Crimson Fists: 2nd Update
And so as the month draws to a close (well technically that happened a week or two ago now, and I’m just slow to write and post things) the next batch of freshly painted marines are ready to join their battle brothers on the battle field*.
Technically I only had 5 models to paint this month, 1 Inceptor, a chap with a jump pack that flies about the battlefield (who I had actually already painted and was in last month’s post); 2 Hellblasters, marines armed with powerful plasma weaponry; and another 2 Intercessor marines to reinforce my existing squad.
While the maths does only leave four models to paint, I’ve had a model sitting half-painted for some time – my Librarian, a warrior that can wield arcane energies**. Not only that but I got side tracked with a few of my vehicles. Now these vehicles aren’t a part of the subscription, and so aren’t technically part of my self imposed painting challenge, but they will ultimately end up in the same army so I painted them anyway.
Now the Librarian and the vehicles actually bring up a couple things that I would like to talk about regarding creative projects. Not wanting to go on for too long or go off on too many tangents, we’ll just talk about the librarian for now.
Firstly, you might be asking, “why did he take so long to finish?” Which would be fair enough, considering the pace I have been cracking through all these miniatures, some of which are much bigger than him. As the Librarian is a character model, he’s somewhat special and I wanted to put extra effort into making sure all the little details were done correctly. This meant I tried out a few new techniques, which is another purpose behind this painting project – learning new techniques and expanding my skill set. But one detail/technique was particularly daunting.
The technique in question is Object Source Lighting (or OSL for short), and as the name suggests, is all about creating the illusion of light or glowing effects. In the case of the Librarian, I wanted his huge sword and his eyes to glow and radiate with magical energy. Now I jumped onto the interwebs and began researching the technique and found that there were a lot of different approaches. I quickly became overwhelmed with trying to figure out which of these many techniques I would use. And not only that, but I still hadn’t figured out what colours I wanted the lights to be.
This uncertainty in colour choice and multitude of technique options left me afraid of making the wrong decision and ruining all the hard work that had gone in. And this fear of messing up is what I wanted to look at.
Fear is a very common motivation disruptor that prevents our creative progress, both in starting a new project or taking the next steps within one. In my painting this fear is usually just a fear that I will mess up and ruin an otherwise good paint job (or at least one that I’m proud of). This fear manifests a little differently in my musical endeavours; “what if people don’t like my music/playing?” “What if my music actually sucks?” Etc.
It is often said that fear is rooted in the unkown, either we don’t know what it is we are going into a situation that we know nothing about, or we fail to understand something about the task we are doing. Sometimes it is simply due to the fact we haven’t stopped to think things through, and usually when this lack of knowledge is remedied, the fear is removed. Take my fear of messing up the paint job; had I got paint in an unwanted spot, I could have just painted back over it (or if it was a huge mistake, strip the paint and just start again). Once I remembered this I realised I didn’t need to worry and could just get on with the painting.
In somewhat of a different vein, I was also concerned about my ability to actually pull of the technique at all – I was afraid that it just wouldn’t look any good. I eventually went and visited one the of hobby stores and asked the store clerk if he could teach my how he painted his glowing power swords. And after attempting to recreate the technique he was showing me I came away disappointed because the sword I had painted didn’t look as crisp and clean as his. My friend who had joined me that day told me “of course it’s not going to look like his. He’s been doing this for years and this is your first attempt, which all things considers actually looks quite good.”
So often as creative I find we can get caught up in the idealised version of the product we originally envisioned before we started working that we can get bogged down in perfectionism. While striving for the best should be an aspiration for everything we do, it’s also important to realise that perfection is impossible. There will always be something that we look at and think “well I could have done this better, or done that differently” but that doesn’t necessarily mean that what has been done isn’t good. This is simply the path we all must take when learning and honing our respective crafts.
So while my Librarian’s sword may not be as bright and spectacular as I would have liked, I learnt a lot about both the techniques and colours involved. In fact you’ll notice that almost all the miniatures this month feature those sword colours somewhere, be it plasma coils, lenses, search lights, etc. By opening myself up to experimenting and just giving it a crack, I’ve found myself exploring various others avenues of possibility.
So don’t let your fears of messing up or not being able to realise your vision stop you from actually creating something. Where you start doesn’t effect your ability to eventually reach your desired destination.
*Well they’re ready to for photo shoots at least, some of these dudes don’t have a full squad to be fielded with yet.
**Technically he wields ‘psychic’ powers because in this setting, magic is heresy to the Imperium of man (but it is essentially just magic)
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