I was never going to paint it all...heavy resin

My very first collecting bug was with the Eldar. For many years I spent a lot of time (probably too much) tracking down every single Eldar model I could get my hands on. The ambition was to collect, build and paint one of every single Eldar model Citadel had ever produced.

Now that's not really the ambition of a sane person, although to all intents and purposes in early 2013 I had achieved part one of that goal and collected Citadel's entire set of Eldar releases, models produced under licence, rarities and a good number of unreleased figures.

At that point I sat back and looked at everything and came to a rather shocking revelation.

I was never going to paint it all!!

The collection comprised well over 800 models, including a large number of huge tanks and titans (thanks Forgeworld and Armorcast!). At my painting rate it would have taken me 28 years to paint 800 infantry models (based on 2013 performance), let alone considering all the big stuff. Not to mention, I hadn't played 40k for several years and the majority of my hobby time was being taken up with the sort of thing I've been revealing in this blog.

After the revelation
So, I decided to rationalise, refocus and think very carefully about this unwieldy collection. I asked myself these questions.

Q. Which Eldar models did I really like?
A. The early Jes Goodwin stuff; pretty much everything up to and including 2nd edition figures.

Q. Which models would I find it difficult to part with?
A. The rare stuff. Old resin (Armorcast et al, limited editions and unreleased. Oh, also my Saim Hann army.

Q. Which models wouldn't I miss?
A. The McVey Striking Scorpions. The plastic stuff. The unbuilt still in shrink-wrap stuff.

So that was that...out went anything that wasn't:
- Part of my Saim Hann army
- Pre-3rd edition
- Rare or interesting

Heavy Resin
And so we're sort of at the point where I started thinking about this blogpost. Part of my Eldar collection is comprised of a number of early resin vehicles and kits produced by a range of different manufacturers as proof of concept, or under licence from Games Workshop. Armorcast and Forgeworld USA were the major guys in the 1990s before GW decided it would be a good idea to set up their own in-house division (Forgeworld).

In future blogposts, I plan to run through the different manufacturers and the pieces they produced, but for now here's a preview of my 'Heavy Resin' collection:

Feel free to tell me what you recognise!