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Back in 2009, Games Workshop released an updated version of what I think is one their all-time best games; Space Hulk. For anyone unfamiliar with it, the game pits two players against one another within the claustrophobic confines of a drifting conglomerate of spacecraft wreckage rather ominously named Sin of Damnation. One player takes command of a handful of humanity's finest warriors from the Blood Angels chapter of the Adeptus Astartes while the other controls a numberless horde of monstrous Genestealers.
Much of the game remained the same as it had in the previous two incarnations, but the new miniatures included in the 2009 set represented an amazing step forward for 'Easy to Build' miniatures (you can read more about my thoughts on Easy to Build minis here) featuring incredibly detailed, dynamic and in the case of the Terminators, unique poses.
I was lucky enough to get a hold of a copy and after assembling all of the miniatures, I was quite taken with one of the objective markers that is used in one of the later missions in the campaign you can play with the contents of the box, in which the Blood Angels try to recover an ancient relic of their chapter from the remains of one of their own spaceships that has been discovered within the tangle of ships that made up the Sin of Damnation.
I'm not sure why the deceased Terminator appealed to me so much, but in any case I began to paint it up, resolving to paint it as well as I could by following a set of painting guides that were published in White Dwarf #357 to get everything 'just right'. Around this time I was just beginning to experiment with using glazes as part of my painting repertoire, and made a lot of use of them on the skull and fabric on the miniature. I honestly couldn't say now how many hours went into the project, but it was probably around three quarters complete when unfortunately, due to a combination of factors. life was turned completely upside down.
In around 2012 I sold on my set of Space Hulk to raise funds for my first forays into The Horus Heresy, but having obtained a spare objective marker to take its' place as the set was dispatched to the new owner, I hung on to the one I'd started painting and the photo above shows how he remained, pinned to a cork and part painted. Incidentally though, when the third edition of Space Hulk received a limited second release in 2014, I snapped up another copy because as much as I loved the Horus Heresy, I came to regret selling Space Hulk.
Over the years that followed though, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't quite bring myself to work on the Terminator, as in my mind it was inextricably tied to what was a very difficult and painful time in my life and so it became what I began to refer to as 'my longest running work in progress'. There are a couple of other projects which were started in around 2011 which I've similarly struggled to return to, but the Blood Angels Terminator was the one that I found nagged at me the most because it was nearly done.
Fast forward to the spring of 2020 and the first lockdown of the Covid-19 pandemic. I had just finished painting a Nemesis-Warbringer Titan in the livery of Legio Ignatum to add to my Adeptus Titanicus collection and with everything that was going on I had absolutely no idea what to work on next. Ultimately, I'd go on to paint up Brutes and Hangers On for my Necromunda gang, which ended up being a fantastic learning experience that has helped me develop my current approaches to painting a lot of things, but I'm getting a bit ahead of myself...
I went backwards and forwards on a few ideas of what I could paint, but nothing was really scratching any itches and then while going through some boxes I came across the enthroned Terminator and I thought maybe I could finish painting this?
As well as reminding me about what was a very difficult and quite painful time in my life, one of the main things that had put me off going back and finishing it over the decade or so since I'd started it was that I couldn't really remember a lot of the paint recipes I'd followed at the time. To add a further complication, the Citadel paint range had been considerably updated since 2009 and I was afraid that if I messed things up, I wouldn't be able to fix it; I was falling into what I now recognise as the trap of catastrophic thinking*.
In 2020 though, I was finally able to counter the headweasels by both acknowledging that my painting skills have come a long way since 2009 and recognising that the benefits of finishing the project off after it had been a work in progress for so long far outweighed any risks of making a mess of it.
It was a little more complex than just getting fired in, but to make it easier I broke it down into stages so I could focus on tackling each of the things that needed to be finished to complete the miniature one at a time until I was happy with how everything looked. Not only was this process incredibly cathartic in terms of finally finishing something that had been started such a long time ago, it also keyed me in to the way I now tend to approach painting miniatures in terms of taking time to focus on individual elements until I'm happy with them rather than rushing to finish things as quickly as possible.
When I sat down and started writing this post, the central thought I wanted to explore was how finishing this miniature had highlighted to me that it's never too late to return to something you've started, even if it was something begun a long time ago and to be honest that's very much still what I'm aiming for as the takeaway here. That said, a close relative of mine passed away as I was though, so I feel I should caveat that thought with the observation that perhaps it's best not to leave things too long because unfortunately, we all run out of time eventually.
So if you've got any particularly long running projects, or there's something that you'd really like to get finished but haven't been able to get back to, I hope this might help offer a little inspiration to get building or painting. Until next time though, as always thanks for reading.
*For those unfamiliar with this term, catastrophic thinking or catastrophising is cognitive distortion in which a situation is overblown and/or future expectations are considered bleak. Individuals who catastrophize become anxious as they overestimate the probability of a poor outcome.
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