When I first started doing commission painting I assumed that I would spend 90% of my time painting Warhammer 40k models. I mean, it's the biggest game out there with the most players it would only make sense. That's slowly turning out not to be the case at all.
Sure, I started out painting a lot of 40K models. Warhammer fantasy models were well represented also, but something interesting happened along the way. That interesting thing was Doom. Doom miniatures, to be more specific. I'm not talking about miniatures from the board game Doom published by FFG. No, I'm talking about the miniatures originally produced by Reaper Miniatures back in the 1990s. I got a commission to paint a set of them. As is my normal procedure I photographed them and put the resulting photos up on my Flickr site. That part was all pretty normal. No, the weird thing happened after that. When people started to discover the photos of that set and began requesting that I paint their Doom miniatures as well. We're talking about miniatures that never had a game to go with them. Miniatures based on a video game. Miniatures that are VERY hard to come by. These miniatures started appearing more and more on my "to do" list.
I'm not complaining. The fact that I have a continuous stream of work is fantastic. To be fair, I don't ONLY paint Doom miniatures (it only seems like it sometimes). I get a fantastic array of miniatures for different games from different companies so I don't ever get bored. I've been working on stuff for Super Dungeon Explore, Dropzone Commander, Mercs, Descent, Warmachine, Hordes, Dust... (wow - I just realized how many games I've painted miniatures for). I still do stuff for Warhammer 40K too, but not nearly as much as I expected to be doing.
So what's the point? Well, mostly to share with you the odd way things tend to go sometimes. You expect one thing and you get another. Who would have thought that I'd be painting more miniatures from a line that no longer exists and that never had a tabletop game to go with them? Not I.