Not the Monday Morning Monster -- Thorns

I do not have a monster painted up today, mea culpa.  Rather than make excuses, I'm posting a treat for the miniature gamers and any fans of Wizard's miniature game "Dreamblade" from a few years back.

I recently received a couple of minis for which I drew the original pencils, years ago.  One of them was this sculpt for "Princess of Thorns."

Princess of Thorns, sculpted

I expect that the process for designing miniatures has changed quite a bit in the last few years, what with the advent of digital sculpting and relatively low-priced 3-D printing, but in  2005, when she was drawn, the production process commissioned sketches of each figure from least two angles then sent out the approved sketches out of house to be sculpted. While a full-on miniatures gaming company might find it cost-effective to fund a local team of sculptors,  Wizards was a very paper-based game company at the time and subcontracted production to a company in China.  Sketches were accepted, disappeared, and new sketches were commissioned with very little chance for me to see how the final art turned out.  Occasionally I'd be given a couple of common figures from this set or that, but mostly I was sketching in a vacuum without seeing the final work I'd helped create.

Princess of Thorns sketch circa 2005

This was a bit unfortunate -- commercial illustrators learn a lot from seeing their work in print (or whatever) and I had never worked on a miniature game before.  I was given a set of basic instructions ("no pointy bits pointing straight up, no undercuts, etc...") and I started drawing.   My husband, bless him, pulled out a couple of dozen of his own wargame figures for me to pore over like Indiana Jones trying to figure out which holy relic would keep him out of that damned flying refrigerator.  "This one is a strong piece," he'd say (my husband, not Indiana Jones) as he'd hand me an elf bowman or a particularly poorly dressed war maiden.  I wondered at the time if I should be drawing a sketch of a character or a sketch of the miniature, but in the end I just drew the best, most evocative sketches I could and trusted that somewhere in China, some poor soul wearing very strong prescription lenses would be grateful to have something interesting to look at as he started into in nine-hundredth tiny sculpture.

Btw, drawing the same imaginary figure over and over from different angles may seem tedious compared to sculpting it digitally, but it was fabulous great drawing training and I will always thank Dreamblade for leveling up my drawing skills and starting to give me the serious interest in pencil work that's motivated me ever since.

I have wondered about those semi-legendary Chinese sculptors, living in a society presumably very different from my own, making their daily living by creating the collectable figures and game miniatures of an alien pop culture.  How do you image a foreign country that you know only by grinding out, day after day, week after week, Todd McFarlane's latest Spawn figures?

As I've met the Dreamblade figures, little by little over the years, I've noticed that some sculpts are stronger than others.  The princess here turned out very well -- I think she's a pretty thing in herself, without considering that I drew the original sketches and without playing the game.  Once again, I feel rather sad that I'll never meet the sculptor.