A Return to Painting or Hobgoblins at Last

In the 90's I was an avid gamer. I mostly played tabletop rpgs, but I also painted up a lot of minis. Both individual figures of various scales for the rpgs and a couple of small armies for Warhammer Fantasy Battle, Rogue Trader and Epik 40k.

Aside from my Ork army for Epic, which got regularly thrashed, I only ever played a couple of games with my armies. But that didn't matter. I had fun painting and loved to haul my minis around to show them off even if the paint jobs were kind of crappy.

Then I found other things to do with my time and didn't touch the hobby for over a decade. But about six months ago while going through some old stuff in storage, I ran into a box of painted metal as well as a whole heap of unpainted and thought it would be fun to pick up a brush again and see what I could manage.

I started with these two, rather characterful chaps.

Two of the four Citadel hobgoblins in my possession from ca. 1985 by Aly Morrison were done with some artist acrylic paint from large tubes. It was cumbersome to do and they took forever to finish, but I'm pretty pleased with the results.

And with that I wanted to start painting again, but what exactly? Today I'm even less likely than before to actually get around to playing wargames. And the idea of painting whole squads or regiments of uniform minis assembly line style didn't feel like relaxing fun-times. But I still wanted some goal and structure to start a project.

I thought back to the other games I had fun playing and remembered Talisman. A simple fantasy boardgame ruled more by chance than strategy. The 2nd edition of the game with the Expansion, Adventure and Timescape sets added provided hours of fun years ago.

That would be my project, to paint the player characters, the enemies, the followers the players could have in their retinues and other persona in 2nd edition Talisman and it's official expansion sets.

These would be mostly fantasy figures, but thanks to the Timescape expansion, a couple of sci-fi minis as well. A quick googling found out the contents of all the expansions and adding up, I came to around 300 minis, a pretty big task! Painting maybe 2 minis per week (as I have more or less at the time I'm writing this) it would take about 3 years to complete. No problem, as long as I follow the rules:

1. I do this for fun. If it starts to feel like a chore, I'll take a break or quit all together.

2. The illustrations of the game, though I like them a lot, shall not be a strict guide. I'll paint them by what ever mood strikes me.

3. My goal is good enough for gaming. If the results look good from 1 meter away, I'm happy.

4. Ruining a small piece of plastic or metal is not a big deal, so I shouldn't be afraid to try new techniques.

So, here are the first result, hobgoblin, the player character and hobgoblin, the enemy!