Blastings From The Pastings...

That all-round good chap and pillar of the wargaming community, Art Steventon, has recently been posting some images of the superb Eldar army he's working on at the moment. This included some pictures of a conversion he did inspired by Geoff Taylor's artwork for the second edition 40k Eldar Codex and by the conversion that Mike McVey did, and I painted, for the 'Eavy Metal Converting Miniatures book waaay back in the mid-90's. His article can be found here.
As he only had a scan from that book to illustrate his idea I thought I'd take a few piccies of the original for him, especially as some of the details of the paintjob have never really been seen in public. While I was retrieved aforesaid Eldar from my cabinet I thought to myself, "Why not drag a few more of the old bits and bobs out for an airing?"
So, here's the Eldar. I painted a few of the models for the book at the time but, unfortunately, I don't have a copy of the book any more, so I can't say exactly which ones. I remember painting a Chaos Spawn, and a couple of other conversions that Mike did, but the old memories are hazy... I remember, with this one, really trying to match the details of the artwork as closely as I could. At the time, I was insanely proud of it but it doesn't really stand up to modern standards. One day I'll have another go and do a new conversion, like Art has done.

Here's the results of my random rummaging from my collection of miniatures painted during my time at GW in the 90's.

This Marauder Skeleton was always a favourite of mine from the range, with his mutated legs, and was to be the start of my Skeleton army, that I had assembled and ranked up on my desk, in the studio, ready to be painted...

This was, inevitably, the only one that ever got painted, and is the only one left from that army...

Next up is a Daemonette. I can't remember why I painted this one. It may have been for an alternative colour scheme for a Warhammer Armies: Chaos book but I'm not entirely sure. It may have just been me messing about with an alternate colour scheme for the hell of it...

Finally, we have a plastic Space Marine, of the Lamenters Chapter, from the second edition 40k boxed set, I believe. Now, I think this one may have been done to illustrate a different chapter colour scheme for the Ultramarines Codex but, again, I'm not 100% sure on that. What I do know is this was done specifically to find a better way of painting yellow, without actually using any yellow paint. I find it difficult to understand the nostalgia around the old paints from the late 80's, early 90's. They were often a nightmare to work with, with a lot of the colours have very poor coverage and strength of pigment. Red was one particularly bad colour, but yellow was worse. This Marine was painted by using Hobgoblin Orange, highlighted to white and then glazed with yellow ink (the inks of that time, known as the Expert Paint Set, being the only paints from that era that were really outstanding) then finished off with sepia ink in the deepest shadows. This is basically the method I use for painting yellow to this day, even with the far superior paints that are available now.

Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed this trip down memory lane. It's nice to trot these old models out into the limelight again and I'll dig some more out soon.