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 jimbolina25 wrote:
I recently found my first one in a bits box. An ultramarine I painted. Does anyone else remember their first looking like a piece of art, and you look now and go "what the hell was i doing?!"

When I fist started playing D&D, we didn’t have fancy battle mats or minis. DM needed something plotted out, it was scratch paper.

Then he got a mat with wet erase markers. We used spare dice or bottlecaps for out positions, and it was great!

Next one of the guys bought some grenedier minis, and out minds were blown. They were the best thing ever.

Then he painted one. It was transcendent.

Looking back at some of that old lead (and it was lead, none of this new fangled safe alloys) the sculpts were not the best. Our paint was OK, but lacked a lot of the perks of modern paints and techniques. Some of that was we were poor teenagers scraping together what we could. Another reason was the era. I can’t say it was pre-internet, but the pictures we were downloading were ASCII-art. Tutorials and advice were few and far between. It really did feel like we were figuring everything out ourselves with trial and error.

Mistakes were made. But minis got painted. And we learned and got better.

Don’t look back on you old stuff and say "what the hell was i doing?!” Look back and say “Wow, I’ve improved a lot since then.” Younger you was doing the best they could with what they knew at the time. Go easy on them.

 jimbolina25 wrote:
I recently found my first one in a bits box. An ultramarine I painted. Does anyone else remember their first looking like a piece of art, and you look now and go "what the hell was i doing?!"

Definitely not. Even at 11 I knew it was merely painted. It didn't even really approach what I'd envisioned, let alone "art".