It's hard to pinpoint when I first started collecting minis, but I believe it all started when I was around 8-12 years old. I was at my good friend's house, and him and his little brother had gotten one of the starter box sets with lots of orcs. I think? He swears I was the one who got them into it, but it's all kind of fuzzy!
Any way, something happened and I started obsessing about building an army! For some reason, I seemed to be good at earning money off of my parents, and they would take me to the local hobby shops so I could pick up minis and paint. I was set on a Warhammer Fantasy army, and I picked up lots of orcs and LOTS of Skaven. I also picked up lots of random discounted metal minis just because they looked cool. I read all of the Gotrek and Felix novels, and became kind of obsessed with the Skaven.
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I'm not really sure what young me was going for here. Those spikes are scary! |
I was really, really pretty bad at painting. I loved it though! I spent a ton of time in the garage planning out my armies and painting them and acting out battles with them. My friend and I tried to figure out how to play, but we never really grasped it. I spent a lot of time reading the rule book and looking at the pictures though. I slept with the thing! I kept saving up money and buying minis (mostly Warhammer), and one day I just kind of lost interest. My friend wasn't really in to it anymore, and I didn't have any one to play with. My mom helped me pack them all up and I pretty much forgot about them. I always wanted to pick them back up, but my wallet had become empty, my paints had dried up, and I had no one to play with. So there they sat, in the garage, all alone. Getting moved around, broken into pieces, and separated from their friends.
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Random Skaven dudes! |
Fast forward ten or so years. I had been playing Magic the Gathering at my local hobby shop,
Phoenix Fire Games, and they also had a pretty large stock of Warhammer minis. I spent a lot of time in between rounds gazing fondly at their selection and sighing. It turns out one of my new friends at the shop was super into collecting minis (He totally started an
Old Hammer blog - which convinced me to start this one), so we began talking shop. He invited me over and showed me his massive collection and offered to teach me how to play 40k. Needless to say, this ignited the spark in me again and I decided I had to try and rescue my old collection.
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A metal Screaming Bell! |
Unfortunately, time has taken it's toll. Most of my plastic clan rats have disappeared, just leaving random limbs behind, and a lot of my goblins have suffered the same fate! I have found a bunch of random minis I didn't even know I had, and I've slowly been building up my paint collection and trying to save the minis I can.
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The best looking one of these is on the far left. I'm pretty sure my mom painted it for me. |
I've got several projects I'm working on currently, but for this post I'll just post some pictures of my old collection throughout this wall of text, because walls of text are boring. The pics are kinda cruddy right now because I was using a cell phone, with one hand, while balancing on my haunches and holding a lamp. I'll post more pictures of my random collection later!
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Random Orcs! |
Thanks for checking this post out. Go forth and conquer!