For some time I had idea in my mind to create a place where I could share my ideas, thoughts and experience related to my greatest hobby – miniatures wargaming. Finally after some motivation from the people I share my time with, I decided to give it a chance – so here we go.
My adventure began over 30 years ago, when as a child I played with plastic soldiers in the yard with my friends. Most of the male part of humanity went through this stage, but only in few passion for this grew deeper. I must admit that the whole idea of hobby has not changed too much over the next years.
Sandbox from backyard with carved trenches by fingers and majestic buildings made from grass and sticks was replaced by a tabletop with terrain elements from styrofoam or plastic. On the table also appeared dices, tape measures, rule books and character sheets. This was at the time when I discovered my first tabletop war game – WarZone. It allowed me to discover the passion for tactics and army building. I learned then also about randomness of events related to dice rolling – in positive and negative way. I truly fell in love with it. Ability to lose and enjoy victories ha salso come in handy. I still have my first metal figures from that period, painted by the hands of a 12-year-old kiddo. Its always reminds me how evertyhing started for me and how my skills both for painting and gaming developed through all those years.
The next stage of my journey were systems created by Games Workshop – Warhammer Fantasy Battle and Warhammer 40K. It was 2nd edition of WH40k and 4th of WFB.
The complexity of the rules, their learning curve and multitude possibilities of their interpretations (related mostly to the lack of access to the Internet) meant that even simple games often stretched for many hours till late night. I must admit that to this day I remember the discussions and repeated measures of distances at different angles, to figure it out whether the charge of a given regiment reached the opponent or not. During that time, my skills related to painting figures have also improved, beginning to catch the eye of family and friends. Then there were next editions of WFB & WH40k and episodes with other systems I hardly can remember. It went on until the end of my studies.
After some break related to beginning of professional IT career and getting married, my hobby hooked me back to its grasp. This time I started to take a closer look at more advanced wargames such as Flames of War and Team Yankee, or Dystopian Wars. In particular, titles from the Battlefront put a lot of emphasis on elements related to tactics and planning. In addition, thanks to my inborn curiosity i was able to learn about the history of the greatest armed conflicts of the last century.
Painting models on a small scale and using all sorts of modeling techniques for tanks and other vehicles again raised my painting skills. Working on models in 1:100 scale (like for Flames of War) also taught me to choose effective techniques. I was concentrating to paint many models with fast painting methods and at the same time to preserve the best visual quality.
I definitely can admit, after all these years, that thanks to wargaming, I learned to make better decisions, think ahead and rely more on the prepared tactics eliminating all elements of randomness. All these skills are still useful and help in my professional life as well as in everyday challenges.
As part of this blog, I want to share with wargaming community my experience, ideas and techniques of painting models for various tabletop battle games. You will find here descriptions of how to paint models in a simple and effective way to get nice looking table-ready quality. Additionaly, I’ll explain what you can do more to make them look even better. Thus, you will be able to decide what final quality you want to achieve and choose the techniques directly matched to your expectations. Last but not least I find this a very good way to expand a bit my English language skills.