A Year in Miniatures 8: Lieutenant Ovulus
In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only egg.
When I was about sevenish years old, I won a prize in my school’s Easter egg painting competition with an entry entitled “R2DEgg”. That was, so far as I can remember, the first painting competition I ever won. In my memory the egg was a perfect facsimile of a certain blue and white droid, although in reality it was much more likely a patchy pink-white orb with some vaguely shaped blue splodges. Either way, the Cadbury’s cream egg it won me tasted like victory! Sadly, my brother’s entry, “Darth Vadegg”, apparently did not warrant a prize, although I’d argue the name alone is worthy of acclaim. I’d like to think that I shared the prize, but small children are a deeply
My family is not particularly religious, but we’ve kept up the egg painting as a fun, creative, communal activity each year, even as pandemics and several hundreds of miles of distance have made it an online event. There’s something freeing about creating art that is intended to be destroyed, rolled down a stony hill into a shattering oblivion. It invites experimentation, and silly ideas. This year it served as a perfect litmus test of whether my hand had healed enough for me to paint again. Those being the stakes, it was perhaps inevitable that I’d have miniatures on the brain. Whatever the reason, I found the idea of adding one more Spare Marine Lieutenant to the world irresistibly entertaining. Therefore, I would like to formally introduce you all to Brother Ovulus, Leutenant of the Ultramarines Chapter.
Is this up to my usual standard? Of course not, it’s an egg. The linework is sketchy, blends are far from smooth, and the helmet stripe it decidedly asymettrical. If you want to get pedantic, there are a number of wild inaccuracies in the armour, all of which arise from my decision not to bother pulling up a reference image - The helmet slits angle the wrong way, as do the rib vents which are also on the wrong panel, and the bolter is the old Godwyn pattern rather than the Cawl pattern Bolt Rifle that Primaris Intercessors typically wield. And none of that matters because the point was never to produce something perfect, it was simply to spend a couple of hours having fun. I’d say that this is the silliest thing that’s going to be showing up on the Year in Miniatures, but let’s be realistic here: this is only just the silliest thing I’ve posted so far, and we are almost certainly going to surpass it before the year is over. And yes, I am absolutely counting this as a finished miniature.
I think next year, I might see if I can use the egg as part of a kitbash and make something extremely cursed! Maybe an exo-armoured squat since apparently they’re back now.
Next week, we get back onto the miniatures train and I try to figure out how to make up a 6 week deficit!
02/ 05/22
Weeks Elapsed: 17
Miniatures Finished: 11
