A year ago I discovered a cache of my old Warhammer 40k miniatures. That started my journey back into miniature painting.  

A lot of these minis were part of my original Imperial Guard force, painted back in my middle school days. Unthinned paints, inks instead of washes, and no YouTube tutorials to tell me better. How many destroyed brushed and gallons of washed paints must have gone into these. Oh my. 

The middle school paintjob:

With no reason to save this paintjob, I tossed these figures right in a vat of paint stripper. 

I went to work, priming them grey and trying to figure out how to approach them. The sculpts do have a charm to them. They have have a heavy, bulky feel. The gasmasks certainly drew from the 1980s SAS, and I always got the feel that the suits themselves looked at home in ground combat in some kind of irradiated hellscape.

I painted the top parts of the headgear gold, envisioning is as some kind of heavy lens meant to be rotated down in the face of bright like, something like an astronaut's face shield. 

For the uniforms I kept it simple with dark grey uniforms and black body armor. Still being rusty I do admit that the drybrushing on the armor ended up much too heavy, making the armor blend too much into the suit. If I did things again, the suits would be brighter and the armor would heavy more careful highlights. Live, learn, repeat. 

I did think the weapons needed to stand out from the body and went full Oldhammer with bright red. Added some jewel effect green to the eyepieces and little lights, of which I'm still proud, and gave them a base.  

 A first step back in.