The Dwarf Army Completed - A Warhammer Journey

 The Entire Dwarf Army is now Complete!

It has only taken 36 years to complete the army. Yes, that is most of my life.
I purchased my first dwarfs in 1988 in a blister pack, (Norse Dwarfs by the Perry twins), and little did I know that it would eventually turn into the throng you see before you.

At this stage I wasn't collecting armies, oh no, I saved up my pocket money and a little from my sales job and bought some models, enamel paints and began what would become a life-long hobby.

I mostly bought minis I liked, but never considered collecting a Warhammer army.

...until..

I walked into a Games Workshop store in Hornsby, Sydney where I found this guy.
He reminded me of a Slayer dwarf I used to roleplay in D&D called Slade.
I bought him and painted him terribly in enamels, using a pinhead to make the tattoos.

That was really the catalyst, as I then began, very slowly, collecting slayers, then other dwarves, and when unable to afford any, made my own using sculpey.

I scored at second-hand copy of 3rd edition as well as Slaves to Darkness and The Lost and the Damned and this became the first edition of Warammer I played and the first time the dwarves would enter the tabletop battlefield. 

  

I never played 4th edition, and only had a few games of 5th edition, including a dwarf vs dwarf battle. I'll always remember to check to see if my slayers have an additional hand weapon next time.
I very much preferred the Marauder style dwarves over others and hated the 4th edition monopose warriors. So ugly. Yes, I have one. It is not in my army, but the shields are.

I didn't mind monopose in my  other armies, growing as they did with boxed sets of Battlemasters, but for the dwarf army, I wanted individuality in every model.
I converted models that I had duplicates of, and that was fine for many years, but then I was buying small batches online and duplicates became necessary if one wanted to field larger units.
There simply wasn't enough variety in the citadel range for a large unit, so I ended up painting them differently rather that converting every single one.

By the time 6h edition came out, I was well on my way to painting up proper units and had a nice range of war machines too. I liked 6th edition rules as they had a lot of 3rd edition feel and made things a lot smoother and I also liked that magic was back in the rulebook rather than a card add-on.

I purposely skipped a few of the GW miniature range editions, not liking the aesthetic, but when BFSP box came out I decided the scuplts were mostly acceptable and would not only boost my dwarf army, but the goblin army too. I also had a good paying job at the time and so I snapped it up, even though it would take me years to paint the dwarf models, and yes, I still have a lot of the goblins with base paint only. Not every single dwarf made it into the army, but most did.

 

It was really the Battle for Skull Pass that got me painting matching uniform schemes too, as individuality often meant a massive rag-tag look for the unit once they were all lined up.
While this was ok when I only had a few units, it also took ages to finish painting models, so when the box came with units, I started speeding up my paint times and finishing whole units at a time.

With the end in sight and Warhammer the Old World due for release, I put my head down and gathered up the last of my dwarf models, finished off the Longbeards and then finally the last unit - Bugmans Drunken Quarrellers. I had been collecting every dwarf with a tankard that I could to make the drunken dwarf unit, and finally, I completed it the week TOW launched.



After that, it was down to a few warrior stragglers, a handful of alternative sculpts that only had undercoat and then finally basing with flock, updating the flock on the old models as well.

The last stage was moving them all to 3D printed movement trays, and finishing off the final cannon crew from the BFSP boxed set which took only one day.

Time to arrange them and take the photo.
A total of 297 dwarves.

For Valaya!