Curating the Collection

Way back in my (much) younger days I played Dungeons & Dragons. Maybe even a lot. This was in the days when there was only one edition of D&D, and if you were lucky you had copies of Greyhawk and Blackmoor. Later D&D figures started to come out, though by then I had largely stopped playing, due chiefly to the demands of work. But even though I never actually played the game with the figures, I enjoyed painting the figures. I have probably 150 of them in my collection, including a fair number of Shadowrun figures.

Anyway, at some point I bought the thing above from Ral Partha, I believe, called "Bridge of Sorrows". Or something like that. A largish dragon ambushing a wizard, a centaur and a scantily-clad fighter on a bridge. I built it and painted it, and then for fifteen or twenty years it sat around, getting dusty, paint flaking off, fading, slowly decomposing into dust. But lately I went through my whole collection of figures, cleaning them, touching up the paint, and in some cases repainting them entirely.

I subjected the bridge thing to a fairly thorough refreshing - I repainted the dragon and bridge, renewed the landscaping, added a tree, and painted the top of the base black and poured on a couple of thick layers of Future floor wax to (hopefully) simulate deep still water. The dragon is painted with Model Master acrylic hull red and insignia red, drybrushed with Testors gold. The landscaping is mostly Woodland Scenics stuff I had left over from an abortive stab at model railroading.

(I have up model railroading because even in N gauge I didn't have enough room for it, and when I got right down to the heart of the matter, I enjoying model railroading not because I like trains, but because I like building and painting HO scale trucks. So I skipped the railroad and kept building the trucks.)