A Space Marine Lost in the Woods

The day finally came to submit the model for the competition. The fact that it was also Earth Day does come into play later.

Anyways, I packed up my entry and headed to the store. I was incredibly nervous. Would mine stand a chance? Will I get laughed out of the competition? How will I feel, win or lose? Will The Simpsons continue to run if anything ever happened to the main four voice actors? So many questions were running through my mind.

The truth is that I am an extremely competitive person. I know it is a fault and I do my best to keep that part of me in check. So while this was as low stakes as possible, I knew I was putting undo pressure on myself. It is a vicious cycle.

When I got to the store, there weren’t many people there. A few tables had some Warhammer 40K games going on in the back, as one as a Magic the Gathering Commander pod in the corner. I was the 6th entry into the comtest.

After a few minutes a handful of other entries showed up. A total of 12 Space Marines in total, including two or three that went that very bright and colorful route. We were told that customers in the store would be voting on the entry over the course of the next hour.

I spent some time talking with some of the other painters about what they did or why they selected the paint schemes they did. It was nice to get to “talk shop” as it were.

As I chatted or sat off to the side, I tried to pay attention to what people were looking at mostly on the table. There was some focus on the bright ones and a lot of people seemed to be attracted to them. I guess that’ll teach me to second guess myself, uh? After a while, though, focus seemed to narrow down to three in particular – and mine was one of them!

I won’t lie. I was feeling a little on Cloud Nine that anyone would like mine, let alone talk about it. The other two models were even better, though, having opted to freehand the store’s logo on the shoulder pad. I figured that small attention to detail was definitely a one-up on everyone when I saw their models. Still I was hopeful.

At the top of the hour, the store manager announced that the votes were in and thanked everyone for being a part of the event, either as a hobbyist or a voter.

Obviously, by the way I’ve been building this up (not to mention the description of the project to the left), my model did not end up winning. Nor did either of the two models that went the extra mile with the free hand or the brightly painted models. The winner ended up being a model that used only the three or four colors found in the store’s logo.

Sort of makes me feel like I wasted 15 hours…