Paints?!

This is an expensive hobby sometimes, especially when you're starting out. This last week or so its brought home in a couple of ways.

Firstly, paints. A bunch of the first paints I bought when restarting the hobby are now running out of life, and need replacing, and I've been thinking about moving from the Citadel Paints (with their fairly well documented problems) to another brand - probably Vallejo given their decent reputation and availability. The problem, mostly, is cost - sure, they're cheap on a pot-by-pot basis but it adds up quickly once you consider how many colours I end up using on even a simply painted model. and of course now GW have refreshed their whole line, which has put me back into "wait and see" mode for the early reviews.

The other thing comes from the much better place that my ongoing painting hobby has spiked the interest of my eldest child, who has co-opted the Orks from my AoBR set, painted them up, and we've started doing battles with them. This is, of course, enormous fun, even if it's often unbalanced and we get the rules wrong a fair bit. But I've got a decent number of Blood Ravens now, because I've been painting them predominantly over the last few months, and most of them I can't use because I'd just crush him. Picking up a couple of boxes of Orks (a horde army, at that!) us again, a costly investment. Maybe ebay is the answer, for just knock-about forces?

There's no real conclusion to this, but it has reminded me that this must really bite on kids, often with less disposable income, trying to get into this for the first time!