Have you ever looked at the painted miniatures on display in a game store, or the figures featured in demos at a convention, and thought that you’d never be able to paint that well, so why bother trying?

That’s okay! You don’t have to make every figure look perfect! You just have to make it look good on the tabletop! In other words, it’s okay to be okay!

That’s a lesson I took a long time to learn. I’ve been painting miniatures for close to twenty-five years now, and the more experienced I got and the more techniques I learned, the fewer minis I finished. That’s because the more I painted, the more perfect I felt the minis had to be. For example, an early rut I got into was that I couldn’t have two separate overlapping pieces of the mini be the same color (like a pouch and a cape). Or every piece of gear had to be a different color (and also couldn’t be the same color as something it overlapped). This led to a sort of analysis paralysis, and then abandoning a project once I realized that my blue cape was going to overlap my blue beltpouch, and well we couldn’t have that, but it was too much trouble to strip the mini and start over, and to hell with it anyway I’m going to play video games now. Or I’d be working on highlighting a figure and meticulously adding one drop of highlight to the base, and painting twenty layers of successively lighter color, only to end up both overworking it, and getting frustrated I was taking so long to finish the damn thing so screw it I’m watching Star Trek.

Your minis don’t have to win contests to look impressive on the table. Whether you’re painting them to use in your weekly roleplaying game sessions or collecting an army for wargaming, just remember, an okay finished miniature on the table is one-thousand percent better than a perfect unfinished mini.

Bottom line is you can have fun and amass quite a collection of minis that look great on the table, even if they aren’t perfect award-winning display pieces. And that’s what the Okay Tabletop is all about: showing that okay, in many ways, is more desirable than perfect.

Happy painting.