Background
While visiting my brother, he rounded up all his old painted minis and let me borrow the box of them to share on the blog.
Miniatures
From Left to Right: Haussen 03-024, Ranger 10-300e, Thugge Cultist 03-023
Manufacturer
Ral Partha
Characters/Minis
Pretty useful minis this time around. The Ranger can be used for a fighter or anyone specializing with a bow. The other two with their large cloaks made for great thief/assassin minis in our games. I especially liked the White/Black skull inspired one. Looking closely at his sword, looks like he isn’t playing fair (poison!). Which will be the basis of this week’s tangent.
Back in my brother’s early Dungeons & Dragons campaign, he ran us up against a local Thieve’s guild. I think I had burned out of always running games (being the older brother), and let him run us through some games. I’d have to say he surpassed me in that regard, having a much better knack for storytelling than I did. Back to the Thieve’s guild, most likely inspired by gritty superhero comics like Frank Miller’s Daredevil, and possibly Gygax’s Gord the Rogue books (which I hadn’t read), my brother set about creating a Thieve’s Guild in his world. They harassed us a bit, but my character got ahold of an object that ended up way more powerful than he should have had (yay, D&D Adventure modules!), and ended up crushing them. We ran across a lot of these thief/assassin type minis along the way, and we knew we were in for a fight when we encountered them.
Tangent – Cheating
Sometimes I get these great ideas for a tangent in mind, and then it comes time to write them and either A) I forgot what it was or B) It’s not as great as I thought it would be. Sure glad I’m not a writer for a living!
Ok, so I’m painting away the other night. Thinking about painting, blogs, etc. The night before everything was going swimmingly, and my brush work could not have been sharper. This night however, nearly everything I put down was crap. I should have called it, but wanting to make progress, I trudged on. On occasion I made a mistake here and there and immediately thought “How obvious is this mistake going to be? Do I really need to cover it up? Will it show up in blog photos (most likely not, if I’m smart!)? How will it look in person? Am I CHEATING by not fixing this errant wisp of the brush?”.
Which got me to thinking “What exactly is Cheating in this hobby?”.
I’m not painting to enter into any competitions, so I don’t have any rules to adhere to. Thus cheating is mainly, my personal integrity. As a blogger, I put my work out there for other people to see. So in essence, I could be cheating my audience, by not putting my best work out there. Then again, it’s not too likely that my miniatures are going to be perfect every single time, and I’m sure anyone who has looked at some pics on my blog, knows my minis are from perfect anyways.
Then there is the blogging community itself. Again, largely my personal integrity is at stake, but also my reputation as a fellow ‘artist’ (that still seems a lofty classification for myself, but what ever). If someone “cheated” and shared the results with the blogging community, I guess the penalty would mainly be discrediting oneself and losing followers.
Okay, so what would cheating look like in the blogging community? Is taking a few shortcuts here and there, cheating? Showing off hastily or poorly painted miniatures? That would most likely depend on the skill level of the painter, as I’ve seen minis that were poorly painted, but were great attempts by the individual. Whereas if some other notable mini painters started sharing poorly painted minis, I’d really begin to wonder. How about stealing paint jobs or conversion ideas? That to me, is probably the closest thing to cheating that I can imagine in this hobby. I’ve jokingly said I’m going to steal some of Wudugast’s conversions ideas in the past. And if I find the time, I just might. However…if I shared my work, I would want to give credit to the person who inspired me. Also, knowing myself, I would probably start with that idea and tinker from there, ending up with something slightly to very different. It would go against my principles to outright copy someone else’s conversion idea and a paint job.
Yet, I mentioned this same thing when working on my Goliath gang. GW posts how-to painting guides. I followed that with my Goliaths, and ended up with some minis looking pretty similar to what they had made. Though I started to diverge as I became more comfortable with the minis and the paints. Which is not too different than learning how to draw, and tracing images out of a book.
Ok, this is getting long in the tooth. So I bolded the main question in the text above, and now will throw this out to the masses to ponder and answer.
On a personal note, it’s been a busy time, cold bug is still lingering, but a bit of progress is being made paint wise. I might try to get something done for Azazel’s September challenge, but I also just want to have something to show off on the site. Will see what wins in the end.
Be Good to Yourselves!
Double Down Dice 
I was just about to go and do some painting when up popped your post. I should have left it, you’ve opened a potential can of worms here, well done! Much food for thought. Well it’s all about opinions and this is mine. In this day and age an original idea is as hard to come by as a hens tooth. Everyone at some point has been inspired by someone else, even the Beatles were. It’s not cheating it’s flattery, a compliment. If you can improve upon it then good on you but acknowledge the third person. As for everything else, we are modellers. Where we draw the line in the pursuit of the end model is for each person to decide. Is it cheating to, say, use a colour printer? Not as far as I’m concerned it’s all part and parcel of creativity. I could go on but won’t. My final thought is this. If you aren’t happy with what you have done, if you think you could make it better but decide not to then maybe, just maybe you’re cheating yourself.
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Uh oh, and now I’ve cheated everyone by delaying your next masterpiece! 😉
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Very well put, TIM, and very true! In a way, Monday’s Midweek Musing! Clever! Putting it up on Faust’s blog is maybe cheating a bit though! 😉
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Using an idea someone else came up with, I would only call cheating if someone deliberately presents it as entirely their own. If you know where you got the idea, you should credit them, but sometimes we forget (either who it was that inspired us, or that we saw the inspiration at all), which isn’t cheating.
The only thing I think I would unquestionably call cheating is putting someone else’s work up and claiming it as your own. But then again, my hobby goals are almost always more about getting stuff done rather than making it fantastic, so I cut corners and take shortcuts all the time. So there’s lots of stuff that someone more focused on high skill and technique might consider cheating, but I just think of as the difference between getting done with this Model before my hands start shaking too much or not.
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Hmm, interesting. A lot of artists seem to take the ‘stealing is part of the game’ approach. In our hobby, where $ aren’t really concerned, it likely makes sense. If someone were making a living off their art, I think that would be different. Though it happens. Not sure what sort of legal recourse there would be, if two people paint very similar paintings.
You’re definitely right about giving credit, and I often feel bad if I happen to forget where the credit is due, or yea when something happens at the ‘subconscious level’.
It makes me wonder a bit when copying became such an issue. Likely when people started selling their work. Then probably got worse as law came to play.
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Copying really becomes an issue when money is involved, yeah. Whether that’s directly (forgery or something), or indirectly (gaining prestige via copied works that leads to employment or something along those lines).
It’s not even “stealing is part of the game” so much as “If I have seen far, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” Part of why we do this is to share with others and help each other improve. It’s kind of hard to do that only with technique and not also spread around some concepts and ideas. Collectively, we can come up with more amazing stuff than any one of us would alone. All we need to do is remember that we didn’t do it alone. No one ever has.
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It’s certainly a matter of perspective. I think there are those who think everything should be free and accessible and those at the opposite end.
I think on a personal level, I’m somewhere in the middle. It’s nice to be able to use some people’s ideas and also give in return. But if I spend a lot of hard work and time on something, then someone just does the exact same thing (in probably far less time than I spend), and gets a lot of credit for it, I imagine I would be miffed.
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Really, it’s sharing the credit that makes the difference, I think. Like in academia, that’s the difference between citing a source and plagiarizing, whether you give credit.
Also, I’m not talking about exact copies. More stuff like, when I made my JuggerLords, with the Chaos Lords standing on the Juggers instead of in a saddle, at least one other player around here thought that was cool enough that he wanted one too. His JuggerLord couldn’t be mistaken for one of mine. He used a different Model for the Lord himself, it’s painted very differently. But if you saw them together, it would be clear that there was some influence there.
Or bits and pieces from different places, not necessarily even Gaming sources. I also have an Iron Warriors Daemon Prince that’s inspired by Ghost Rider and the cover from Painkiller by Judas Priest. Is that “cheating”?
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Yea, and I think when you see someone take a similar idea (like your JuggerLord standing example) and do something different with it, but also give credit, it makes us a bit proud. It’s like your idea was cool/interesting enough that other people want to emulate it.
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Looks like I don’t need to reply here, as Alexis has done most of it for me.
Also, shortcuts in most disciplines aren’t the same as cheating. There are a whole lot of ..bell ends out there that think “dipping” your models is “cheating” because it gives a nice effect for (comparatively) little work. I’d use more …colourful language on my own blog, but here I’ll play nice and suggest that I respectfully disagree with them. 🙂
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If you’re having sex with anyone apart from your wife/husband/partner while painting I’d say that’s cheating. Other than that it’s allllllllll good. Do what you want and how you want. I like the ranger!
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LOL….I saw a snippet of your post in the notifications and was wondering “What sorts of meds is IRO on?!”. Then it dawned on me that you must have replied to the Cheating tangent! Wow! Yea, that Ranger is a pretty sweet mini. I like the other two as well, but I’ve always liked the thief classes in RPGs.
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PS every time I see the title of this regular post I sing… Just another manic Monday woa a woa…
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S-T-O-P!
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But that’s my FUN day!!!
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You guys…
I’ve discovered something much worse though. Kid songs. Can’t remember the one that was going through my head over and over last week. Thank god it’s gone now!
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Was it from Steps, or The Wiggles?
I’ll just leave this here…
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No clue, and I’m not clicking that one! 😜
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I don’t think that there is any meaningful way to cheat with painting in our part of the blogosphere, short of posting pictures of someone else’s miniatures and passing them off as your own. This is such a niche hobby that the number of people who would notice or care would be at most in low single digits. Just enjoy your painting and don’t sweat the small stuff!
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Agree with Argentbadger and IRO. Cheating would be claiming you did a work that was not yours without attribution. Influence is completely different, but attribution is key. About a couple of months ago a guy was posting a lot of photos about Archive Miniatures on the Old School Miniatures page. I was amazed to see that he was posting Star Duck pics from my blog without attribution! Needless to say that was a bit weird and disturbing and I let the guy (and on the post) that these were mine and that he should attribute the original. Well, he said was old and could not see well enough to paint anymore, so he googled images. So, in the end, did he cheat? Yeah, but I think he was unaware of what he was doing.
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Yea, he should have at least linked back to your blog, since that’s where the pics came from.
I guess that’s an area where I have cheated at times. Sometimes I’ll use a pic when I’m giving a nod to a movie or what not, but mainly I’ve just tried to use free images so that I’m not stepping on anyone’s toes.
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