ABOUT

About GeOrc's Workbench

Welcome to GeOrc's Workbench — a place for painted armies, rare miniatures, unfinished projects and more than two decades of collecting and painting.

I started the hobby in 1998 with a Dark Elf army and have been painting and collecting miniatures ever since. Over the years, my hobby has moved between three closely connected passions: building armies, hunting down rare and unreleased miniatures, and pushing my painting through competitions.

This blog has always been the place where these different sides of my hobby come together.

Armies & Projects

I have always been an army painter at heart.

There is something fascinating about seeing a large collection of miniatures come together as a coherent force. I enjoy the repetition and uniformity of an army, but at the same time I want individual models and characters to break that uniformity and give the whole project its own identity.

Dark Elves were my first army when I entered the hobby in 1998, and they remain one of my great passions. Part of their appeal has always been the sheer diversity of the range: Witch Elves and Cold One Knights alongside dragons, Manticores, Hydras, Harpies and all the other creatures that make a Dark Elf army feel like much more than ranks of similar warriors.

My Dark Elves – the army that started it all and has remained a constant passion ever since.

Over the years, many other armies and projects have joined them. Some are complete, some have been growing for years, and others are still waiting on the workbench.

For me, that is part of the attraction. An army is never just a collection of individually painted miniatures. It becomes something larger when all those models finally stand together.

Unreleased & Rarities

I have probably always been a collector.

As a child it might have been completing a LEGO Space series or filling the last gaps in a Panini album. There is something deeply satisfying about completing a collection — and something equally irritating about knowing that one piece is still missing.

Unfortunately, I chose exactly the right army to turn that tendency into an obsession.

One of the unreleased
4th Edition Dark Elves

Among the Dark Elves produced around the 4th Edition were a number of miniatures that appeared in publications and even in the army book, but were never commercially released. You could see them. You knew they existed. You just couldn't buy them.

That was irresistible.

Finding those miniatures meant looking beyond shops and catalogues and getting in contact with collectors, painters and people connected to the hobby. Over time, tracking down unreleased sculpts and unusual pieces became a distinct part of the hobby for me.

But I have never wanted simply to own them. I want to paint them.

For some of these miniatures, only a handful of painted examples exist. Bringing an obscure sculpt out of a collection and finally seeing it painted is still one of the things I enjoy most about the hobby — and it has often led to the next miniature, the next contact and the next story.

Competition Painting

My standards for my own painting were high almost from the beginning.

With some of my Golden Demon trophies.

I had always enjoyed drawing and painting, and as a teenager and young adult I finally found the medium that really suited me in miniature painting. At first, my goal was simple: I wanted my models to look like the box art and the studio armies I saw in White Dwarf.

Trying to reproduce those models pushed my painting forward quickly. The first successes at local painting competitions followed around 2000, and in 2003 I won my first award at the Golden Demon.

For many years, army painting and competition painting were not really separate things for me. I would start painting a model for an army, realise somewhere along the way that it had potential, push it a little further — and sometimes that was enough to turn an army piece into a successful competition entry.

That also became closely connected to collecting. A well-painted rare miniature was often a better introduction than any message I could write. Many unreleased models spend their lives unpainted in collectors' drawers, and showing what one of these sculpts could look like when given the full painting treatment helped me build relationships with other collectors and occasionally opened the door to pieces I would otherwise never have had the chance to acquire.

From army painting to competition pieces

Competition painting itself has changed considerably since those years. With the relaunch and restructuring of the Golden Demon, the standard and character of competition painting have moved increasingly towards highly elaborate individual pieces and narrative display art.

My more recent entries have still earned pins and Commended Entries, but I no longer consider myself truly competitive at the very top level.

And perhaps that brings things full circle.

These days, my focus is shifting back towards where it began: painting armies, building collections and giving individual characters enough attention to make them stand out among the ranks.

The Workbench

After more than two decades in the hobby, there are plenty of unfinished armies, half-realised ideas, old miniatures waiting to be restored, rare sculpts waiting for paint — and inevitably another project just around the corner.

GeOrc's Workbench is where all of that comes together.

It is an archive of what I have painted, a record of what I am working on, and a place to share some of the unusual miniatures I have been fortunate enough to collect along the way.

And there is still plenty left on the workbench.

GeOrc