Although this is mainly a blog about my painting progress, I thought I'd write a little about how I started in the hobby, this account is clouded by nostalgia and is about 20 years in the past, so is by no means an accurate reflection of reality.
There was a Games Workshop on Lord Street in Liverpool, it's a Sayers now, and what was once an Electronic Boutique, the constant next-door neighbour of Games Workshops everywhere at the time, was a Jessops until recently, who knows what it will be once they finally stop clutching on to a business that's failed, but when I was 10 years old, these were my favourite places in the world, that and the section of Virgin Megastore that had PC games and role playing books and stuff. (Odd, if you were to guess then which of those business would still be holding on in 2013, GW wouldn't be your first choice.) Anyway, EB was the first place I would want to go in town, I wasn't allowed a games console back then, mother didn't like the idea of them, but we had a PC and I'd play games on that, i loved Duke Nukem, Wolfstein 3D and Doom that my dad thought he'd hidden in a sub-directory and I would play NES and Super NES and Mega Drives whenever there was one available to me, but mainly I just liked to go to the shop to look at the pictures on the boxes, I had no money, so I'd never be able to buy anything anyway.
One day I was walking to EB, I must have been with my Mum, we walked past Games Workshop and through the doorway I saw a cardboard standup of what I now know to be an Imperator Titan, the image taken from the front of the EPic boxed set, i had to go and look closer, , when I learnt that this 5 foot tall standee was a picture of a robot the size of a sky scraper, it's gun barrels as big as a house, I was hooked. I remember being absolutely overwhelmed by it all, guessing what it was all about from pictures and overheard conversations, it was the coolest thing in the world.
excitedly telling my younger brothers all about it the next day, I think we were away as a family in Edinburgh, on camp beds in a hotel room, as I explained to them how Space Marines were 7 foot tall and had massive armour and giant guns, they were all different colours and that showed their rank, the next day, walking through the streets, we pretended to be Space Marines, I was the red one so I was in charge, my brothers were blue and yellow.
For weeks after I begged to go there again, and eventually, my parents relented, they phoned the shop and asked how i could start this game, that day they took me to the shop and a madsive game was going on, it felt like there were 50 people around the board, commanding massive armies, i was given a squad of Catachan jungle fighters and told how to move them and shoot with them, I moved them into a bunker and the next turn blew up a Rhino with the Missle launcher. It was amazing and i wanted more.
A few weeks later my brothers and I went there again and my parents bought us the metal devastator squad, which we thought were the coolest models ever, and we were sat down at a little table covered in amazing models and shown how to paint, obviously looking back, no one told us to thin the paints, but we loved them, to us, they looked exactly how they did on the box. It progressed from there, we got more space marines and then the boxed sets for Christmas one year, I would spend hours at a time reading all the cards from Dark Millennium. I didn't have many friends back then, which I am sure is a constant amongst people my age who liked the hobby.
Eventually I would start Secondary school, Where I would finally meet other kids who played the game that I wasn't related to, we'd go to the art department at lunch time and play huge games, or try to, the hour we had for lunch wasn't even enough time for a turn of second edition Warhammer 40,000, after a few years, the lack of money, burgeoning interest in computer games and girls and beer led me away from the hobby, I still checked up on things and looked in the window at new models whenever I went past, but I didn't have any models or paints or interest in spending what little money I got a month on more.
It was years later, I think I was about 24, j hadn't done much in the way of hobby, I had gotten a few of my better painted models out of the box and put them on a shelf and had looked around at the newest things, some new Ork models caught my eye, I'd always loved Orks and played Gorkamorka with my brothers had been the most fun I'd had with the model hobby, so I looked around and ordered some things online, I didn't want to go into the shop itself, but yeah, I got some paints and some orks and I turned out to be a lot better than I remember, so I kept it up, every 6 months or so, I'd paint a few orks or a trukk or something, I didn't buy very much at all, I started reading the novels and getting involved in threads on Something Awful, I would visit the shop every now and then for new paints or the odd model, but wouldn't stay and talk to any of the weirdos.
Until I went in one time and ran into people I knew, suddenly this wasn't a lonely hobby that I was ashamed of, which was about a year ago and it lead me to where I am now.
