Cover Gallery - White Dwarf #122 Back Cover

Waaaagggghhhh, Da Orks!!!!

There is certainly some bias involved since this was my first issue, but this is my favorite of the back cover dioramas in WD.  I spent so many hours in the pre-internet days of my teens staring at this picture and dreaming of how I would paint the models or use them in a game.  I loved reading 'Ere We Go and built so many aspirational ork armies on paper that never saw a game.  The original plastic boyz, battlewagon, and warbike are still sitting in their boxes twenty-five years later just waiting to recreate this classic scene.  2023 hobby goals perhaps????

Cover Gallery - White Dwarf #122

The Cover That Started It All, For Me Anyway...

Even though I included this cover in my very first post on this blog, this issue was so instrumental in the genesis of my love of the Warhammer universe it definitely needed to get the cover gallery treatment.  There are certainly better scans of this cover out there, it is more than obvious from the picture that I have owned this since I was 12 and it has been read countless times.  This cover still makes me happy every time I view it.  Even though there was very little WH40K content inside, the beautiful miniatures and stunning ads left me with a hunger to learn more about this fictional world that still continues unabated 30 years later.  Thanks for stopping by and stay safe out there...

Cover Gallery - White Dwarf #117

 The Beginning...

So while it seems crazy to post the cover of a White Dwarf that is a truncated version of the banner picture you can see every time you load this page, there is a method to my madness.  I recently picked up a few more classic issues of White Dwarf to add to my collection and combined with the recent publication of Herohammer fanzine, I was inspired for a new feature on the blog.  I have mentioned many times how pivotal these old issues of White Dwarf were in kindling my lifelong love of the hobby, so I have decided to utilize my scanning abilities and feature the covers of these amazing magazines from my youth.  As cool as many of the front covers are, the back covers in those early days were really amazing.  I spent so may hours staring at the dioramas the 'Eavy Metal team would create thinking about the narrative established by the image and how I'd love to be able to own/paint the miniatures pictured.  I used the first of these cover diorama scans to promote Herohammer's premiere this week and I will be featuring a scan every week to highlight the front and back of these fantastic periodicals.

White Dwarf #117 was the second issue I ever purchased but given the subject nature of my blog and army collecting you can see what an influence this one issue had on me.  My scanner is perceptive enough to catch the wear and tear of thirty years on this illustration when compared to the banner pic above so you can see what a well loved gem this was in my collection.  Someday I would like to do in depth reviews of the contents of each issue but I think I'll need my kids to go to college before I have that much free time on my hands to do the reviews justice, so for now I'll just settle for highlighting the covers.  Thanks for reading along and stay safe out there!

Genestealer Attack!

Roots Of Madness

I spent so much time staring at this picture when I was twelve.  I had never seen such a detailed multi-level diorama that told a story with so much drama and action in stationary models.

To show how much my fascination with the lore of WH40K as illustrated in the many works of the GW studio and 'Eavy Metal permeated my mind almost constantly as a teen, I found this sketch the other day that I drew when I was 12.  This would have been around the winter spring of 91-92 as I was really immersing myself in any GW material I could get my hands on and definitely the result of hours spent staring at the above diorama which was featured on the back of a How To Paint Citadel Miniatures guide that sadly is no longer in my collection.   Is it the random luck of the dicing universe this sketch came back to the forefront of my attention in relative proximity to the time when I found a mediocre picture of that classic diorama on Facebook?  Like the Tootsie Roll pop, the world may never know...

Epic Proportions WIP

Salamanders Slither Forth

If they could muster an entire veteran company, my Salamanders must be a pre-Istvaan V army...

As May marches on, I'm making some progress in my goal to paint/restore somewhere between 500-1000 points each month as part of the Epic Proportions challenge.  I'm going for the low hanging fruit this month and restoring the first GW army of any kind that I ever owned and played games with.  Additionally this story will explain why I have a green space marine army that's not the first legion.

My first exposure to the 40K universe was when I started picking up White Dwarf issues in 8th grade way back in 1990.  However for the first year I was interested in the hobby, it was a solo adventure.  Coming from a small rural town in Pennsylvania I didn't know any one who was even familiar with Games Workshop or Warhammer.   While I had gotten Rogue Trader, RTB01, and other box sets for Christmas that year, other than trying to convince my younger brother to play an overly complicated game that neither one of us could totally understand, my experiences with actual gameplay were only in issues of WD or my imagination.  All that changed one fateful day in 9th grade Geometry class...

WIP Battletech

Giant Robots!

Green and Gold is the color scheme you end up with when your gaming group is made up of too many William and Mary graduates...

Battletech is another of my lifelong loves and my gaming group had only gotten two games into a campaign right before lockdown 2020 happened.  We have found an innovative way to keep it going which I will post on next week but until then I'm including a WIP Mech that is the current ride of one of my lance mates.  This Griffin is from the Battletech 2nd Edition box set that I bought off the off the Games/Hobby shelf of a Waldenbooks wayyyy back in 1992.  That was my first introduction to the game but I was immediately hooked and it has remained one of my favorite games and background settings, second only to WH40K.  I stripped his very old and unskilled paint job I had applied long ago and now I'm repainting him and his lance mates in the colors requested by my weekly gaming group.  Using the Dark Angels Green contrast paint, and honestly I know this wasn't GW's intent but contrast paint works great on Battlemechs.  It settles into the many recesses and skips you right to the step of drybrushing which is the heart of most Mech painting.  I used Soulstone Blue from the short-lived gem colors paints from GW for the cockpit and I really like the glossy effect that it gives.  More on the subject of Battletech to follow in the future...

3rd Squad, 4th Company

Or Why Do I Paint All The Chest Eagles And Pauldron Edges Yellow? Part I

Veteran Sergeant Peliel, Squad Standard Bearer Areli, Squad Support Gunner Thaddeus

Plasma Cannon Gunner Nahum

Hello phantasmal readers, the blog has been filled with some non-GW content lately that's frankly far faster and easier to produce, but today we return to our first order of business - painted Dark Angels miniatures!  Also today we will answer the question on the minds of everyone (all four of you) reading this blog: why do my Dark Angels look so colorful?  The answers will involve a deep dive into the history of space marine paint schemes and some pictures of my most recently completed unit Squad Peliel of the fourth company.

Heretics!

Part Two

The 2nd and 3rd gentlemen from the left are the only metal models in this unit.

Previously on 1st Legion Chronicles ...Staring down my first ever entry into the Nova Open and knowing I would be playing next to the corrupted forces of my friend's Death Guard Army I was unable to bring myself to field my Dark Angels army in concert with the decrepit heretics...

There was a solution to my problem that would involve a race against the clock hobby project for what remained of the spring and the summer before Nova 19 in August.  When 3rd edition 40K came out in the late 90's my brother, his dad, and I played 40K on an almost weekly basis for a few years.  At the time my brother played a Chaos Space Marine army as they were known in the days before the addition of extraneous latin for the purposes of copyright differentiation.  His army served him well for a few years and traveled with us along with mine when we moved to Colorado in 2002.

Origin Stories

or How It All Got Started

Hello, Everyone... or more realistically no one since this is a new blog about an already niche hobby.  Nonetheless for the sake of future back scrolling I will explain the whys of this venture a little bit.  I have enjoyed reading comic book and gaming blogs since they first became popular in the early aughts.  Having been a fan of the main blog for years, I wanted to participate in Dreadtober, a subsidiary collaborative modeling and painting project of the the awesome Mordian 7th blog.

The Mordian 7th author was gracious enough to include me in the project even though I didn't have anywhere to post updates of my dreadnought WIP.  However, the more I thought about it, I believed I had grokked the essential elements of all the blogs I have read and loved over the years.  I have been fortunate enough to have enjoyed 30 years of adventures in the highs and lows of comic books and miniature collecting.  Also, I am a super wordy person who enjoys the long way to tell a story, and now that my children are in elementary school for at least seven hours a day, the potential time to bore others with my tales of gaming and collecting via the magic of the tubes and wires of the Internet.