Burried.... treasure?

Well so much for my intention to update this blog once a week! I manged to keep that up for a while, but work and Christmas conspired against me, and it's been quite a while since the last post. Never mind, new year - new start!

On a recent trip to my mothers house to clear out some old stuff, I came across a few boxes of my old miniatures, and it was quite a trip into the past. There were many boxes of painted miniatures, including a large wooden case I made for a school project - and many boxes of unpainted castings (of course). I have never made an estimation at how many miniatures I have painted in my life, but it's a lot... 8,000+ I would have thought. There were several hundred in the boxes I found - and they were painted before I was 17, which is 23 years ago now... Anyway it's a lot of miniatures! I thought I would share a couple of my early attempts here - just to show that we all have to start somewhere. Back then, any information about how to paint was hard to come by, and drybrushing was the height of sophistication! All of my earliest miniatures were painted with Humbrol Enamels, but the halflings shown here were some of the first I painted with the brand new Citadel Acrylics - that was quite a revelation!

I found a couple of really old Citadel box sets too - in pristine condition. One was the Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champions and the other was the Chaos Dwarf Renegades. I was amazed by the quality of the castings in the Eternal Champion set - they looked closer to masters castings than production metal. I might even paint one some time - it would be interesting to paint a miniature from that period in a more 'modern' style than I was using in those days!

I found some even older box sets - like a couple of the really old Regiments of Renown, when they didn't even have printed sleeves on the boxes, just a vac-formed tray. I also found my old copies of the Citadel Journals - which I poured over for hours trying to work out how people like John Blanche and Phil Lewis painted their miniatures.

Not quite sure what I'm going to do with all this 'treasure', most likely just store it away again and re-discover it in another 20 years! There were a few more interesting bits and pieces that I may share here if I get round to photographing them.

Back to the modern era, I thought I'd better share something that I painted less then 20 years ago! I painted this for Felix Paniagua early last year and it's part of his amazing Avatars of War range - which seems to just get better and better (I just love his most recent - the Dwarf Lord of Chaos). I wanted to have a classic Elven colour scheme for this one - so I kept all of the colours cool. It's a great sculpt and a pleasure to paint.