Buried Treasure?

A while ago my father asked me to take some of the huge collection of old miniatures that'd I'd left behind when I left home, almost 20 years ago. Of course in recent years I'd built up a sizeable collection of my own which was filling my own home but I took a few figures that I'd found buried deep in a box and promptly forgot about them.

When I started painting metal figure were by far the best option, plastics were far behind the models you see today. But as time progressed they caught up and I found myself painting them and my vast collection of lead and white metal figures were discarded into boxes to gather dust. I remember at one point I'd do anything to avoid painting metals, so old and out of date was how I viewed them.

Back to the present and I wanted to try a new way of stripping paint and so I decided these old figures would be good for a test. The paint stripping was a success (and will feature in a future blog post). After reading an excellent blog, Realm of Chaos 80s, I began to to look at the figures and see them in a new light.

Sure some of them were certainly worth something on eBay, I'd seen some of the figures selling for between £5 to £50! But really I have no desire to sell them, I feel inspired to give some of them a chance to be repainted rather than cashing them in for a short term gain.

So what did I find?

Here's some of the highlights:

First up a set of figures from the 90's game Warhammer Quest. The Pit Fighter and Chaos Warrior were playable characters, the rest were NPCs from the Lair of the Orc Warlord expansion pack (left to right Gubbinz the Jester, Bogoff the Snotling and Growler the Squighound).

Next up was part of large group of undead, I seem to remember writing a lot of undead scenarios for Warhammer Quest. If my memory serves me well these are all 1990's Wraiths, with the exception of the figure at the bottom left. This one is a 1980's Wight, made from lead.

Finally we have a collection of hero figures that I used over several years. The Golden Wizard and the Dwarf Pirate were more recent figures. The 2 Dwarfs were part of a larger group I had when I played advanced Heroquest in the late 80s / early 90s (before playing Warhammer Quest).





So is nostalgia going to be all it seems? I certainly have happy memories of the times when I played games with these very figures and maybe I was wrong to write off these figures all those years ago. Will they paint up well second time round or have me rushing back to painting newer plastic and resin figures? Well keep reading and I'm sure future posts will hold the answers.

The 15 Minute Goblin

Not long ago I had a friend visit from Russia who was a big fan of the Games Workshop range, primarily through the computer games that they've released. As he'd travelled such a long way I decided that with Games Workshop HQ only a short trip away that I had to take him there.

Now for me it's been I while since I was involved in the Games Workshop hobby, however he really enjoyed his trip and came away with a set of figures and some paints, keen to start painting them. So upon our return home I set about giving him a quick tutorial on painting and how to do simple highlights. The result, the 15 minute Goblin.

I've never painted a Goblin (or any other variant of Green-skins) before so it was something new for me too. With the addition of a brown rather than a Games Workshop standard black set of robes I felt it was a fun experiment.

The Sales Assistant in the HQ shop did manage to persuade me to purchase one of the newer plastic figures, promising me that they'd moved on a bit since I last painted their figures. I eventually left with a Chaos Nurgle Champion, something about pustulent skin and corroding armour obviously seemed appealing at the time.

He took me a bit longer than 15 minutes to paint...