My First Step Into a Smaller World, Part 2
So after weeks of learning about Warhammer and trying to convince my mother to take me to the local game store, I finally had the makings of my first army in hand. I had a starter box, rulebooks, and a handful of paints. I wasn’t a complete novice to model making since I had completed a few kits in recent months but tabletop miniatures are a very different animal compared to scale models. Learning how to paint and the act of painting was much more difficult back in 2004. No YouTube to watch along with and limited resources online made it more difficult to learn the craft. The rulebooks had some decent instructions but I could barely get my Space Marines to look like the ones in the photos. I’m so jealous of new people picking the hobby up now, the wealth of resources available is infinitely more than what we had 16 years ago. I had no concept of how to shade with inks or how to highlight. I even thought priming indoors was a good idea. (It’s not, after a few weeks there was black dust covering every flat surface of my parents’ kitchen.) The paint system was a lot different too. Today the Citadel Paint range that’s designed for Warhammer has over 320 different kinds of paint. Back in 2004 there were around 60. The range is also now designed to be a bit more “paint by numbers” for beginners, having different paints suitable for particular situations such as base coating, shades and washes to add shadows, layer paints to add highlighting. I could only afford to buy about 7 paints and I skipped out on some key ones like brown and grey because I figured I could just mix those myself. (I ended up buying more paint a few weeks later, no one likes mixing paint). It took about a month of building, painting, purchasing and then more building and painting but I had my army of dark green Space Marines and I was ready for my first night at the game store.
On the left: my original Space Marine from 2004 painted with about 7 different colors. On the right: 16 years of experience later.