Phase one is complete...

 Hello and welcome to Inso's World. This post will be all about my Space Dwarf Army because I have reached the first major milestone... it has all been sculpted, it has all been cast up and converted and it has all been painted. What started as a brief conversation over six years ago, has finally reached this milestone and I reckon that it is worthy of a recap so please feel free to pull up a sandbag because it's a bit of a story...

Around nine years ago, I retired from the Royal Air Force and moved to sunny Cornwall. I hadn't been there long before I thought I'd sculpt something and when I showed it off, people wanted me to share so I decided to get it cast up and would see how it went. The sculpt in question was a pair of legs that shortened a standard Terminator into a Dwarf version. The image shows the legs fitted to GW Terminator bodies. This little foray into the world of selling casts of my own work didn't go brilliantly; selling a dozen sets of five legs and not really making back my costs:

Click the Pic!

Undeterred, I decided to make a small unit of Halfling Snipers to get cast up to both use in my armies and sell some copies. This fared slightly better but I didn't sell all of them and I ended up selling the greens to Checkpoint Miniatures:

Click the Pic!

After this, I continued to build my GW plastic Squat army until there was a competition to sculpt a sci-fi character... so I sculpted my Space Dwarf Berserker:

Click the Pic!

The sculpt didn't win and I felt it would probably be better selling it off... so I did. After this, there was a further competition and I sculpted a pair of Space Dwarfs:

Click the Pic!

Again, these didn't win but I didn't sell them and kept them in my collection... THEN, I got a message from Chris Nicholls (owner of Macrocosm Miniatures), saying that he had bought the Berserker sculpt from the guy I sold it to. I said that I had a couple of greens sitting idle if he wanted them so he bought the two competition sculpts from me. THEN we had a chat and I suggested that it would be cool for me to sculpt a range for him, at my own pace and all I'd need in return would be casts of the sculpts... and the deal was struck! That was about six years ago and led to me sculpting a range:

Click the Pic!

It was a bumpy ride... I had a mental breakdown and was in therapy for three years, caught Long Covid which lasted about 13 months, got side-tracked a few times and lost my mojo a bit but the range kept growing, the sculpts kept getting done and eventually, all of the items on my army list were ticked off. During the process, I was arranging my casts in to units and getting paint on them as I went along... culminating in an army of painted miniatures that is 125 miniatures strong:

Click the Pic!

As well as the army, I painted a few other bits along the way... like Thor, an Adventurer, a Berserker, a Grief Diorama and a few other bits... but they are for another post (maybe)... and the focus is on the army and having all those miniatures painted is the end of Phase One.

Phase Two will be adding tufts to all the bases and varnishing the army... THEN, the army will be finished and ready for Phase Three; the creation of a scenic display base.

However... I am currently basking in the successful completion of Phase One and will get around to starting the next phase when I have cleared some of the sculpting backlog I have managed to build up.

This has been a journey! 

I have received a lot of encouragement along the way, from the hobby community and a few people who are almost as Dwarf obsessed as I am. I certainly couldn't have done it without my friend Chris at Macrocosm Miniatures, who has left me to it and been very patient with my progress!

Six years...

Worth it!

See you from the top of the pedestal!