Miniature Painting and Movement
Last year I undertook an entirely useless hobby. Not useless in that I find no value in it, but useless because it serves no larger purpose or affects the wider world.
I started painting miniature models. I did it because I got back in to playing D&D (Dungeons and Dragons for the uninitiated). Tabletop or role playing games are an entirely separate subject about which I feel I could write a long series of articles, so I won't get too much in to them today.
But painting miniatures (or minis as they're known in "the hobby") is an exercise in patience, focus, and for me, humility. It is a humbling pursuit, not only because it reminds me of my relative lack of understanding of painting and color mixing, but because it's something that seems like it should be simple, but isn't.
One of the things that really frustrates me about painting miniatures is the seeming never ending nature of it. Perhaps it’s just the perfectionist in me, but no project ever feels like it’s truly done.
Each layer reveals to me more detail, more errors to be fixed, and more work to be done. Every turn of the model makes me feel like I’m back at the beginning.
It drives me bananas. I think I’m done and then NOPE! There’s so much more to do.
But I think that’s part of the beauty of the hobby: it is, in a way, never ending. I can canoodle forever on a project. The more I work on something, the more I see that can be done.
At the beginning of a project I slop on paint in (relatively) wide swathes. The name of the game is full coverage. After that I begin working on large details, then medium, small, and minute. Then washes, dry brushing, highlights and low lights. Then error correction, adjustments, and more.
It could go on forever.
Each level of work reveals more. More to be done. Tiny things I never noticed the first 20, 30, 40, 100 rotations of the model. My attention to those minutiae rises at each level. It’s as if my awareness increases as I do more.
This reminds me of the Ohad Naharin (Founder of Gaga, s/o to my friend Greg for introducing me to him!) quote where he discusses the process of turning up our internal volume until we can feel the details of very small movements.
At first, the process is difficult, and it is challenging to differentiate parts of the body. Exercise is especially bad for this: many people disassociate while exercising, leaving their bodies and focusing only on “getting through it” and finishing the set.
Increased focus on the execution of certain techniques (what we commonly call “proper form”) can offer a challenge that forces people to pay attention to how certain parts of their body moves, but it is rarely pleasurable and often discouraging: external cues that demand our body look or move in a certain way can rarely be replicated as a Platonic form.
How then can we invert this and instead ask: how does a movement feel? What is happening in your body when you perform a movement?
Increasing the awareness of what is happening in the body reveals more about the body and how it moves.
Doing this offers an opportunity to listen. To discover those tiny details we miss when just trying to get something done.
It is the repetition, the hundreds of rotations that allow us to view something from a hundred different angles that help us view and understand it better.
Much like painting miniatures, this is attention to detail is the process by which we might better understand our body and how it moves and how it desires to move.
By gradually increasing our focus on the small parts of movements and positions we can raise the level of dialogue we have with our physical form to a point where we can identify and understand the most subtle of signals from our bodies.