Sunday 10 January 2016

The Emperor's Champion: the beginning

A love of modelling...

Can you remember what got you into the world of Warhammer 40k? For me it's a long time ago, but I can still remember the hooks. It was never one thing, more a series of things I loved combining.

The recent GW birthday party at Warhammer World Reminded me one of the key ingredients that drew me into this world as I spent two great hours with my son and Dave building a mini-diorama with Space Marine and Ork sprues.

Creating an epic battle that had nothing to do with army lists or allowable weapon combinations brought us back (aided by a 7 year old) to the fun and excitement I felt when first starting the hobby and I really want to have a go at a serious diorama, for entry into Golden Daemon.

It got me thinking about what inspired me aged 14 to pick up the hobby.  I grew up building and painting airfix WW2 aircraft, my room was full of hurricanes, me109s, Heinkel 111s and my favourite the Mosquito bomber. I had got about as good as I could at that stage- there was nowhere I could learn more and even though I enjoyed the modelling and painting my models were just gathering dust once I had hung them from the ceiling and after all that effort I wanted them to have more purpose.

Around the same time my Dad bought this book.
 
It's an amazing book, kinda like the FW Model Masterclass books. It was full of advanced modelling kit and skills and inspired me to do more. One problem though, it was all too expensive for me and so I would wait another 17 years to fulfil the ambition of trying this stuff out!

Age 14, I loved modelling and painting, sci-fi novels, Elite (computer game), and Tolkien. Imagine my amazement when looking at another kids White Dwarf magazine and discovering someone had merged all of these into a sci-fi, Middle earth in space, that required hobbying and painting, and after all that "it was a game"?!! I couldn't believe my luck. My first WD below...

I remember my first inspirations were to build dioramas of the scenes I loved but that was out of reach financially and I had forgotten this inspiration until we picked up the sprues at Warhammer World a couple of weeks ago.

Over the past few years I have dabbled with dioramas but the draw of building an army always won out. Below is a gun nest I built atop a chimera - a small diorama if you like.

I really feel inspired again to try a diorama - but it's gonna be a while before I am ready so I will target 2017 golden daemon unbound category and see if I can at least get shortlisted.

I am off to do some research now on building a diorama, more on this in the future...
 
The Emperor's Champion

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