. And so on. Mind the gap.
Piripiri Tamati, Airshipman First Class, ZX Basilisk
