Monday 13 January 2014

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!


4 comments:

  1. Never been a fan of the Elder look, but having said that one of my all time favourite Armorcast toys is the Falcon. One of these days I'll get one (Along with the Ork Gobsmasha)

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  2. Conversely I love the Eldar look, although the early angular vehicles are somewhat wide of the mark. So...what would you use the falcon for? ;-)

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  3. Man, I knew there was something with you and eldars ! I wouldn't have thought it was this bad though...
    I can say you don't lack ambition and this was a very good choice of rnage to start with considering the number of excellent Jes Goodwin references. I am aiming at getting all th epre-craftworld references myself (avoiding unreleased or limited releases) just because I love every single one and because I already bought a lot back in the day.

    Funny thing is after realising collecting and painting all the eldars was impossible, you decided to collect all the eternal champion range...

    Sezrisouly, how do you store ALL THE ELDAR RANGE? oO

    I like the resin vehicle which looks like the sort of car you can see in one of JG's drawings with the rose bearing eldar.

    few, you just blew my mind here mate...

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  4. The Eldar aren't a problem now I've sold off the bulk of them - they fit in a couple of cases and with the big resin kits in the garage.

    The Eternal Champion range is much more compact - just ~70 figures ;-)

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