Quote Originally Posted by Thanqol View Post
(Incidentally, I'm actually glad I didn't get into it earlier than I did. I simply wouldn't have had the mental, physical and financial infrastructure to do what I have been doing before now - and also, I seem to have dodged the worst of Games Workshop's evil phase.)
Hopefully, I'm not hijacking your drawthread for personal reflection overly much, but I have experience with this exact thing and it may be of interest to you. When I was in high school, I was very into Games Workshop models. I doubt I was ever as good a painter as you were, I liked building the models, painted simple colors schemes with just one or two layers, and then liked playing the games with them, but despite those differences, the parts of the hobby I enjoyed, I really, really enjoyed. I was in the Warhammer 40k afterschool club at school (which I helped found), and before I even got a license to drive, had my parents cart me around to local game stores to play. Models were a tad more limited at the time (they only had plastic kits for the big main squads, you needed pewter cast for a lot of the other stuff), but even with that, I had a full Space Marine army, and enough craftworld Eldar to field both a normal Codex force and a Biel-Tan specialty specialty force. I also dipped my toe into Warhammer, with some lizardmen, undead, and Bretonnians, though only in small groups.

And, well, that stuff is all still there in my parents' basement, but it's not doing anyone much good. The problem with getting into it so early is that I was young. And I moved out for college with no way to take any of that stuff and no space to continue the hobby while living in a college dorm with three other people. Then I moved across the entire United States for law school and ain't nobody wants to ship all those models anywhere, so I didn't even have access to them if I had wanted them. I then went and worked, and then worked elsewhere, such that I've moved house, let's see, I think four times in the past six years. So, without ever really intending to give it up, I can now look back and say that I pretty much abandoned my Games Workshop model hobby purely out of the fact that I haven't touched any of the models in over a decade now. And while my parents have done an admirable job storing them all that time, at this point I hardly know what I had, nor am I at all certain that everything survived the process of being boxed up and moved onto shelves in a basement, so there's a good chance that there's a box full of headless Eldar down there (the pointy hats and tiny neck joints were a perennial risk for the careless).

It might be a hobby that I take back up from scratch now that I have my own home and have a basement with lots of storage space, but there's quite a mental barrier to starting something like that back up at the moment. So, for real, count yourself lucky that you fell into it, with all its joy and unique community at a time when you're able to support it and not have to abandon all the time and work you put into it just because of how life works.