How We Build Characters at Mad Priest Miniatures

Most characters at Mad Priest don’t really start from a drawing.

Usually it’s something smaller and harder to explain. A memory, a face, a feeling that stayed somewhere in the back of the head for years without doing much. Sometimes it comes back while sculpting another piece. Sometimes while sanding resin late at night when the workshop gets quiet.

The strange thing is that none of the characters were ever meant to be fully good or fully bad.

That probably comes from childhood more than fantasy.

When you’re a kid, people feel larger than they really are. The doctor feels terrifying even if he wants to help you. A strict teacher becomes almost monstrous for a while, even if years later you realize she was probably trying harder than most people around you. Even comfort has something bittersweet attached to it because it usually comes after fear, effort or loneliness.

That duality slowly became one of the red lines behind Mad Priest.

Dr Plague was never imagined as an evil plague doctor. The idea came more from the uncomfortable silence of medical offices and the strange fear children have of adults that know more than them. Under all the heavy clothes and rough shapes there’s still somebody trying to heal people, even if he forgot how to speak gently a long time ago.

Herbalista appeared almost as the opposite side of that memory. Less authority, more warmth. The kind of person that fixes things quietly without making a performance out of it. Butterflies started appearing around her naturally after a while. Not really as fantasy elements, more like fragments of calm.

Miss Ghikka probably says the most about the whole series. Everybody remembers at least one teacher they feared a little. At the time you think they’re cruel. Years later you realize they simply refused to let you become lazy.

Le Patissier came from something much simpler. That small feeling of relief after school ends and the world suddenly becomes warm again. Bread, sugar, light from bakery windows during winter afternoons. Small things but they stay with you.

The miniatures themselves are sculpted traditionally and cast in resin in small batches. No AI generated sculpts, no automated process trying to imitate hand work. I still like seeing fingerprints in clay, small asymmetries, surfaces that feel touched by somebody instead of mathematically perfect.

That’s probably why even unfinished grey resin pieces still feel alive to me sometimes. Before paint covers everything, you can still see all the decisions sitting there on the surface.

Animals also became part of the language of the series without being fully planned at first. The frog around Dr Plague, the rooster near Miss Ghikka, the mice around Le Patissier, the cat beside The Story Teller. They work almost like emotional echoes more than companions.

In the end the whole universe slowly moves toward The Story Teller.

Not really a hero. More like an old man sitting somewhere late in life, sculpting fragments of memory and trying to pass them further before they disappear completely.

That’s probably what Mad Priest really is underneath all the resin, paint and fantasy elements.

Just memories changing shape.