Dawn of the Lead

Ah, the joys of writing an hobby blog when you haven’t been doing anything even remotely connected to your hobbies. Instead of being down about it or posting a quick ‘n’ easy movie trailer post, I figured I’d explore the whole phenomenon some. Everyone loves editorials, don’t they?

For me, painting miniatures is very much a thing dependent on inspiration, which at any given moment you either have or haven’t. It’s very much like a mood swing thing: one day I”ll be thinking “oh, sweet, miniatures!” and spend an hour or six working on all that stuff on my desk and starting different projects. The next day – or rather the next month – I’ll lose interest. Not gradually, mind you, but just go cold turkey. It’s not that I start feeling bad about doing miniatures or getting in any way repulsed by the hobby, but it simply gets pushed way back in the priorities, so I’ll be thinking “oh, I should finish those models. I’ll just clean the flat and go jogging, do a little Facebooking and play some Mount & Blade first.” And what do you know, it’s 1 AM and “oh, I’m not going to start painting at this hour, but tomorrow!” Yeah, right.

Now, I’m a bit of a bipolar character and my relation to miniatures reflects this a lot. It’s almost like a switch that’s either on or off. When I’m really into it, I can – despite my rather slow painting – get pretty prolific and multitask a lot, sculpting this, painting that and assembling those. However, this enthusiasm does have its downside. As probably every single miniature hobbyist knows, minis are like crack or bacon. You just can’t get enough. What this means, that when the craze hits I tend to order just a few more, since I only have around a thousand or so waiting unpainted on the wardrobe shelves. This really isn’t a problem, though. I know that I’m in no hurry, and most of that stuff will get painted some day, but it is a bit funny. I blame the ease of internet shopping. Especially eBay has delivered me a ton of WHFB orcs, which I simply had to have. Even if I play WHFB maybe twice a year.

That brings me conveniently to gaming. Which I don’t do a lot. Come to think of it, I’ve probably played less than ten games during the last year. I get in a shot of WHFB every now and then, although the laborious task of setting up the tables and assembling the armies tends to put our group off frequently. To combat this I bought Fear & Faith to go with all of my vampires, zombies and werewolves. The problem with this? Ummmn. There actually isn’t one, come to think of it. For crying out loud, I should get a game on. Ok, the reason it got put on the back burner was the fact that I was very much into moderns when I bought it, and didn’t have a good modern table setup available. Of course I had grand plans for that too, but it fell into the “oh, I’ll just finish the kitchen renovation first” category. The renovation is long done, the table not yet started.

Gaming is important. Even if I’ve become much more of a collector than a gamer in the last few years, games still hold a very special place in this hobby for me. While I often think that games aren’t half as much fun as painting and collecting, every single time I play I game I will think “oh, this is really fun! Why don’t I do this more often?” Seriously. Every single time (apart from that WHFB game with the high elves destroying my army without ever leaving their hiding place behind a largish wood). Luckily, I now have the new Space Hulk game on the way. It’s very quick to set up, doesn’t require special gaming boards and I already have the painted miniatures I need for it. In other words, it’s perfect to kick start my gaming anew. After that a bit of Fear & Faith, maybe a werewolf hunt using my WHFB Empire troopers and terrain? After that..oh yes, the blog.

This, dear readers, is interesting. Writing this blog right now has actually rekindled my enthusiasm for minis and gaming. All I really needed was a good think about this wonderful hobby of ours. See? It comes and goes, often on a whim, and unspiration turns into inspiration.

I’m leaving for London and Cardiff in ten hours or so – just imagine my frustration about missing Salute by a very small margin! Anyone fancying a pint, a chat or simply a chance to say hi, feel free to send me an email.