Today's post is meant to be a sort of time travel, and a naive exhibition too. If I am always happy to repaint my old minis in today's standard, I also appreciate to bring memories back from the past, and to see these minis as they were. Before I finished to repaint all of them (I don't really worry, I am so slow, and I have so many of them), I took time today to take pictures of these old dear toys.
When I was a child, I first played with the minis out of the box, without any paint at all. But one Christmas, my brother received a fabulous gift that would change everything: a box of Playmobil Colors. Do you remember them ? The men, the horses, their equipment, everything was white, and you were meant to add the color with a set of dedicated pencils. An example below:
I don't remember how long it took before I realized that these pencils could be used on other plastic minis... but as soon as it came to my mind, I started to color every mini I had. In those days, my 1/72 soldiers were Airfix and Atlantic.
Let me show you my gallery:
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| Atlantic Greek civilians |
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| Atlantic court of Pharaoh |
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| Airfix Tarzan figures |
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| Airfix Sheriff of Nottingham's men |
But it was impossible to represent armors without metallic colors, so I was encouraged to use model paints, and I discovered the Humbrol Enamel paints. I am sure you remember :) How I hated the smell of the White Spirit...
And other minis got painted too:
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| Atlantic gladiators |
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| Atlantic Romans - the less accurate set ever... The blue one was my first zombie experiment :) |
Years later, I began to use acrylic paints, but without shades and lights.
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| Airfix Robin Hood's men |
Many years passed before I tried other techniques, and you can see the actual style on this blog.
A few pictures to compare the different steps:
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| Atlantic Egyptians: Playmobil color / Humbrol / acrylic |
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| Airfix: Acrylic without shades / with shades |
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| Airfix archers in today's standard. |
I hope you like them all, even the old ones. Do you have a similar experience ?
Thank you for reading this far.
Very similar experience, although I never knew of the Playmobil colours. Along with Humbrol (mostly gloss and I´ve still got a lot of them, all still useable)I even tried wall paints, any old lead paints I could find and fingernail polish..the last two really did smell :-)
RépondreSupprimerGreat figs and a great walk through your 'hobby evolution'. Its so interesting to learn how and why we do the things we do the way we do.
RépondreSupprimerHa! Very cool!
RépondreSupprimerThank you all for your kind comments.
RépondreSupprimerYou have a real talent for making the most of these figures, I could never really get to grips with them.
RépondreSupprimerThank you Russ. As a child I played a lot with them, I probably think they deserve a second life :)
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