Where to start painting?

My love for miniatures dates back at the end of the 80s, but in those days me and my friends used them for self-written-platform-like adventure games, with crazy rules and bizarre stories.

Those were glorious days, when our imagination run wild and game balance was something none of us had ever heard of.

Then came Heroquest and Space Crusade (Starquest in Italy) , who changed the way we played forever.

And finally, in '92, came Battle Masters, which was a blast!

Battle Masters was my first experience with fantasy mass battles, and God, I loved that game! I played it tons of times, and enjoyed every moment with it.

Even though most of the miniatures get lost in time and space, I still own and use the plastic tower that came in the box and the Chaos Archers, which are fantastic models!

It took me one more year to discover Warhammer Fantasy Battles, the 4th edition box, but that proved to be a much more difficult game system, and most of my friends didn't like it that much.

So I struggled to find opponents and, in the end, I dropped it for the 40k, witch was way more popular in my area.

And that was sad, because I really liked both the models and the setting and the idea of moving around the battlefield big, squared units of medieval-like fantasy cliches with banners, heroes, musicians and all of that.

Since I opened the big 4th ed. box, I really fell in love with the aesthetic of the high elven army, and even more upon reading the army book, with the all the fluff and the photos of the studio models.

But, in those days, I never had the determination (and the money) to collect an army I wouldn't even play with.

So that left me something like a wargaming scar, something I can't really shake me off... The urge to collect and paint a proper High Elves Army!

And now, I think, it's about time to accomplish exactly that! I will give to my "inner boy" the army he once dreamt of.

The long term goal of my project is to collect and paint each and every high elf model that was in 4th ed. (and to have some wargaming fun in the process).

I know it will take a lot of time, but I think it's doable, there weren't so many models at the time and I already managed to find quite a lot, actually.

Painting them will prove to be much harder, that's for sure!

Here comes the title of the post, "where to start painting"?

I already have a good amount of models from different units, and some heroes, too.

Which one to paint first?

After some procrastination, I opted for one of the most common units in the army: the archers. 

There are quite a few reasons for that: first of all I will need a lot of these, if I want to actually play with my army sooner or later; secondly they're quite disposable, since it's easy to find them for reasonable prices, and lastly I won't be too upset if I screw them up in the process (as I'm a little bit rusted in my painting-fu).

Here is the prototype for the first unit, a classic plastic monopose, what do you think of it?

I'm not too displeased of how it came out, and right now 15 of his brothers are on my painting desk waiting to be completed.

I hope to be able to show you the result of this batch painting soon enough, even if I'm struggling with it right now.

I've always hated batch painting, since I easily get bored of the same model over and over, so I think I will make smaller groups in the future, say 6 models at a time to avoid being bogged down.

The most important thing is, at this stage, not to lose the momentum, and keep painting till I have enough models to play something with them (maybe a little Song of Blades and Heroes game, which requires low model count... we'll see in the future).

Had you ever done something similar? Any advice?

Cheers,

ilmostromarino