Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower (part one)

Darkoath Chieftain, Knight Questor, Excelsior Warpriest

Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower (part one)

These figures actually have a special place in my heart.

Well, one of them does, at any rate.

The story goes like this: I received the game as a Christmas gift and started in on the figures in early January. The Knight Questor is on the cover of the game, so I figured I'd start there.

I ended up producing one of the worst paint jobs of my adult life.

Seriously: the colors were all wrong, the details were sloppy, the overall contrast looked super desaturated, I left these big, chunky dry brushing marks all over, I ultimately just gave up on the cape because I couldn't figure out what the hell to do with it, etc.

It was a debacle. But don't take my word for it:

GW Knight Questor - January 2019

Yikes.

Anyway, it ended up being for the good, because it helped me realize that a.) I was not very good at painting minis in general, b.) was way out of my league diving into GW figures and, most importantly, c.) was not nearly as good as I thought I was.

That last realization, that I wasn't as good as I thought I was, ended up being important because it inspired me to get some disciple, commit to painting for at least an hour every day and, as the saying goes, git gud.

And so, after two months of focused practice and hundreds of hours watching youtubes, I ended up doing something I don't normally do: I stripped and disassembled the figure and then painted it again from scratch.

The results, while not world-class or pro-painter grade by any stretch, show a ton of technical improvement:

GW Knight Questor - April 2019

Ultimately, the point of this post is that focused practice--setting aside time every day and drilling on techniques--works as a methodology for getting better at something.

What works even better, in my experience, is if you can make a good faith effort to try to forget everything you think you know. For, as the saying goes, you can't learn a thing you think you already know and, if you know you're already pretty good at something, it is extremely difficult to get better.

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