The first miniatures I ever owned were the plastics that came with the Warhammer 40,000 second edition box set. The thing that is hard to imagine nowadays is that in the early days, plastic was really there just as a cheap substitute for the metal miniatures. The issue was that those early Games Workshop plastics, the miniatures only had a single pose and were at most built from two or three pieces. So the most exciting thing about those second edition plastic marines was that there was a sergeant, missle launcher, and flamer that were slightly different than the run-of-the-mill bolter marines. If you wanted diversity, you had to go for the metal miniatures. The problem was they are expensive and in December of 1994 - when I picked up the boxset - I was a broke college student. My original vision was to paint the miniatures from the starter set as World Eaters and proxy them for my chaos army. Sometime around the same time that I had bought the second edition box set, Games Workshop released a set of plastics for World Eaters (featured in my next post) that I also purchased. My idea was to paint the space marines from the starter set as World Eaters alongside the actual World Eater minis. However, by the time I got around to painting the miniatures I was having second thoughts on my chaos army. As I noted in my earlier post, those original lists out of the Codex Imperialis were limited. I lost every game I played against my friend's Orks. As any good W40K general knows, of course if you are losing a lot it is because of bad game design, not your skills as a general. So I figured I would give Blood Angels a try instead - since they were sort of like World Eaters that stayed (more or less) good. This is why the marine posted above is orange, not red.
As for my early forays in painting, there is not too much good to say about that miniature. You can see an attempt at highlighting below the knee pads. Here you can also see it on the backside. Not that the highlighting makes any sense:
As it turned out, that initial listlessness with my World Eaters translated into a general shift away from the hobby around mid 1995. Just as in high school, I yet again felt the lure of school work and a social life and moved away from 40K for the next few years
In 1998 I went away to graduate school and my well developed social life ended. That freed up time to return to Warhammer 40,000. I decided to abandon the Blood Angels and return to my World Eaters. I began by doing a couple of test jobs on the second edition starter set Space Marines. If anything, the couple of years away from the hobby made me a worse painter:
Now you might be wondering - what's with the green? Why is that supposed World Eater looking like he stopped off of a Christmas tree? Well, back in the early to mid 1990s, the general painting style by the Eavy Metal team was for bright, oftentime garish miniatures. Green was often used as a spot color on World Eaters (I guess red, black, and bronze was not enough). Moreover, I am in general not the most inventive painter when it comes to color schemes and I certainly wasn't back then. So I followed what I saw in the books. Obviously the end result is terrible.
But don't worry, it gets better from here - both my skills as a painter, and especially the miniatures.
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