The Resin Beast miniature painting competition will return to the Adepticon wargaming convention this March, with a combined prize pool of around $21,000. Pre-registration is now open for entrants, with entries to be displayed and judged at Adepticon from March 21 to 24.
If you pre-register, there’s no fee to enter the miniature painting competition, though you will need an entry ticket for Adepticon itself, as well as transport and accommodation in Schaumburg, USA. Walk-ups will need to pay a $25 dollar fee to enter.
You can pre-register, find all the details of the competition and entries from previous years, at the Resin Beast website.
There are five categories this year: large model, mid-size model, small model, unit or warband, and diorama. The models need to be from one of the ranges of the competition’s three sponsors, either Creature Caster, Para Bellum Conquest, or Bestiarum Games.
That’s not a painful restriction for painters: we wrote about the quality of Conquest’s monster models at the start of the year, Bestiarum features on our list of the best horror miniatures, and Creature Caster has been a go-to source of alternate Chaos Daemons miniatures for gamers and painters for years.
The prizes for each category reward the amount of effort you’ll need to put in: first prize in large figure is worth $2,700, while it’s $750 for small figure.
There are bonus awards for contenders who get their first ever podium place at the competition, while the painter who gets the highest average score for both a Para Bellum and a Creature Caster miniature will win the $2,000 Killing Blow prize, effectively the best in show award.
The judging criteria weight artistic application most heavily, but points are available for originality and ambition, theme and narrative, and workmanship. The amount of points available differ by category, too: the diorama category has a lot more points on the table for theme and narrative than does small figure.
You can find out more about Resin Beast 2023 in the video by Play On Tabletop, below:
For a look at what it takes to become a prize-winning painter, check out our interview with the 2023 Golden Demon Slayer Sword winner, Albert Moreto Font.