Why Do We Paint?

When you come to think about it, painting miniatures could very well be the oddest part of this entire hobby, particularly in this day and age of pre-painted miniatures and professional painting services. Why spend countless eye-straining hours laboring over tiny figures long into the night? Even if you are lucky enough to get in multiple games a week, it's likely that you'll never spend as much time playing as you do painting. And then there's all the additional cost (both time and money) involved in gaining proficiency in painting itself!

And yet most of us persevere. Why?

My answer: self-expression.

We want to feel like our miniatures reflect a bit of our own creative vision. In fantasy wargaming (and the more obscure historical genres), this includes things like choosing uniform colors and other details of the figures' appearance, but even in your more rigidly-proscribed historical genres like Napoleonics or WWII, there's often room for more than a bit of creative flourish amongst the uniform plates and camo swatches.

And then there's your own personal style. Everyone has one, even if it's subtle. To my mind, there is no point in painting miniatures yourself if the result isn't obviously your own "brand" of painting, as it were. Yes, most of us watch tutorials and try to emulate a particular favored style. But if the end goal is to look just like a Kev Dallimore or Duncan Rhodes piece, I have to question why you would bother painting your own minis at all. Just find a professional painter who can ape your favored style and spend the money you would have otherwise on paints and painting supplies on commissions instead.

So that's all my subjective opinion, and YMMV and all that. Where I start to get a bit tetchy, as the Brits say, is when emulation of a particular style gets confused with being a "good" painter. It's all a bit Académie des Beaux-Arts, if you will.

A personal anecdote to illustrate my point:

I've been painting miniatures for literally 30 years at this point. I am happy with my level of painting proficiency, though I'm always pushing myself to try new techniques or up my skill level in this way or that. But, ultimately, I would call myself a "good" painter.

To that end, I have periodically engaged in painting miniatures for commission. I have never had an unhappy client, and have frequently had to turn down work because my queue got too full.

A few years ago, I was looking into taking my commission work to a more regular gig and so was looking to put my name out there. One of the bigger GW-adjacent wargaming YouTube channels at the time ran a painting service (they may still, for all I know) and had an offer for commission painters where, if you did some painting for them, they would advertise your services on their channel. I submitted a portfolio.

The response I got was one of the most condescending rejections I've ever received; it more or less said, "Hey, great effort buddy! Keep practicing and in a few years you might actually get good!"

At first, this really threw me for a loop, I have to say. But as I thought it over, I realized where they were coming from: I don't paint to GW standards. And in their world, painting to the GW standard is the sole marker for what constitutes "good" painting. How clean are those edge highlights? Tighten them up, or you'll never be a "good" painter! That kind of nonsense. After that insight, I had a good laugh and moved on.

But that insight has stuck with me ever since as illustrative of a much more pervasive attitude. And it's frankly bullshit. It's an attitude that turns the art of miniatures painting into a craft of paint-by-numbers.

Do your figures look badass on the table? Are you happy with them? Then you're a "good" painter. End of story.

Timely insights courtesy of @sonicsledge.

Yes, there are certain minimum technical bars we all should be clearing. There is, I believe, an objective definition of what constitutes a "bad" paint job. Beyond that, anything is fair game. Paint for yourself and your own enjoyment and satisfaction; nobody else's.

(Okay, you can also paint for the enjoyment of your gaming buddies who appreciate your efforts and ogle your figures when you put them on the table, but that's it!)

Vintage Wargaming

Some of you may be aware that British Pathe has begun uploading its archives to YouTube. A wonderful little piece from 1966 popped up on my feed the other day, and I wanted to share it here:



 Old school!

(Nice to see that "husband & wife" wargaming goes back a ways, too.)

My Article on Operation Goodwood

A few months back I submitted an article on "Operation Goodwood" - the largest British tank offensive to date - for publication on Warlord Games' website. I was pleased this morning to see the article featured in their latest newsletter, and even more pleased to see that the editorial staff gussied up my words with some truly excellent pictures, of both the archival photo and minis-based variety.

Have a read if you're so inclined. It's a fascinating little chapter of the Normandy campaign!

Female Gamers Go Back a Ways

[Since this has something to do with RPGs and something to do with miniatures gaming, I'm cross-posting it to both my gaming blogs.]

I've been slowly making my way through Jon Peterson's magnificent Playing at the World, a deep and scholarly (yet readable) account of the origins of role-playing games that goes all the way back to 18th-century chess variants and the emergence of genre literature and then traces things up through to the publication of the original boxed set of Dungeons & Dragons. It's a gaming nerd's dream, frankly.

One thing I've been taking away from my readings so far (I'm about halfway through) is that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Back during the whole "Consultancygate" brouhaha in July, for example, I just happened to be reading a section that touched on some of the infighting in the nascent gaming community following the publication of D&D, wherein two camps emerged, divided between the old guard wargamers and the more counterculture-inspired RPGers, both of whom claimed the other was "doing it wrong" and that they themselves had the moral high ground. It was certainly illustrative of the fact that the gaming community has always been subject to passionate debates on perceptions of who or what should and shouldn't be allowed in the hobby. 

More recently, of course, there's been a much more widely-reported controversy surrounding the acceptance (or lack thereof) of women in the larger video-gaming community. I'm not a video gamer by any stretch of the imagination, but over the years I've witnessed similar prejudices being expressed in the RPG hobby as well. Once again, Playing at the World has provided an interesting and timely point-of-view.

In my latest reading, the book is discussing a game called Fletcher Pratt's Naval War Game. Published in 1943, the game was developed from soirees Pratt (a pulp fiction writer) would hold at his Manhattan apartment (and later, when attendance got up to around 50 people, at a nearby hall) in which attendees would engage in a wargame featuring model ships, played out using the floor as the game space.

The game was significant to the later development of RPGs because it influenced the development of mechanics like Armor Class and Hit Points. But it was also significant for being the first time female gamers got a mention in a published wargame, previously perceived as the exclusive domain of men. Quoted from the rulebook itself:

"[Once Pratt's group had embraced the system] the sweethearts-and-wives influence became manifest. One of the latter appeared as a spectator of what was originally intended to be a purely stag game. In the midst of the ensuing red-hot engagement she was discovered flat on her stomach, aiming the guns of a cruiser and muttering something like, 'I'll get the so-and-so this time.' From that date on there was no checking the rising tide of feminism. Today there are nearly as many players of one sex as of the other; and one of the feminine delegation has been praised by a naval officer as the most competent tactician of the group."

Playing at the World goes on to feature an illustration from the book in which "a skirted woman, alongside her male counterparts, is shown kneeling on the floor, angling a cardboard arrow to fire at her target."

It also discusses how this inclusion represented an evolution from H.G. Wells' Little Wars (1911), the first wargame marketed to casual gamers; although the book subtitles itself as a "game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books", Wells also complains within the pages of his rules of being interrupted "by a great rustle and chattering of lady visitors" who "regarded the [game] with the empty disdain of their sex for all imaginative things."

In my 25-plus years of tabletop gaming, I've gamed with at least as many women as men. My current weekly face-to-face group is comprised of a majority of women, and has been all-woman (save for yours truly) at times in the past. I've also gamed with women who were flat-out denied the opportunity to join other groups because of their gender.

I've written about this before, but I just want to reiterate that, of the women I've gamed with, some have sucked at math and others have loved crunch; some have been totally story-oriented and others have been violent and bloodthirsty. In other words, they've been just like all the male gamers I've played with.

I wanted to post this little piece of history simply because it shows that women's interest in the tradition of gaming from which RPGs, wargaming, and video games grew out of goes back a long ways. If this sort of history was better-known...well, we'd still probably have lots of stupid trolls out there spewing misogyny in-person and online, but knowing about stuff like this puts their ridiculous appeals to the "tradition" of an all-male hobby in an even weaker light, I think.