Plagued

Sometimes you finish a task, a chore or a project, put it down, move onto the next thing and then realise that you weren't particularly happy with it. The finished job sits in your mind, gnawing away at you, occupying your thoughts, because it wasn't completed to the standard you had initially intended.

So you have to make a decision. Do you revisit it, or just try to improve the next attempt?

I spent the first couple of decades of my hobby journey constantly repainting the same old minis, hardly ever getting anything finished. But I was always aware of the ever-growing pile of unpainted orcs, chaos warriors, marines, and other assorted toy soldiers, lurking in cupboards or to the side of my desk. Then one day, while moving house, confronted by the sheer discrepancy between finished and unfinished models, I realised this behaviour was totally unsustainable. I either had to finish more and move on quicker, or just stop buying any new miniatures ever again. Obviously I'm completely addicted to purchasing tiny plastic bad boys, and could never give them up, so I really had to change my painting habits.

And I did.

But occasionally that niggling feeling just won't go away. It sits there haunting me, like an unfinished chore. Like a front door that I'm not sure I closed, or a tap that I could have left on. So sometimes, just sometimes, I do go back and adjust old miniatures. It's rare, but it happens.

I was never happy with the skin on a handful of these guys, so this week, rather than painting something new, I went back in and revisited them. I only spent 20 minutes or so on each one, and I'm not even convinced that I actually improved them at all, but at least I've scratched that damn itch.