Skip to main content
Two free guides. One small creative adventure. Start your adventure here!

Tag: Fatherhood

Starting Warhammer 40K as a Complete Beginner: Why I Chose Aeldari

Posted on by

I didn’t choose my first Warhammer 40K army because someone told me it was the easiest one for a beginner. I chose Aeldari because the way they play sounded interesting, the models gave me plenty of room to experiment with paint, and my four-year-old daughter thought the idea of space elves was great. That last one may not appear in many competitive army guides. It still mattered. Starting Warhammer 40K from absolutely zero means making a surprising number of decisions before you have any real idea what you’re doing. There are factions, subfactions, Combat Patrols, datasheets, paints, lore, army lists, weapon options, and enough abbreviations floating around online to make you wonder if everyone else received an orientation packet you somehow missed. So naturally, one of the first big questions is which army to choose. I ended up with Aeldari.

Starting Warhammer 40K Means Choosing Something You Actually Care About

A lot of beginner advice focuses on finding the easiest army. That makes sense. Warhammer 40K already has a lot to learn, so picking a forgiving faction can remove some of the friction. But I think there is another part of the decision that matters just as much, especially when you are brand new. You have to actually want the army. Not just the rules. The army. You are going to spend hours building these things. Then you are going to spend more hours painting the miniatures. Eventually you have to learn what all the models do, remember which weapons belong to which unit, and figure out why the beautifully painted squad you carefully positioned just disappeared from the table. Probably because you positioned it less carefully than you thought. If I was going to put that much time into one faction, I wanted one that interested me beyond whether it happened to be considered beginner-friendly at the moment.

Your first Warhammer 40K army probably shouldn’t just be the army somebody tells you is easiest. It should be an army that gives you enough reasons to keep building, painting, learning, and playing it.

The Aeldari Playstyle Sounded Like Something I’d Actually Enjoy

The first thing that pushed me toward Aeldari was the way the army is supposed to play. At a broad level, Aeldari are fast, mobile, and specialized. Their units tend to have particular jobs rather than simply being good at everything, and much of their battlefield identity revolves around getting those units into the right place at the right time. That isn’t just community shorthand. Games Workshop’s own guide to starting an Aeldari army describes them as relying on specialist units for precise, powerful attacks while using speed to compensate for forces that can often be relatively fragile. That immediately sounded more interesting to me than choosing an army primarily because it could absorb mistakes.

I Like the Idea of Movement Matter­ing

I like the idea that where I put something should matter. Movement, positioning, picking a fight, getting a specialized unit where it needs to be, and then trying to get it out again all sound like the kind of tactical problems I want to learn. The current Warhammer 40,000 Aeldari Faction Focus still puts a heavy emphasis on that speed, particularly across the faction’s vehicles and mobile shooting. Of course, liking the concept and executing it correctly are two completely different things. I am very much at the first part. But that is also why the army appealed to me. I want to learn the positioning part of the game rather than just discovering which units can stand in one place most efficiently.

Specialized Units Also Mean More to Learn

This is also where I think the usual question of whether Aeldari are a good Warhammer 40K beginner army gets slightly complicated. The same specialization that makes them interesting can make them less forgiving. If one unit is particularly good at solving one kind of problem, I eventually need to learn what that problem is. Speed does not automatically make an army easier either. Moving very quickly in the wrong direction is still moving in the wrong direction. You just arrive at the mistake sooner. And many Aeldari units trade durability for mobility or offensive power, so poor positioning can have consequences. That doesn’t make them a bad beginner army. It just means good for beginners and easy to play aren’t necessarily the same thing.

Then My Daughter Heard “Space Elves”

The second reason was considerably less technical. My four-year-old daughter loved the idea of space elves. Fair enough. There are substantially worse sales pitches. Warhammer 40K is full of enormous armored soldiers, walking skeleton robots, alien swarms, daemons, religious machinery, and several factions that appear to have looked at the phrase “too many skulls” and rejected the premise entirely. And then there are elegant psychic space elves flying around on anti-gravity vehicles. That clicked with her. Her interest didn’t determine the whole decision, but it gave me another reason to like it. Part of what I want from getting into hobbies again is finding places where my own interests can overlap naturally with the things my kids find interesting. Not because every hobby has to become a family activity. Some things can just be mine. But if I’m going to spend hours painting tiny science-fiction warriors and my daughter is already interested in what they look like, what colors they should be, and the fact that they are apparently elves in space? That’s a pretty good bonus. It also connects to the bigger reason I’m building The Creative Return in the first place. I want creativity and hobbies to be things that exist alongside family life rather than things I vaguely remember having time for before it.

Aeldari Gave Me Room to Paint Something That Was Mine

The painting side may have been just as important as the tabletop side. One of the reasons I wanted to start Warhammer was the miniatures themselves. I didn’t just want an army that sounded fun to play. I wanted models that I would actually enjoy painting, experimenting with, and eventually making look like my army rather than a slightly worse copy of the picture on the box. Aeldari are extremely good for that. Different Craftworlds already use dramatically different color schemes, while Aspect Warriors traditionally bring their own recognizable colors and visual identities. Games Workshop’s beginner painting material specifically points out the faction’s wide range of colors and the freedom painters have to incorporate those traditions however they want. That opened the door for what I wanted to do anyway. Experiment.

I Didn’t Want the Box Art to Become a Rule

There is nothing wrong with painting an established Craftworld scheme exactly as shown. Some of them look great. But as a new painter, I like the idea that I can try different combinations without feeling like I broke some sacred rule because the left knee pad is the wrong shade of red. I especially wanted room to work pink into the army for my daughter. And Aeldari feel almost built for that kind of experimentation. Sleek armor, bright colors, contrasting helmets, spirit stones, Aspect Warriors, vehicles, and all the little details give me a lot of places to play with color without making every model look identical. That matters because painting isn’t just the chore standing between buying a box and playing the game. For me, it is part of the reason to buy the box at all.

I didn’t just want an army that sounded fun to play. I wanted an army I would still want to work on when there wasn’t a game scheduled.

Are Aeldari Actually a Good Beginner Army?

I think they can be. But I would put an asterisk the size of a Wraithknight next to that answer. If by “good beginner army” you mean an army designed to forgive every bad decision while you learn the rules, Aeldari probably aren’t the most obvious answer. The faction’s emphasis on specialization, speed, and positioning means there is quite a bit to learn. Some units are less durable than the giant armored warriors found elsewhere in Warhammer 40K, and using the wrong tool for the wrong job can go badly. But if by “good beginner army” you mean an army that gives you reasons to stay interested while you learn? That is different. Aeldari have a huge visual identity, lots of different unit styles, fast vehicles, Aspect Warriors, Wraith constructs, psychic weirdness, plenty of painting options, and enough variation that I can see several different directions an army could eventually go. I find that much more useful than being told I should start with something else purely because it has a gentler learning curve. The rules can be learned. Wanting to spend the next hundred hours with the models is harder to fake.

The First Army Doesn’t Have to Be the Perfect Army

This is probably the biggest thing I have taken from choosing my first Warhammer 40K army. I don’t think there is a perfect choice. Rules change. Points change. Units get stronger and weaker. New books appear. Games Workshop occasionally reaches into the machinery and moves several important gears around while everyone is still arguing about the previous arrangement. If your entire reason for choosing a faction is that somebody online says it is currently the easiest or strongest option, that reason has an expiration date. The models don’t change nearly as quickly. Neither does the basic fantasy of the faction. If you love the lumbering war machines, pick the lumbering war machines. Do you want an endless swarm of horrible bugs, there is an army waiting for you. If giant armored knights are the reason you started looking at Warhammer in the first place, that probably tells you something useful. For me, it was fast, specialized space elves that I could paint in colors my daughter and I both thought looked cool. That seems like enough of a reason to start.

For Me, That Was Aeldari

I am still at the beginning of all this. That’s important. This isn’t an article written after years of tournament games explaining why everyone else has misunderstood Aeldari. It is the opposite. I am learning the army while I learn Warhammer 40K itself. And that is part of what I want to document on EpicAgain: starting hobbies from the uncomfortable point where other people already seem to know all the terminology, all the tricks, and apparently which shade paint produces the objectively correct buckle. I picked Aeldari because the playstyle makes me want to understand the game. I picked them because the models make me want to paint. And I picked them because my daughter thinks space elves are cool. None of that proves they are the correct first Warhammer army. It only proves they were the right one for me to start with. I still have to learn how to play them. But at least I picked an army I actually want to learn.

Sharing Hobbies With Kids: Planning Pink Aeldari With My Daughter

Posted on by
The project started bringing creativity back before we painted a single miniature. We haven’t painted a single pink Aeldari yet. We do, however, have enough tiny space elves waiting for paint that this distinction is becoming increasingly academic. What started as me getting into Warhammer 40,000 has slowly turned into something my four-year-old daughter has a piece of too. We’ve been shopping together, looking at models, building up the army, and settling on the most important tactical decision of the entire project. They’re going to be black and pink. The actual painting still has to happen. There will be mistakes, experiments, colors that look much better in my head than they do on plastic, and probably several Guardians sacrificed to the ancient hobby gods of Trying Something Weird. But the interesting part is that the project already feels like it has started. And that has made me think differently about sharing hobbies with kids.

Sharing Hobbies With Kids Doesn’t Have to Start With Teaching

I think we often picture sharing a hobby with our kids in one particular way. The parent knows how to do something. The child becomes interested. Then the parent teaches them. That is not what is happening here. I am new too. I’m learning Warhammer 40K, learning the Aeldari, learning how the army works, and getting back into miniature painting as part of the same process. There is something useful about that. I don’t have to stand over the project as the expert showing her the correct way to do everything. There isn’t a correct Gary Method for Painting Aeldari that has been passed down through generations. We’re figuring things out. She gets to have opinions before I have enough expertise to explain why those opinions are supposedly wrong. I rather like that arrangement.
You don’t have to be the expert to invite your child into your curiosity.

It Started With Space Elves

Aeldari were already the army I was leaning toward when I started looking seriously at Warhammer 40K. The playstyle appealed to me. They’re fast, specialized, and built around using different units for particular jobs rather than expecting the same heavily armored brick to solve every problem. But there was another factor. My daughter liked the idea of space elves. Which, honestly, is a very efficient faction pitch. You can spend quite a while explaining the Fall of the Aeldari, Craftworlds, psychic abilities, Aspect Warriors, spirit stones, ancient galactic tragedy, and several thousand years of accumulated lore. Or you can say: Space elves. Apparently that works too. Her interest didn’t make the decision for me, but it made the army more fun immediately. Something I had been researching for myself suddenly had a small connection to her imagination as well. That was enough to start changing the project.

Then Pink Became Part of the Army

The next step was color. I knew I wanted something that felt different from simply copying the box art, and having Aeldari gave us plenty of freedom to do that. Games Workshop’s own guide to starting an Aeldari army specifically highlights the faction’s wide range of Craftworld colors and the freedom painters have to incorporate traditional Aspect Warrior schemes however they want. That suits me just fine. Because our army is going black and pink. The black gives me the darker base I wanted. The pink gives the models something brighter and more distinctive, and it brings my daughter into the visual identity of the army in a way that feels natural rather than tacked on afterward. Pink isn’t there because it provides +1 to anything. It’s there because she matters to the project. Which is probably a better reason to choose a paint color anyway.
The army doesn’t have to look like mine with a little bit of her added. It can become something different because she was part of it.

Apparently Planning an Army Involves Buying Quite a Few Elves

The collection has also grown slightly beyond the theoretical stage. At this point, we have a Combat Patrol: Aeldari, Lhykhis, three Windriders, Swooping Hawks, and twenty used Guardian models that I picked up through Facebook. Lhykhis in particular caught my attention because she is the Phoenix Lord associated with the Warp Spiders, a newer addition to the Aeldari model range. Games Workshop introduced the character as Lhykhis, the Whispering Web. The Swooping Hawks and Windriders give the army even more of the fast Aeldari look that attracted me in the first place. But the least glamorous part of the collection may actually be the most useful right now.

The Used Guardians Have a Job

The twenty used Guardians are practice. That is intentional. Rather than making the first model I seriously experiment on one of the miniatures I care most about, the Guardians give me a place to work out the black-and-pink scheme. How much pink is enough? Where does black need a different highlight so everything doesn’t disappear into one dark shape? Do the helmets stay dark or become one of the bright focal points? What colors work for the weapons, spirit stones, cloth, and smaller details? I don’t know yet. That is what the Guardians are for. Some of them may look great. One or two may eventually look like they were painted during a minor electrical emergency. Good. They are allowed to. One thing I want to get better at through EpicAgain is being willing to make something badly while I’m learning how to make it well. Having practice models makes that easier. They aren’t failed finished models. They’re experiments.

The Project Is Already Working Before the Paint Does

This is the part I didn’t expect. When I started thinking seriously about returning to creativity, I naturally thought about finished things. Writing something. Painting something. Building something. Having an object at the end that proved creativity had occurred. But this project has made me think the return happens earlier than that. I’m thinking about colors again. I’m looking at models and wondering what I could do with them. I’m learning techniques because I want to try them rather than because they have some practical use elsewhere. I’m planning an army that doesn’t exist yet. And my daughter is part of those conversations. The imagination is already working.
We haven’t painted the army yet. But we’ve already started imagining it.
That feels important. Creativity doesn’t begin when something is good enough to photograph. It starts when you become interested enough to make something that wasn’t there before.

I Don’t Want This to Become Her Homework

There is another side to sharing hobbies with kids that I want to remember as this project develops. She doesn’t have to love Warhammer because I do. She might love picking colors. She might enjoy painting. She might eventually want models of her own. Or she might paint two things, decide that was plenty, and move on to something completely different. All of those outcomes are fine. The goal isn’t to create a tiny hobbyist who approaches Warhammer exactly the way I do. And at four years old, the parts she participates in naturally need to be the parts that make sense for her. Choosing colors, looking at models, talking about what looks cool, and eventually doing age-appropriate painting are very different from handing over every tool on the hobby desk. I want this to stay an invitation. Not another thing she is expected to perform correctly. That distinction probably matters for any hobby we share with our kids.

Maybe the Better Hobby Is the One We Change Together

I used to think sharing an interest meant bringing someone else into something that already existed. Now I’m wondering if the more interesting version is letting them change it. The army I might have built completely on my own would probably look different. That’s the point. Her involvement doesn’t need to mean she paints half the force or learns every unit name. She has already changed the project simply by helping shape its identity. I think that idea extends well beyond Warhammer. If you draw with your kids, let them invent something you wouldn’t. If you build models, let them choose a strange color. If you write stories together, let the creature have six eyes because six eyes are apparently necessary. If you build a fictional world, let them put something in it that disrupts your carefully organized logic. Sometimes that’s where the interesting part begins. Sharing creativity doesn’t always mean teaching the next generation how to make things our way. Sometimes it means giving them enough room to alter what we were going to make.

Eventually, We Should Probably Paint Them

At some point, all of this planning needs to survive contact with an actual paintbrush. The Guardians are waiting. The black-and-pink scheme still exists mostly in our heads. Lhykhis and the Swooping Hawks remain substantially better painted in my imagination than they are in reality, largely because reality currently contains no paint at all. That will change. And when it does, I want to document the experiments, what works, what absolutely does not, and how the final army scheme develops rather than pretending I knew the answer from the beginning. That is part of what I want EpicAgain to be. Not a display case where everything appears after it has been figured out. A record of figuring it out. Somewhere between buying old Guardians off Facebook, talking about pink armor with my daughter, and accumulating a suspicious number of space elves, creativity started feeling active again. Nothing is finished yet. That doesn’t seem to matter. We haven’t painted a miniature together yet. But the army already has both of us in it.

Returning to Creativity: Why I’m Making EpicAgain

Posted on by

Life got busy. The imagination never left. I don’t think I ever stopped being creative. I just stopped making enough things. There is a difference between those two ideas, though it took me a while to notice it. The interests were still there. Stories still pulled me in. Games, art, strange worlds, history, miniatures, writing, design, and all the other things that make my brain wander off somewhere interesting never really disappeared. But actually creating something of my own? That got pushed further and further down the list. Life has a pretty effective system for doing that. Work needs attention. Family needs attention. The house needs something. There is another practice, appointment, project, deadline, bill, email, or small domestic emergency involving an object that worked perfectly yesterday. None of those things are bad. Most of them matter quite a bit. But somewhere in all of that, I started missing a part of myself I hadn’t realized I was neglecting. That is a big part of why I’m making EpicAgain.

I Don’t Think Creativity Ever Really Left

When people talk about returning to creativity, it can sound like creativity is something we completely lose. I’m not sure that’s what happened to me. I never stopped being interested in creative things. If anything, I probably surrounded myself with more of them. Books. Games. Movies. Art. Miniatures. Ideas. Projects I wanted to try. Things I wanted to learn. Stories that sent my brain down completely unnecessary rabbit holes for the next three days. The problem was that enjoying creative things and making creative things slowly became two different parts of my life. Consuming is easy to fit into the cracks. You can watch something after everyone goes to bed. Read a few pages. Scroll through somebody else’s artwork. Look at a beautifully painted miniature and confidently think, I should try that sometime. Sometime is very accommodating. It never complains when you move something there. Creating asks a little more from you. You have to start, you have to make choices. You have to be bad at something for a while. Sometimes you need space, tools, uninterrupted time, or enough mental energy left at the end of the day to form a coherent thought. And slowly, without making any deliberate decision to stop, I made less.

I don’t think the creative part disappeared. I think it got crowded.

Life Got Busy. Then It Stayed Busy.

There was no dramatic moment when I packed away creativity and announced that adulthood had officially begun. That would almost be easier. Instead, responsibilities accumulated in the very ordinary way they tend to. Career. Family. Schedules. Commitments. Things that needed to be handled because I was the person who needed to handle them. One season of life rolls into another, and eventually you realize something you meant to get back to has been waiting for years. I think that happens to a lot of adults. Especially when we start treating creative work as the thing we are allowed to do once everything else is finished. That sounds responsible. It is also a fantastic way to never create anything again. Because everything else is never finished. There will always be laundry, always be work, always be another email somebody decided was urgent at 4:47 on a Friday afternoon. There will always be a reason that tonight would be easier if you just watched something instead. And again, none of this makes adulthood the enemy. I like my life. The people and responsibilities filling it are not obstacles standing between me and some imaginary pure creative existence. I’m not trying to escape them so I can retreat to a candlelit tower and finally finish my masterpiece while somebody else figures out what the kids are eating. That isn’t the point.

If creativity matters, it probably has to exist inside the life I actually have. Not the life I might have once things calm down.

That question, how to make creativity fit inside a life that is already full, is something I want to keep exploring through Making Time to Create.

My Kids Made Me Notice What Was Missing

One of the strange things about becoming a parent is getting a front-row seat to imagination before adulthood has had much chance to organize it. Kids don’t need everything to have a purpose. They can become interested in something because it is interesting. Kids can make something because making it sounds fun. They can care deeply about an idea that has absolutely no measurable effect on quarterly performance. There is something refreshing about that. And watching my kids has made me think more about my own relationship with creativity. Not because I suddenly decided I needed to become some sort of model Creative Dad who turns every Saturday into an elaborate family craft project. That sounds exhausting for everyone involved. It was simpler than that. Their excitement reminded me how much I still wanted to make things myself. How much I missed following an idea just because I wanted to know where it went. How much I missed learning something new without needing it to advance my career, improve a metric, solve a problem, or become useful in some defensible adult way. And maybe most importantly, it made me think about what I want them to see in me. I want my kids to know adulthood does not have to mean slowly trading every curiosity you have for responsibility. You can be responsible and still make things. People can take care of people and still have interests of your own. You can build a career, raise a family, have obligations, be tired more often than seems medically reasonable, and still decide that imagination deserves some room. I needed that reminder too.

Returning to Creativity Doesn’t Mean Going Back

I think this is the part of returning to creativity that interests me most. I’m not trying to go backward. There is no previous version of me waiting somewhere that I need to recover perfectly. I’m older now. My interests are different. The skills are different. Life’s responsibilities are definitely different. So are the things I want to make. That means rediscovering creativity cannot just be nostalgia. I don’t want to recreate exactly how I thought or worked twenty years ago. I want to take whatever survived those twenty years and see what it can do now. The things we experience while creativity sits quietly in the background still become part of us. Work teaches things. Parenthood teaches things. Failure certainly teaches things, although it tends to use a fairly obnoxious curriculum. All of that comes back with you. So maybe returning is the wrong mental picture. This feels more like continuing something that went quiet for a while.

You are not loading an old save file. You are starting the next part with a much stranger inventory.

That idea is really the heart of The Creative Return. I’m less interested in recreating who I used to be than figuring out what that creative part of me looks like now.

So I’m Making EpicAgain

EpicAgain is my attempt to give all of this somewhere to happen. Not just somewhere to talk about wanting to create. Somewhere to actually create. I want to write more. Build worlds. Tell stories. Paint things. Learn new skills. Explore games and hobbies that catch my attention. Dig into ideas that probably do not need to become anything useful. Try projects that might work and some that almost certainly won’t. I want to document parts of that process too. Not because I think my way of doing any of this will become the definitive method for creative adults everywhere. It won’t. I’m figuring it out. That is part of the point. EpicAgain can be a place for finished things, but I also want it to be a place for the messy middle. The learning. The experiments. The half-formed ideas that become better ideas. The projects that change direction halfway through because the original plan turned out to be terrible. I’ll use What I’m Learning for some of those discoveries, Writing Updates for the stories and worlds taking shape, and Monthly Progress as a place to occasionally look up from the workbench and see whether any of this is actually moving. There should be room for all of it. Because I suspect one of the things that keeps adults from rediscovering creativity is the feeling that we should already be good at whatever we choose to do. Kids generally have no such problem. Adults will avoid trying something for six years because the first attempt might look slightly embarrassing. I would like to get over that.

I Don’t Know Exactly What This Turns Into Yet

There is a temptation when starting something like EpicAgain to pretend the entire map already exists. It doesn’t. I have ideas. Plenty of them, probably more than is useful. But I don’t know exactly which projects will stick. I don’t know which hobbies will become long-term obsessions and which ones will send me enthusiastically buying supplies before quietly disappearing three weeks later. Just like I’ll never know what I will make that I’m genuinely proud of. I also don’t know what I’m going to make that will look ridiculous in hindsight. Probably several things. Good.

I don’t want EpicAgain to become a monument to having everything figured out. I want it to be evidence that I started.

And then kept going. Some weeks that might mean a lot gets made. Other weeks, life will win. That doesn’t mean the whole thing failed. I think I spent too long unconsciously treating creativity as something that required ideal conditions. Enough time. Enough energy. The right setup. A fully developed idea. Permission, apparently, from an imaginary committee that has never once returned my emails. I’m less interested in waiting for that now. Building EpicAgain will be where I document some of this site’s own evolution too, including the parts that change once I actually start using the thing instead of endlessly planning what it could become.

Maybe You Never Lost It Either

If you found this because you are thinking about your own personal creative journey, maybe some of this feels familiar. Maybe there was something you used to make. You wrote stories. Drew constantly. Played music. Built models. Took photographs. Painted. Designed games. Made videos. Invented worlds. Took things apart and rebuilt them into something they were absolutely not intended to become. Then life got bigger. And that part of you got smaller. Or at least quieter. I don’t think the answer is necessarily to blow up your schedule, find six uninterrupted hours every day, and announce to your family that you are now pursuing Art. Most of us probably need something much less dramatic. Make one thing. Pick something back up. Try the hobby you keep watching other people enjoy. Write the page. Paint the miniature. Draw the bad drawing. Build the weird little project nobody asked for. See if that part of you is still there. I have a feeling it probably is. That is what EpicAgain is for me. Not going back. Making something again.