Crack is Cheaper

I don't know what it is, and I know that I have more than enough material in front of me right now to chew through in my free time, but for one reason or another, I'm starting to consider jumping back into Warhammer.

For those that don't know, it's creating amazing things like this.

The catch with creating things like this? Because there is always a catch with something like this, or else everyone would be doing it.

That one little guy is only three (roughly) inches high.

 The interesting part to these, is that they start out as dull plastic/metal, and then it's the job of the individual to put them together, form them, and paint them.

That means that ever color change in the armor, every shade of facial expression, and everything that you see on that first guy was put there by a person. Some of the work was done in the model, but all of the coloring, the forming of his body and making sure that everything was in the exact place that you see it, was put together by a person.

It is an intense hobby, and the down side to it, is that it is an expensive (like super expensive) hobby.

The only people that do this hobby are people that have a lot of time, a lot of attention to detail, and a lot of disposable income. One unit of men cost around $35. That's them unpainted, unassembled, and looking horrible.

One little army man, if you're being lazy, is going to take about a half hour to glue together. Then you're going to have to do multiple levels of paint. You do an undercoat/primer, base coat, and then at least one layer of detailing through doing a wash or drybrush. That's low end of time. If you're going to actually care about your piece, make sure that it looks like some quality work, you're going to involve primer, base level, wash, dry brushing, detail work, and then highlights and lowlights as needed from there, and don't forget painting or including stuff on the base of he model. Just remember that each time you do a different thing, you have to wait for whatever you did previously to dry and cure, to make sure that you don't mess up whatever it was that you did before.

Let's also take in consideration the size of these things.

If you're going to play the game, and not just collect and model, the smallest army that you can possibly run is a chaos army. Each model has a specific amount of points that they're equal to. Points balance armies. One army of 2,000 points might be a few members of well trained, heavily modified knights, but it could also be 2,000 points of a swarm of untrained, weak, rats. Chaos armies are the heaviest point value, so you're going to get the least amount of models, so the low end of things means that you're going to only have about two dozen things to paint. However, if you go the other route and just want to go over the top and have a huge low point army, you can get over 100 models for only about 200-300 points.

 Now, imagine having to make every single unit in an army have the same quality of work. Trying to paint them all equally with the same quality of work means time. Lots, and lots of time. Think about making one guy, now make him 19 more times. Then make another type of guy, and then make him 14 more times. It's a lot of time.

Because of how painfully expansive this is, I would not be interested in creating a full army. I'm interested in making a few models at a time. If, by luck, I become a fan of this long enough, and don't pull out all of my hair doing it, I could build up an entire army, just one little bit at a time.

I'm not even sure that I actually want to get into this, but hey, if you're ever short on a gift idea buy me a paintbrush and some paints (just acrylic paints, I don't need anything specific (expensive) like Citadel paints. In fact, all I really need is a white, black, skin tone, and the primary colors, I'm not above mixing my own colors, it's cheaper and about 1,000,000 times more hardcore/impressive when you tell people that you mixed every single color you used yourself), or even decide to shell out for a unit. Anything at all from the Vampire Counts armies, is what I like. I like those models the most, and I think they're the most interesting. Seriously, if you ever are lost and have nothing else better to do with your time (or money) feel free to buy ANYTHING from that page and send it my way, and I'll love it.

Let's be honest, you hand me anything even related to this and I don't have to pay for it, I'll be happy. Even if it's not stuck just in the world of Warhammer Fantasy, but you go into Warhammer 40k (the sci-fi step brother to fantasy) I'd still be happy to see that.

Either way, all things considering with the amount of time, effort, energy, and money that Warhammer would cost me if I got into it - crack would be cheaper.