I got this email (one of many over the past few years) from Andy at Heresy minis. It's worth reading, just for a glimpse into the other life that is running your own miniature sculpting company. I read bits of it to my wife, and she nearly cried - its that emotional...
Heresy Andy wrote:If oyu aren't even vaguely interested in the Heresy Dragon, don't read
this rambling tale as it will likely mean less than nothing to you. It
also gets a bit emotional near the end so fair warning.
Once upon a time, way back in the closing years of the last decade, a
young-ish man, with little or no grey hair, decided he might have a
quick go at doing a Dragon, especially because somebody had posted
somewhere on the internet that he wouldn't be able to make a good one.
Ever the easily goaded fool, the young man spent his Christmas break
gluing some wire to a lump of concrete that was a bit rocky, which he
had ripped off his converted old plastic GW dragon that had once been
pictured in White Dwarf magazine and which he always liked the shape of.
He bulked it out a bit, and made a face for it, and was so smugly
pleased with himself that he posted a picture online and suddenly,
people asked if they could buy it.
Well, he thought, it'll only take me a month or two, so why not?
That was Christmas 2008, when I started this project. If I knew then
what a terrible, dragging weight it would become on my time and
resources, what crushing pressure it would begin to bring to bear as the
weeks trickled by and no discernible progress seemed to be happening,
how much it would haunt my every thought as more and more people put a
deposit down and the thing still wasn\t finished...well, I wouldn't have
done it, obviously. I mean, September last year i very nearly had an
actual nervious breakdown becuase it had become The Thing That Would Not
End. Endlessly resculpting scales, layer upon layer, each one
individually sculpted and shaped. Staring blindly into a future where
parts of the dragon that didn't exist yet would reposition themselves
over and over, flailing madly in their desire to be the one position
that got used in the end. The limitless possibilities of final choices.
Riders, armour, two horns, four horns, six horns, long snout, short
snout, tiny teeth, massive teeth, longneck, short neck, wings,
membranes, leathery, scaly - on and on and on. I am not lying or
embellishing when I tell you that this Dragon was an arduous and by the
end mentally painful process that almost beat me. Almost. I have
definitely aged, the white hair is plentiful, the business is almost
non-existent because so few new figures have been made in the last year
whilst I worked on the Dragon.
But here it is at last, the first test casting assembled!
It's not a perfect cast, there are a few bubbles and things as the
moulds are tweaked, these parts are literally the first ones out of the
moulds and the thickness of resin, the timings and pressures etc are
being played with to produce the perfect casting. But it is, for the
moment, at a stage where people who've waited over two years might
actually get hold of theirs in a few weeks, rather than some random far
off future. It marks the beginning of an era, or the end of an old one.
It is the moment where suddenly, I'm not that guy taking forever DOING
that Dragon, I've at last become the guy who took ages to DO that
Dragon. People came up to me and shook my hand at Hammerhead last Sunday
when they saw the final thing. They glanced at it as they went past and
then stopped and came for a closer look. One guy patted me on the
shoulder and just nodded whilst looking me in the eye. I assume it was
to do with the Dragon, anyway, I suppose he could just have been some
random Community Affirmer there to acknowledge my basic existence.
Now, as though I was the Ancient Mariner, rotting albatross around my
neck - except it's a scaly one - the Curse of the Dragon is finally
lifting. Any week now, the first batch of actual honest to goodness
Dragons will arrive at the Heresy Dungeon (Ian has to balance production
with keeping his own business going and dealing with day to day castings
of his own stock, so it will be slow but sure as I certainly don't want
to kill his business like I almost did Heresy with this thing and I know
my customers won't either). I can get on with frantically making some
multiple-purchase bread and butter type figures like Sci-fi troopers and
goblins and whatnot to get the sales starting to come in again. To begin
with, there will be six new figures on the cart in the next few days, a
last few trenchcoat gangers and a crazy Were-Turtle that won the
Heretic's Balll sculpting contest just before Christmas last year. Feels
good to be out from under the winged shadow.
I would like to thank everybody who has paid some money towards the
Dragon over the last couple of years. You will never know how awed I
felt as the deposits came in despite there being no real guarantees that
it would ever end. You won't appreciate how those deposits kept me and
my wife fed, or helped the business scrape clear of the overdraft limit
each month. So thankyou, thankyou and again thankyou. If I was mad to
think I could make such a large dragon quickly, you people were more
insane than me to believe I could do it even more than I did. But I
guess we all get the last laugh, huh?
Well,not quite. It turns out that two years later, the Dragon costs
twice as much as expected to buy in due to the size of the rubber moulds
involved and the usable life of them being a lot less than planned for
so in the end I won't actually make any profit on it at the special
pre-order price. You can imagine what a wrench to the guts that was when
Ian gave me the bad news. Neither of us wanted it to be th ecase but
there's only so much Ian can do to help me out, man's got to cover his
costs and pay for his labour.
But again, amazingly, unbelievably, some of the people who had
pre-ordered it, people who were fully paid up with that pre-orde
guaranteed price, no obligations, didn't need to do anything except pay
the postage, have volunteered extra money towards the difference. Some
have paid the actual full price. I am at a a loss for words. I have
tears in my eyes typing this. All I can do is stammer my gratitude to
them, and maybe give them a special paladin figure I'm sculpting to
accompany their dragons to symoblise their heroic support of Heresy
through this process and with these grand financial gestures. I pray
that when they get their Dragon through the mail, it's everything they
thought it would be and in each of their eyes worth every penny they've
stumped up for it.
Take that, Dragon. You didn't beat me. I had help from people who,
really, in all honesty and without wanting to seem trite or patronising
in any way i can't just refer to as customers any more. I think I have
to now call them friends too.
Thankyou, friends.
Andy Foster
Heresy Miniatures Ltd
http://www.heresyminiatures.com/dragon.htm
