Working on a D&D Model

By Titus Villanueva

With tabletop roleplaying games getting more popular, people are starting to discover that they love the roleplaying aspect. There’s nothing like watching your character grow from their first level to their latest. Sorcerers become more powerful, barbarians become braver and clerics feel their connection with the divine growing further. Because of this, one’s imagination becomes too small to contain the excitement that is their character.

At this point, players need more than a thought. They need a solid representation of their character on the battlefield. That’s where fully painted 3D printed customized miniatures come in. The player creates the character digitally, has them printed and sends them to me for the finishing touch. Nobody wants grey resin. They want that model coming straight to life.

It isn’t just the coloring either. When a client comes to me, I make sure to ask them who their character is, what their powers are, their class, maybe even a short important detail about their character that may manifest physically.

For this particular model, I asked the player what spells she used most often. She described that she always imagined them as manifesting as whisps of purple and blue smoke that came from her hands. I sent work-in-progress shots when I could just so I knew I was working within the vision of the player and even asked what locations she normally visited. That gave me the idea for giving her a base that looked like a ruined tower.

When painting my own miniatures, I’m bringing my imagination into the physical world. Creating something out of mere thought. When it comes to painting other people’s things, it’s the same thing only harder. There is a need to translate something from the world of imagination into a chunk of shaped resin.

The pictured work was a commission for Lianne Ong, created with Hero Forge and printed by BRD.PH.

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