In which I discuss my miniatures wargaming interests and the state of my painting desk.
This one is going to be a more personal post than the gaming posts, mostly because painting miniatures has been not just something I do for fun, but a part of my identity for over two decades.
I started with Battletech miniatures back in the 6th grade. We had played and enjoyed Mechwarrior 2 on our home computer (it was the only Mechwarrior game to come out on Mac) and wanted to get into the larger world of Battletech. I remember one day growing in Borders Books and Music where i got my Star Wars novels and noticing these Battletech novels next to Star Wars and thinking "That looks like Mechwarrior!" Sure enough, it was the same universe. Now I could read about the whole story behind the game. And it was intense! Full of politics and warfare, lots of characters who grew and changed as the series progressed. Like Star Wars books they were written by a series of authors but the in universe rules were (largely) applied evenly and the storyline progressed. Obviously there was a team of editors and lore gurus keeping things straight (except that one book where they found aliens, that one just kind of gets lost out there). I don't remember exactly how we stumbled upon Ral Partha's miniatures line, but we were soon buying them from Boscos Comics and Hobbycraft, both stores located in the Dimond Center mall in Anchorage where we lived. At some point we realized we could paint them with the Testers paint range we had from building model airplanes (a hobby we adapted from my dad, who built some impressive model planes back in the day).
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| A Dark Elf Dreadlord, he's missing his left hand. I'll have to look around for it... |
We never got into the battle tech board game. It was half roleplaying game, and very complicated, with entire full page schematics of your individual 'mechs tracking armor damage with little bubbles and which arms your weapons were in as they took damage, your heat level had to be maintained or you'd risk a shutdown, or worse a fusion reactor explosion. There were rules for running and jumping on other 'mechs, and for punching them, as well as shooting. Oh I looked into it, but we were still young, and not as into game mechanics as I have become in recent years. But we did a lot of setting the little metal mechs up and pretending to shoot each other the same way we did with the plastic army men we had a bucket of.
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| He lost his spear tip, if I can get some modeling putty I think I can fix it... But for now, it will not cut. |
Anyway, I believe it was 1996 or 1997, shortly before we moved back to Ohio, that my mom bought us the starter box for Warhammer Fantasy Battles (5th edition, Lizardmen vs. Bretonnia!) on the recommendation of somebody at Hobbycraft, and we've never looked back. I've painted whole armies of Warhammer fantasy in my life, from my Ostland soldiers of the Empire to Dark Elves, Wood Elves, and Lizardmen. We got into the White Dwarf catalogue, and through that into Warhammer 40,000, Games Workshop's sci-fi (and more popular) model line. I painted Dark Angels Space Marines, Tau, Elder, Dark Elder... most of these armies I have since sold to pay for new armies to paint. We tried occasionally, my cousin my brother and I, to learn the rules and play some games, but we were never that successful. We much preferred to build and paint armies and make up stories about them.
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| One of my oldest painted models I've held on to, the poor dragon breaks every move. I need to put some pins in the joins to strengthen them, so I'm going to do some extra work on this guy. |
In more recent years I've taken up Runewars Miniatures from Fantasy Flight Games (in particular since Games Workshop stopped doing Warhammer Fantasy in favor of Warhammer Age of Sigmar. Age of Sigmar uses the same model range but is designed to be more squad based combat rather than entire armies, and I just like the look of ranked units of spear wielding soldiers...) and X-Wing miniatures also by Fantasy Flight. X-wing comes with repainted ships, although I've done some repaints when inspiration strikes, but Runewars miniatures are unpainted, leaving me free to come up with some fun color schemes. My only trouble is that I don't like the kind of plastic FFG uses, which is more flexible but doesn't take paint as easily as the stiff plastic of GW minis. Also it's weird to have bendy spears, although I can straighten them out with hot water.
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| Some of the Age of Sigmar models I picked up |
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| I want to try these new Stormcast Eternals since GW added women to the range. I don't like all-male armies... I find them boring |
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| The opposition in the starter set is the Nighthaunts, basically a bunch of ghosts. They'll be fun |
I've also been painting hero figures for our Dungeons and Dragons characters, which is great for a small project but I'm hoping for something more ongoing. Hopefully we won't be going through characters as often as I'll want to paint something...
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| I have plans to give Sadun a big axe... |
Anyway, I've been in this hobby for a long time, but I've been finding my motivation to actually do the painting slipping in the last 5 or 6 years. Part of it is the depression, and part the stress of employment, and the feeling that I need to be productive and doing fun things is not productive... of course then I end up messing around on my phone anyway. But I really enjoy the process when I get to it, when I can give myself permission to enjoy it, so I'm hoping that if I add it to the blog, that will help motivate me to follow through on the various projects I have going on.
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| These two also broke in the move. I'm thinking more pins will help... basically I drill a hold out and superglue a bit of paperclip in to add surface area for the glue to adhere to. |
My first project is going to be the Latari Elves army I have for Runewars Miniatures. I'm messing around with a green and purple scheme inspired by a conversation with one of my friends on twitter a few weeks ago. I'm also working to fix all the models that broke during the move last summer, and I bought a starter set for Age of Sigmar to check out the new models (I've been off GW for a few years, just burned out by the online community there and the massive changes I think...) I also have a drawer full of unassembled plastic dragons from the Reaper Miniatures Bones wave 3 kickstarter a year or two back...
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| My first test models for the Latari Elves |
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| I'm messing around with the color scheme a bit as I go, but it will be faster once I finalize it. Also I should try to figure out a light box for these posts... |
So that's the purpose of these posts. Check them out if you want to see my progress and pictures of the models I paint!
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| A group of models awaiting various levels of paint |
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| Here are more of them, these are mostly hero figures |
To be continued!
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