Dawn of the Lead

I’ve wanted to start a blog for quite a while. Of course I have my trusty Livejournal, where I whine to friends about my personal life, but I wanted to do something completely different. Dawn of the Lead will – as the name suggests – deal with two of my favourite things: miniatures and zombies. Most of the posts will revolve around these two, and occasionally both as I get my hands on some zombie miniatures.

Why zombies and miniatures? Nothing deep here. In all honesty, they’re both excellent, and I couldn’t just pick one. Besides, I probably couldn’t create enough content from just one of those. Come to think of it, I have a feeling that even these two won’t be enough for regular updates, but I’m still hopeful!

In the last five-six years I’ve developed something of an addiction to zombie culture in the form of movies, games and books. I’ve occasionally (on the bus today, to be honest) wondered about this. What makes zombies so interesting to me? There’s none of the romantic fantasy associated with vampires and the like, not a lot of Lovecraftian cosmic horror, no deep and exciting mythology to explore, just an endless horde of flesh hungry undead.

Then it came to me.

I’ve always been fascinated (in a very sane, rational and normal sense) by catastrophes, what-if fantasies, tales of desperate struggle and the end of the world. The sinking of Titanic, alternative history, Helm’s deep, Alamo, Chernobyl,  The Book of Revelation, global epidemics, thermonuclear war…you name it. The zombie genre combines all of this. Simple as that.

And miniatures? Thanks to my two older brothers, I’ve been playing roleplaying games since I was six years old. They used to paint the occasional miniature for our D&D games, and I’d always play with the miniatures when they weren’t in rpg use. Still, the miniatures were forgotten for years while the roleplaying continued. Then, around age 14 a friend introduced me to something called Warhammer Fantasy Battle. Being young and naive I was quickly hooked on miniatures. Now, 12 years later, I still occasionally play WHFB although the ratio between painting/modeling and gaming has tipped heavily in favor of the former. I also have a couple of hundred painted miniatures, and at least twice as many waiting to be painted. And I still keep buying them much much faster than I paint.

I consider myself an OK painter. While I lack the patience to truly master the art, I produce models that I’m happy with. I started my painting following Mike McVey’s Games Workshop tutorials, and to this day I always paint even those areas on a miniature that won’t be seen. Did I mention that I have a lot of miniatures waiting to be painted? Maybe one day I’ll explode with frustration and dip and drybrush my entire backlog, but until that day I’m treating most of the models that I paint as individual works of casual art and craftsmanship.

This blog will deal with these two subjects and their outskirts as the mood strikes me. Reports and reviews of movies seen and books read, painting ideas and finished work, general frothing over some new soon-to-be-dead modeling projects and basically whatever I feel like sharing with teh Internets. I hope it provides inspiration, information and maybe a touch of entertainment.

Welcome!