When I decided to get back into the hobby I "um'd" and "ah'd" (is that how you spell that?) about what I wanted to paint for quite a while. All I really knew was that I wanted it to be a 40k army. The only armies I knew I didn't want to paint were Chaos Space Marines and Necrons. I don't know what it is about either of these factions but they've just never really done it for me (with the exception of Kharn the Betrayer which is one of my favourite miniatures of all time). As I've mentioned previously, my initial plan was to go with Orks but it didn't take me long before I got sucked in by Space Marines. Once I'd re-familiarised myself with the lore and the rules of chapter organisation, the idea of putting together an entire company really started to appeal to me. I spent a fair bit of time looking at all of the different chapters and narrowed it down to Imperial Fists, White Scars or Blood Angels. I've already shown the Imper...

In my last (and also first) post I talked about how I decided to get in to the hobby, spent a fortune on all kinds of miniatures and then hardly painted any. As true as this may be, I have actually finished painting some  of them... So I thought I'd share a few and give a bit of a brief history lesson on how I got to where I am today. My original plan was to start a small Ork army for Warhammer 40k. I had no intention of ever getting into actually playing 40k (and I still don't), but I thought Orks would be a good place to start as they seemed pretty quick and easy to paint. I bought a box of Boyz but before I'd managed to get together enough paints to actually paint any of them, I'd started to snoop around on eBay and managed to find a complete Assault on Black Reach box set at a pretty reasonable price. I snapped it up, but by the time it had arrived I'd convinced myself I wanted to paint the Space Marines in it first. I decided I didn't want to go for the...

Hello! Thank you for taking the time to check out my new blog. My name is John (AKA Stiff Bristles) and I'm a 32 year old miniature hobbyist, currently living in Nottingham. I first got into collecting and painting Games Workshop miniatures many years ago in primary school. I was never really much of a gamer. I much preferred planning out army lists, spending all of my parent's hard-earned cash on miniatures, supergluing my fingers together trying to assemble them and painting them up. I would play odd game with my friends from time to time, but not very often. As I grew older and moved into high school my commitment to miniature painting waned and by the time I came to do my GCSEs I'd pretty much given it up. However, a few years ago I decided I needed a new hobby and thought I'd take a look at the Games Workshop website and see how things had changed over time. The answer was: not much! In fact a lot of the models still being sold were the same casts I remembere...