I am an avid miniatures hobbyist. I've been in love with the concept since I was around eight years old, and have been actively collecting since middle school.

My first miniatures were a pair of medieval armored footmen, and a quad of Battletech mechs. I thought the whole concept was just magical. When I was in middle school I started getting warhammer miniatures, and then shoplifted a book that changed my life forever:

The modeling guide featured dozens of examples of how you could customize your minis and make them your own. Back in those days, most miniatures were metal with the occasional plastic component, as plastic casting couldn't do the sorts of details metal casting could yet. So you didn't have the modular kits we take for granted these days that make kitbashing a simple process.

This book taught me how to properly clean a miniature, how to saw off components and clean them up to be placed on another. It taught me how bending metal limbs could produce variations, how to use spare parts to hide gaps and create even more uniqueness. How to use modeling putty to make new components. It had so many ideas and guidelines to basically frankenstein up your very own miniature. As a person who learns well from explicit examples, it was transformative.

I became obsessed with the idea of custom figs, and wanted so badly to have my own personalized space marine army someday. Unfortunately high school was a time of little expendable income in my life, and most of the money I got went to Playstation games and DnD books. I occasionally bought Reaper miniatures for use with my games and they became probably my favorite company. I wasn't a bad painter, but my struggles to make things look good would often discourage me. Still, with a little practice and some technical knowledge I became fairly adept.

It was after high school that my Dad got me a simple set of hobby tools: some needle files and a handsaw. Later on, he got me a dremel so I could do even more difficult modifications and parts swaps.

And I was terrible at it. I would often make mistakes, destroy parts I wanted to preserve, create little nicks and not be able to correct them. It was a very discouraging process. Sometimes I would finish a project and then be unhappy with how it came out years later and find myself dismantling it and using the parts for other things. It was easy to get discouraged, but I loved the idea of having a collection of tiny figurines too much to let it go and so I just kept at it, crappy project after crappy project.

My tools eventually became my samurai sword, an extension of my will shaping my miniatures into newer, more awesome forms. Soon enough, my dreams of having my own custom collection began to become real. Even if at a snail's pace.

It was something I loved doing, even when I wasn't very good about following through. Most of my projects never made it to the painting stage, but that is an entirely different struggle for me and my own self-critical personality.

I got better at the things I kept practicing, and in times of my life when I wanted to learn a new skill but was being dragged down by my own habit of self discouragement, I looked back on my successess in the hobby through my own individual determination and that would give me the stubbornness I needed to be more than a novice at anything I wanted to try.

When I decided to stop drinking, miniatures were the things that kept me focused and occupied. Focusing through the dark times of my life has always been a cinch when I could just do miniature work, and over time my tools became a bit of an extension of myself as my skills grew. Eventually I was able to build myself an excellent workshop space:

Now don't make the mistake of picturing me as constantly at my workbench struggling to make art. I have so many hobbies that I cycle through on the regular that it's hard to keep at one thing for too long. On top of that I've accumulated many many bins worth of parts over the years that have been waiting for their chance to be included in some grand project I'll muster up the mettle to see through eventually.

And so this year I have pushed myself to finish as many of my outstanding projects as I could, starting with the Warhammer 40K armies I planned out when I was in high school, and have made a great deal of progress. I'll post them here as they're finished in the coming weeks.