In the beginning...

I first encountered Citadel Miniatures in 1979.

I was a 14 year old with an interest in model-making.  We had a lunch-time model club at school, where we avidly spilt Humbrol enamels on the desks, breathed the dizzying fumes from Airfix plastic cement and carelessly severed fingertips with X-Acto knives.

Then one day everything changed.  A new kid had recently arrived at our school, and he brought in a small selection of metal gaming miniatures to paint.  There were monsters from folklore and fiction, adventurers in armour and wizards in robes and pointy hats.  I had never seen anything like them.  A group soon gathered around these figures, our half-finished Spitfires and Chieftain tanks were abandoned.

We soon found out that these figures were used as playing pieces in a strange new game (well, new for Cornwall) called Dungeons & Dragons.  It wasn't long before D&D took over from model-making as my chief hobby, and I still play regularly today.  But it was always the miniatures which were my first passion!

My earliest purchases of gaming miniatures were mostly from Citadel's Fantasy Adventurers, Fiend Factory and Fantasy Specials ranges, with a few Ral Partha and Minifigs models thrown in to fill the gaps.  Around 20 years ago, I made a concerted effort to collect the complete 'F-series' range, with all it's variants and remakes.  I got pretty close to finding them all, but didn't get far with the painting.

Now, after many years of gathering dust, the collection is back on my painting desk.  Some miniatures don't need much more than a rapid re-basing and a spray of Dullcote, but most need to be painted from scratch.  A lot of the models are poor sculpts by today's standards, and some of the castings are not great quality either, but I'll be presenting them here 'warts and all'.