Hi there! I’d like to start my blog by introducing myself and telling you a bit about what I’ve been doing in the hobby so far. My name is Angie. I’m 25 years old and I live together with my boyfriend in the Netherlands. I started playing Warhammer Fantasy when I was 14 and was introduced to the game by a good friend. I liked it a lot, played it more and more often with his models and then decided to get an army of my own.
The two of us were not quite sure how well those tiny miniatures full of blood, skulls and Juan Diaz daemonette boobs would go over with my parents, so we decided to look at the good side of the Warhammer world. We narrowed down the army of choice to two possibilities: High Elves and Bretonnia. As I was (and still am) quite a bit into medieval history, I settled for Bretonnia. I bought my first batallion box and some paints when I had a day off school in december 2005. A St. Nick gift at the girl scouts a few days earlier had netted me a knightly hero and a damsel. I was all set.
I didn’t know much about painting and photographing when I started. A lot of my early models are now stripped and either stored away or repainted. I didn’t have a habit of taking pictures of them either, except for this pegasus. It was one of the first bigger minis I painted and I was quite proud of it then. A goopy layer of undiluted midnight blue, drybrushing on the wings with a darker colour and a freehand that, if you squint, looks a little like the unicorn on the knight’s helm.
The pegasus on the right was done about four years later. I thinned my paint, worked with some layering and washing. The wings pop out with multiple colours. The freehanded lilies are recognizable as such. When I painted this, it was the best I could do. It was the summer before I started college and the summer I started my second army: Dark Elves.
My initial colour scheme for them was odd. It was based on the Dunmer, the dark elves from the Elder Scrolls series with blue skin and red eyes. For some reason I went for white robes and bright, colourful details. I painted a unit of spearmen, a unit filler and a bolt thrower that way and it didn’t work. Not at all, in fact. So I learned how to strip painted miniatures and switched my colour scheme to blue and gold. College however had me moved to a new town, brought new friends, new classes and a lot of studying, so I took a break.
After a few years the itch to paint came back. I stuck with the Dark Elves and greatly expanded them. This time I mostly bought second-hand miniatures, allowing me to create a much grander army than I would’ve had with GW prices. Then, when browsing the selection of Warhammer on sale on Marktplaats (a Dutch mixture between Ebay and Craigslist), I came across a gem. A guy who was moving to New Zealand offered two starter armies for sale: Vampire Counts and Warriors of Chaos. I bought them and took my first step into the actual collecting of miniatures. They were nog longer just models to play game, but parts of multiple great armies, painted to the best of my abilities.
By now the Vampire Counts have become an Undead Legions army. The Warriors of Chaos have grown a lot. New armies have sprouted up: High Elves, small detachments of Wood Elves and Lizardmen. My boyfriend joined the hobby too, painting his Empire. Together we are working our way through the Skaven that came with the Isle of Blood. I started painting boardgame miniatures: World of Warcraft and Battlemasters. I’m even picking up some of my old Bretonnians again, while diving into Inquisitor 28 by making a bunch of warbands. The Old World died, and Age of Sigmar rose into its place, leaving me wondering what to do with some of my smaller armies. Round bases? Square after all? Not to mention all the new boardgames coming up both by Games Workshop and various Kickstarted companies.
Together with my trusty lightbox set-up I love to take photos of all my miniatures now. I’d like to use this blog to show both my older work and all the exiting new projects I’ll start in the future!