Self Care With WizKids’ ‘Frameworks’ — Rediscovering Parts Of Myself Long Lost

Welcome to the table,

I was never able to afford real miniatures as a kid. I would see them from time to time when I was accompanying my parents on trips to their favorite swap meets, flea markets, or auction houses. Normally they were behind glass next to replicas of weird daggers with spider designs, or statues of half-naked barbarian ladies.

While my parents would discuss the purchase of some bit of military memorabilia or some part for some project they had undertaken, I would peer through dirty glass cases at these small pewters miniatures nestled between framed holographic Marvel trading cards and random overpriced Gen-1 Transformers.

The miniatures, as cool as they were, were hardly ever well sculpted. We have, thanks in no small part to companies like WizKids, come a long way from the squish-faced elven archer or the “bigfoot playing a bone guitar” minis of my childhood.

That’s not to say that those weird minis from my youth were not great. The comic shop I used to hang out in had a windowless back room. In that room, there was a collection of communal miniatures that could be used by anyone. As someone who had no money for minis, I would forever use what was available in the communal bucket.

These communal minis we affectionately referred to as The Pope*, Butt Pants Man*, Cutter from ElfQuest*, and Franklin the Dwarf.* If the communal minis were being used as extra bodies in some massive 40k battle or somesuch we would make use of coins, bits of paper, and dice we had collected from random boardgames and bubblegum machines we came across in our day-to-day. We were hardly ever short on dice even if half of them were totally unbalanced.

I was always around cool miniatures, though. One of the byproducts of having my parents leave me unattended for countless hours in the windowless backroom of a comic shop day after day was that I got to see adult collectors with adult money showcasing their collections of well-painted mins to each other as they battled across massive tables covered in foam and flocked terrain.

Some of these people had miniatures that were so well painted they were nothing short of works of art. Battletech minis where each canon had microscopic scorch marks. Warhammer 40k Chaos Marines with bone armor adornments that looked so real you could have sworn they were shaving down actual bone to decorate their legions with. These things were breathtaking to behold.

When the fates aligned and my young teenage self got to sleep in the backroom of the comic shop for overnights I got to see some of these guys bust out little pots of paint and fine-tipped brushes and over floppy slices of foldable pizza they would paint woodland rangers or plague bells manned by Skaven or Sisters of Battle.

I would sit quietly in a corner wrapped in a hoodie chewing on discarded pizza crusts and I would watch them work. I know a lot of people think my youth was weird and hard, and it really was. In a lot of ways it sucked, and sure, I wish I had had more opportunities for connections and joy and comfort. But in total truth, these quiet moments where I watched elder nerds work on their hobbies and listened to them discuss DC’s Zero Hour or the Stargate movie or a local band called Gwar… in those moments I felt like I was the most at peace during that time in my life.

Just existing in that space, where Zeppelin played gently in the background, and the industrial AC dripped brown water from the perpetually leaky roof, while 1/4″ brushes worked across minis, laying drybrush coats on flat colored models that would soon become tiny works of art, was so peaceful and centering. In those quiet moments, I was truly free from all the bullying and judgment and scorn and expectation. I was just a kid with some pizza crust who was happy to be in a space where people seemed to care about the stuff I cared about and did not mock me for asking questions or tell me I was going to be condemned because I thought dragons were rad.

All these years later, I find myself struggling to find that peace that came in those quiet moments between Battletech skirmishes and Gama World one-shots. My hands, not being what they use to, feel a little foreign to me. They cramp often, thanks to the degenerative disability my body has programmed into it, so it’s always easier to pick up a controller and run through a couple encounters on Elden Ring or watch a few episodes of Bluey to pass the time when I’m not designing a game or writing an article.

My downtime was feeling hollow and a little bland. Between the want to keep my hands busy but also unplug from my phone and video games and just sorta vibe to some music or a show softly playing in the background, I decided, against all inner voices screaming things like “you will mess this up” and “you are only going to fail,” that I was going to try and start painting miniatures like those nerds who came before me had done.

After doing some research, I figured that the Frameworks line of miniatures from WizKids would make the most sense for me to start with. I did not expect that, after some internal conversations, I would end up with such an amazing selection of minis to explore. I am eternally grateful to my friends at WizKids for these.

After some deliberation as to what I was going to start with I had a heart-to-heart with my weekly gaming table and we all agreed that a Troll would be the best place for me to begin in my journey.

One of the key NPCs from our nearly two-decade-long TTRPG campaign is a Troll named Hanz ,who has brass-colored skin with a very defined patina about it. He has a blue mohawk and a purple suit as well, but I was far from ready to tackle that level of detailing on my first venture into this hallowed hobby taken on by so many nerd elders before me.

What made these Frameworks minis so approachable for me was that they had a ton of parts you could mix and match. In the case of the troll the base figure’s torso, face, nose, and mouth were fairly locked in, but the arms, hands, hair, and accessories, had a ton of options you could swap around making the process feel really customizable without being overwhelming.

I prefer, when 1980’s punk-scene hair is not available, for my trolls to be hairless and while the front of the box shows an example of the troll with a great mane of greasy hair, the sculpt is actually fully realized on all the pieces and parts so you are not left with these smooth surfaces you have to stick stuff onto to cover up manufacturing features that would look out of place.

All of the pieces come wrapped in a bundle resembling butcher’s paper and, at least in the instance of the troll, all of the various parts were snuggly secured in the plastic frames.

I used some clippers I had in my desk to free the parts I wanted to use and then once I had them all together I stored the excess pieces I was not going to make use of back in the box. Once I saw all the pieces laid out in front of me, the anxiety started to slip away. What had started off as an intimidating endeavor I was forcing myself through in hopes that I would be able to climb this mountain of fear and self-expectation started to become an actually enjoyable experience.

I had gone shopping earlier in the week at a Local Gaming Store (LGS). While it is hard to navigate in a wheelchair due to the way they stock all the minis, paints, and accessories up on high shelves I can’t reach and the staff is comprised of less than helpful living incarnations of memes, I did manage to find another of the paint sets that had paint in it I could use and a set of D&D branded brushes that I had decided I was going to use for this inaugural outing.

I went with the night set for paints, because I was not interested in trying to convince the oblivious store employee to help me get paint down from the shelf. I don’t like to feel helpless, and even though I had money to spend, shops that make it hard to even buy stuff don’t really deserve my money or my returning patronage.

As a kid who grew up disabled, I always felt totally embarrassed and super out of place when I wanted to buy something I had saved up for, and the store moved it to a space where I could not reach it by myself. There have been more than a few larger purchases I have rolled away from because I just haven’t been able to get to them in my wheelchair. Most notably the Dragon Minis that came out a few years back. I love the Wayne Reynolds designs but if I can’t even get down the aisle you are selling them on, how am I expected to purchase them?

I have painted a few minis in the past, and I have watched the elder nerds paint minis for easily hundreds of hours during my childhood. I also went to art school, and have more art supplies in my home going unused than I care to admit, but that, much like the tale of King Conan, is a story for another time.

What I really wanted to do was go into this experience as if I had just gone to the LGS and picked up all the stuff I needed for a fun night of mini-painting at home.

The paints were meant for the lich Acererak, but if you recall the trolls I favor in my long-running campaign have metallic colorations to them. This has to do with the fact I present them as manifestations of stone and precious metal as a little bit of a nod to Terry Pratchett and a little bit of a play on the fact that Dwarves also come from the earth and I wanted them to have a shared visual theme and heritage in my homebrew world.

The painting set had a beautiful brassy metallic paint in it called Cursed Blade that once I tested it on a bit of paper I knew was going to be the base coat I wanted on my troll.

My hands were shaky in the beginning. As I worked the coat of brassy paint over the mini, I was worried I had made a dumb choice. The worms of self-doubt and anxiety were wriggling through my brain, but I had already started and I figured if I at least got a base coat down I could at least feel like I had done something.

What was really comforting is that I could paint each of the pieces on their own before having to glue them all together and the quality plastic that the Frameworks mini is made out of took the paint so nicely. Even with my novice level of skill, I did not feel like I was totally wrecking things, regardless of what my negative thoughts were telling me.

I started to lay a cover of Ghostly Vapours paint over the brassy form once I had given it a chance to dry and had given myself a chance to steel my nerves a bit. I was delighted to see that what I had intended to happen was indeed coming together. The folds and creases of the skin were retaining the metallic shine while the rest of the flesh of my troll was starting to take on a patina that would be indicative of something that had been exposed to elements for a prolonged amount of time.

In my homebrew world, there are groups who hunt trolls to harvest their limbs in the hopes they come across trolls whose bodies produce gold, platinum, or other even more exotic naturally occurring stones and metals. The Trolls, not wanting to be harvested tend to shy away from societies and even actively band together to remove, often by force or fear, any pockets of civilization, as those typically mean that hunters are about and looking for them. It’s a weird bit of lore, I know, but to be able to see it starting to become realized on this mini that was blank grey plastic hours beforehand was really delightful.

Once I had let my Ghostly Vapours detail work dry I started going back in with some Bone White and Moldy Wash to begin to bring out smaller details on the teeth, eyes, skull belt clasp, and old ropes used to fasten the loin cloth.

I knew what was coming together was not going to be the dazzling works of art that I had watched the elder nerds work in my youth. This was my first outing with paint and plastic in over a decade. What was happening, though, was that I caught myself having fun. A lot of fun.

This little Frameworks mini of a troll was allowing me to harken back to a time when things were just a little more unplugged and a little less overwhelming. Sitting and working with my hands while I listened to something random in the background and just sorta vibed and worked the paint.

What I was creating was not what was on the cover of the box, but WizKids had made that okay from the start of this whole process. By presenting me with options and letting me choose my own path of how I was going to construct this mini, they had given me the freedom to not be beholden to a self-imposed expectation of making something that looked like what was on the box.

As all the pieces of the troll dried I was worried that gluing them together was going to be tricky. I had seen glue strip off panel lines from a Gundam model before and melt plastic from a PVC statue I was trying to repair so I had no idea what to expect as I started to affix the arms, legs, and loincloth together on my now dubbed “A Troll Named Midas.”

The pieces all glued together so nicely, though. Each part fit where it was supposed to, even the organic bends and folds of the hands and legs, against all expectations, totally fit and worked making a stable and balanced mini to sit upon my metallic paint-coated base.

I worked in some blistering and ichor to give “A Troll Named Midas” a bit of a swampy slimy feel to him and then worrying I was going to do too much I fixed him to his base. Sat him on one of my TTRPG shelves, and rolled out of my office.

He is far from perfect in the respect that he does not look like he could grace the cover of a WizKids box or be showcased as one of the finalists on paint night at a LGS, but the journey that I took from his inception to his completion was nostalgic and with no hyperbole genuinely fun.

I reconnected with a part of myself that had long gone dormant. Not some primal desire to hunt mammoths with a pointy stick or some need to buy a sports car like you hear about in random novels or from in-laws who are really really into cars.

As I was preparing for and working on “A Troll Named Midas” I somehow was able to just slow down and enjoy the time I was spending on it. It did not cure my anxiety. It did not erase the debt I have on the accessible bathroom I needed to put in, or give me a raise, or make me feel less weird about the tingling I sometimes get in my neck. It did, however, provide a very welcomed and very healthy escape that I needed more than I realized.

Painting miniatures is not going to solve world hunger or fix broken homes. They are not going to let you grow your mohawk back, or suddenly give you the ability to walk again. What they may allow you to do, though, is put down your phone, focus on something entertaining, and watch as small bits of grey plastic turn into a fully formed and realized little creature you can sit on your shelf and plague your players with at your next game night and that, in its own way, is pretty amazing.

Until next time, you can find a bunch of the Frameworks minis at this link. If you are like me and struggling with anxiety or stress or need something to do that is not doom scrolling TikTok or playing hours upon hours of Marvel Snap when you can’t sleep at night, maybe give the painting a mini try. I’m not a doctor, and I have no scientific proof to offer, but from my personal experience, I know for sure I already have my next mini picked out and am looking forward to listening to some music and just enjoying whatever happens when I put paint on plastic.

The Pope – This was a mini that looked like the pope. Tall hat, staff with a cross on the end, long robes, and shorter than all the other minis save Franklin the Dwarf.

Butt Pants Man – This was a mini that appeared to be a cavalier of some sort. He had a rapier and a deep V shirt and his pants seemed to be assless chaps. Often Chris and JM would roll to see who had to use Butt Pants Man. JM typically won and got to be The Pope leaving Chris with Butt Pants Man.

Cutter from Elf Quest – This, we were pretty sure, was just a mini of Cutter from Wendy and Richard Pini ElfQuest.

Franklin the Dwarf – Think of a fantasy dwarf. Franklin the Dwarf was a mini that looked like that. Every Dwarf ever in a fantasy setting between 1978 and 1985 could have, if you squinted, been Franklin.