Making room.

With my growing collection of miniatures and modelling equipment I thought it time to get rid of some of my old Warhammer figures, which currently use up 6 drawers in a small chest of drawers, and make some room. Whilst rummaging around in the piles of poorly painted miniatures I found a few gems which I painted at the then peak of my painting ability some 6 years ago when I was about 14 (after that, I gave up Warhammer and concentrated on being 'cool'). The following pictures are representative of my work at the end of my Warhammer career and I thought you'd like to see when I considered 'good' all those years ago (it hasn't improved much since then!)

This was my favourite painted model at the time. I think it's from the Wood Elves range and I was given it in a carrier bag full of all sorts of old GW figures (including a complete blood bowl team!) by a family friend who'd found it in a charity shop. I had spent a lot of time put a lot of work into this figure and was using something similar to today's 3 shade method (dip wasn't invented) which achieved pretty decent results. He was used quite a lot as an Ent in LOTR games.



I think this is Samwise Gamgee from the Weathertop boxed set GW do. I used to spray ALL my figures black and then leave 'shading gaps' to simulate shading. For some reason, the paint was always rather sticky which meant you could do this really easily - it was a lot like drybrushing actually but I have no idea why my paints all went like that. I also used to paint the faces dark brown and then paint fleshy highlights, as you can see in the pic. We played a lot of LOTR games as it was the only range we had complete sets of figures for (because they were small scale skirmish games).

I don't know if any of you remember 'City Fight' by GW but me and my friends all built armies for it. I had built a sort of rag tag band of hardy Imperial Guard which included Cadian, Valhallan and those ones that were supposed to look a bit like the Nazis (Steel Legion or something like that?) which always seemed to be the ones who would fight to the death to defend my team mates' retreat as I was set upon by hordes of Tyranids or Orcs. The rest of the 'army' was of a similar standard - I was quite proud of the camouflage at the time!

So there you go, a little look back at my career as a painter. Of all the GW things I've got, the only one I'd seriously consider revisiting would be the LOTR skirmish games (not the War of the Ring) as they were always very fun and action packed. My friend who lived behind my house used to come round every weekend for a game of something (he used to climb through a hole in our hedge!). Playstation 2s were invented a little later on and so our lives ended...