Staying Home - And This Time I've Not Been Grounded By My Mum...

Hi All!

I hope that this finds you all as well as can be expected.

All this staying at home and isolation talk, is kind of like water off a duck's back for me, as both my wife and I work from home. Thus, the opportunity of 80% wages and some free time, has gone right over our heads. 

However, it has meant that instead of travelling all over at weekends, looking for new culinary delights, I've been forcing myself to paint some of my own models, a 1980s Citadel Miniatures fantasy army I had to sell a kidney for. I have set a target of 7 figures per weekend, and they are painted in a pleasing but uncomplicated 80s style. This is because:

A. That was how they would have looked back then.

B. I am not ‘at work’

C. I am also trying to ‘unlearn’ and try to approach things as I would have 40 years ago, with limited materials and none of the ‘wonder weapons’ available today. Humbrol ‘gunmetal’ spray is pretty cutting edge for 1982 and static grass is so elitist that it makes me giddy. I remember the first time I saw static grass used at SWS by Ian Smith, when it had to be imported at £7 for a tiny packet.

I may seem a bit of an old ham, but honestly, it’s actually starting to undo the hang-ups I had about not painting for myself. I will add the caveat that when the fun stops, so shall I… I certainly won’t be painting thousands for myself, but this fantasy army is sort of ‘unfinished business’ that I have to straighten out with the 12 year old me.

It is very interesting nevertheless, to really ‘revisit’ the ways you first picked up the knowledge and skills, so for now I am very content. Mind you, I am painting the models which I hated as a kid, first - sort of the metaphorical eating of the greens before the beef.

Last week, I completed 9 and this weekend, I've finished 10, taking the total to 42, which is 3 units so far, as well as an Undead Chaos Champion which is a homage to the same figure, as it appeared in the famous undead diorama by John Blanche which I saw in Sheffield GW back in the early 80s and which inspired me greatly. Although, on revisiting it the brushwork was pretty dire, but what the hell, it still speaks to me after almost 4 decades and is a pleasure to see in the Warhammer World museum.

It's really quite fun to be able to divest myself of all 3rd party expectations and opinions and just paint to get it done and onto the table, which at the end of the day was how it was back when Warhammer was new and a commercial flop. Also, it's very liberating to abandon the dark arts I've learned over 40 years, and just let that 12 year old loose with the poster paints again.

I have also been literally playing with the Rowney FW inks with which 80% of the Undead Chaos Champion was painted, and the flesh on these two Chaos Warriors:

They are a joy to use. They are very fluid and really are not strictly inks per se.All of the flesh in the pic above is using just FWs. Just treat them as if you are applying watercolours, but blending as if using oils. Easy! DON'T just overload your brush as if washing with those goddamn awful modellers inks... Precision application is the aim of the game.

As I write, I am painting the rather rare 'Chaos Warrior', a modelI've been doing a lot of mulling and remembering of my youth recently you could only get by cutting tokens from the inners of blister packs in the 1980s and assembling one of several different characters. You sent the completed set into GW and they sent you a rather splendid toy in return. 

I've started on a white base, and then painted the armour with a coat of FW crimson, then once that was dry I painted over that with a lighter red - scarlet. Yes, lighter straight over darker, with no mucking about. As you can see, you get a subtly shaded red which pops right out at you. This is what is so great about FW colours. This model is destined to be one of the generals in the pre-slotta Chaos army and is to my mind one of the nicest Chaos Warriors that GW ever created.

No enhancement was used on the image by the way...

I also bought the remastered deluxe edition of the seminal Marillion album, 'Script For A Jester's Tear' earlier this week. Now, I am not one for generally buying newer re-workings of stuff I already have, but WOW! is all I can say about this 4 CD and 1 blu-ray set. It gave me the same kick and tingle down the spine as the first time I listened to it. It's a totally, and subtly different beast, and the inclusion of the 'Recital Of The Script' filmed 1983 Hamersmith Odeon gig and a 90 minute  vintage documentary make it a real work of art.

There are many worse ways to spend £30 , and you get a really high quality bit of kit. I am now even mulling buying a complete hi-fi separates system to really get every ounce out of this and some other items of musical beauty.

And that's about it for now, but here's an excerpt from my book, on the last time I was grounded for 3 weeks:

My earliest gaming buddy was Alan Staniforth, who just happened to also be my best friend in Junior School. He'd game with me, but after an incident in GW when he pronounced Runequest as 'Runnykwest' and was berated unmercifully by the late and much missed Pete 'Greblord' Armstrong, he'd never gone back in.

Consequently we gamed less, but did still take our bikes all over the place, and generally remained friends.

However, Alan and I effectively parted company after a trivial incident left him a temporarily missing left ear. I was the one who cut it off. The story is not the hate-fuelled orgy of bloody combat that you may be expecting but nonetheless is full of subterfuge, chance and drama.

One Sunday morning, I, with Al, and Mick, a casual acquaintance of some years had set off for a ride on our racing bikes. As has already been recounted, Al’s dad was not known for gestures of generosity and so his bike was a mechanical Frankenstein’s Monster cobbled together from junkyard pieces whilst Mick and I had custom-built bikes with up to date brakes and gears.

We decided to take the various back roads from Sheffield to Barnsley where another friend from school, Shaun, was staying with a girl he’d met whilst her foolishly trusting parents were away for the weekend. We thought that it may be a pleasant wheeze to cycle over and pop our faces up to the window and surprise Shaun and the young lady in question. Under the circumstances we felt that it was prudent not to inform our parents of our intended route and goal. After all parents like mine would not share our enthusiasm for this innocent little road trip.

We were doing well on the fateful day in autumn and arrived at the top of the steep street on which we hoped to find Shaun ‘in flagrante’ so to speak. The ride had been smooth but had taken longer than expected due to the hills and road conditions and light was failing.

It was decided that we would see how fast we could hurtle down the street to our intended target to reduce the chances of a cautious approach and squeak of brakes alerting Shaun. It’s common knowledge of course that all boys consider themselves impervious to damage and not bound by the laws of physics and on that day we were flying the flag for that particular theory.

I was in the lead with Alan behind me by a couple of metres, Mick to the rear, when I felt a collision with the back of my bike and then Al’s piece of mobile scaffolding cartwheeled past to my right, it’s pedal hitting my knee. I hit the brakes and with a little more drag than one might expect, came to a sudden halt.

Alan was somehow caught up in the spokes of my back wheel having parted company with his steed and was looking a little befuddled but otherwise O.K. As Mick and I helped him to his feet, Al remarked that his head was a little painful on the left hand side. As if on cue, a small trickle of blood ran down from under his hair and I obligingly moved the hair to one side to investigate. This may perhaps on reflection, not have been the ideal first-aid action. As the hair was moved, Alan’s ear decided to take some quality time, away from his head and dangle by a strand of flesh. Even though I am to this day squeamish, I was oddly unmoved at seeing my friend minus part of his body.

The casualty was taken to a nearby house and from there to the local hospital where the ear was stitched back and some minor plastic surgery performed. In the meantime, Mick and I went home as if nothing had happened, taking turns to carry the Franken-cycle on our backs. It was some hours later whilst I was in the bath nursing my swollen knee that my parents found out from Al’s family, the whole sordid tale.

The aftermath will not be recorded, but given that I was grounded just for being an hour late home from town some time previously, you may imagine the outcome of this particular incident. I was as they say 'given a long stretch by the Beak'.

Despite the incident, Alan and I were still friends, but he was away from school for some time and by the time he returned I had found other distractions and friends with whom I was now gaming. It was as simple as that, we talked, we hung around in school, but he and I had gone our separate ways, not unlike the parting of the remaining members of the Company of Nine in The Lord Of The Rings. We shared a room during a residential art course – of which more later on - but as with many friendships, we were becoming distinctly different in our tastes.