Hello world! – Sigur’s Introduction

Welcome to Tale of Painters! I’m Sigur, located in Austria, and one of the guys who will post their pictures, thoughts, opinions, reviews, tutorials and all the other content that make this site. What I will post mostly on the Tale of Painters is what I’m currently working on, pictures of finished models and armies, product reviews, product previews, opinions and ideas on current miniatures ranges and those of the past and painting, the occational event reports and modelling tutorials, hints and tips. I’m running Battle Brush Studios, a painting, modelling and converting service. I’m just mentioning this so you don’t think I really, really clumsily stole my pictures from some company and forgot to remove the watermark. 😉

Here’s some short biography on my painting/wargaming “career” so you know where I’m coming from: Thinking about it retrospectively, my interests started out at each of the three pillars that make today’s Fantasy/Sci-Fi wargaming.

In my early teenage years I started building and painting various historical military model kits (my first proper one was a 1/72nd Saab JAS39 Gripen) which I did mostly at 1/72 and 1/35 scales, mostly WW2. I’m hugely into history. World’s history is the most exciting, most tragic and at times the weirdest setting of all.

I always liked playing games (who doesn’t, right?). My siblings and I would play all these fantasy boardgames that came with miniatures. I think those were mostly popular in the early 1990s and then resurfaced again with the D&D boardgame, Doom, Descent and so on in the 2000s. Good stuff and the first time I started painting Fantasy miniatures. I still have some of those around, maybe I’ll post pictures of them at some point. Should be a good occation for you guys to point at me and laugh. 😉 Of course there’s also video games. Great medium that finally turned what we only imagined before into a visual experience. I’m mostly a PC gamer these days.

Then there was pen&paper role-playing games. The Dark Eye, which I got into at an early age and Shadowrun I have the fondest memories of. Those two also made me appreciate good background settings for games and made me realize how important the background is to get a proper feel for the game.

So combining all these – painting/modelling, gaming and background it was practically inevitable that sooner or later I’d stumble across Warhammer. At least back then, in the mid-1990s, it was hard enough to find anything (fantasy/sci-fi) tabletop wargaming related around here so other systems, the very little that existed, were virtually non-present. First time I got into contact with GW’s games was through Space Crusade (or Star Quest as the publisher called it here), Hero Quest and Battle Masters (a.k.a. The Claymore Saga). At one point I went to one of my favorite store for model kits and noticed that they had a whole new section of stuff that looked just like the stuff I knew from the above games. First my brother and I planned to get some models and add them to our games of Space Crusade but two weeks later I got the big, shiny Warhammer 40,000 box and was immediately captivated by the immense and mysterious 40k universe. It was dark, it was violent, it was epic, it was over the top and, last but not least, it was funny and entertaing as hell. The stuff we knew was great, creative and insane and the best thing was that it was only a glimpse of what’s there and we knew that the stuff we actually didn’t know was even more insane.

So that’s how I got into Warhammer 40k. Warhammer Fantasy soon followed along with some of the games (Gorkamorka, Necromunda, Battlefleet Gothic mainly) that are now known as “Specialist Games”. Games Workshop’s models and games accompanied me for the past 15 years and I’m rather sure that they will go on doing so for a rather long time. If that’s worriying or not is up to you to judge. 😉

Through all these years, I surely painted/converted more than I actually played. Ironically, early 3rd edition 40k was the time I played the most despite the fact that I absolutely hated the 3rd edition rules but that was the only time I actually had a regular group of 40k players. So I guess you could say that I’m a painter/modeller first, gamer second. I enjoy the occational game but never get to play much really.

Around 2002 I started posting my miniatures online and finding that the interaction with a larger group of people online is not only an amazing way to improve one’s painting as well as for getting feedback and motivation to go on. In 2005 I started doing commission painting for a local games store and some people I had met online. In 2010 I started Battle Brush Studios, a professional painting/converting/modelling service. It’s a great experience and I get so much positive feedback and get to work on a huge variety of great projects for people all across the world. In the future I will post pictures of current and past commission projects I did and/or personal projects of mine and I hope that you enjoy them.

Being part of Tale of Painters is a great opportunity for me to showcase pictures of miniatures, share knowledge about painting, sculpting and converting miniatures and just generally interact with people. It’s great to have a place that is so dedicated to painting and modelling because no matter what systems by what company you play, we all enjoy looking at pictures of pretty miniatures. Tabletop wargaming is meant to be a visual and social experience in my opinion and I think that with Tale of Painters, we serve these two aspects very well despite the lack of physical presence.

I’m excited about Tale of Painters. It’s great to work alongside such skillful people as Rev, Sheep and Stahly and I’m very much looking forward to seeing where this project is going. Very special thanks to Stahly for organizing this whole thing of course.

What you will get out of this is tons of painting and modelling content and information and inspiring eyecandy. So let’s get to work, shall we!