The Mad Devil
I don't remember what year precisely I started painting, but is was around 1980.
The early years were mostly Grenadier and Ral Partha and a few sculpts from what I guess could be called independents. Lead was the material of the day. There is a blog post about that waiting to happen. Stupid New York.
My paints were pretty much exclusively Polly S. They had some great paints in my opinion, although I am sure that some of that belief is infected by nostalgia. For a brief window, they also had a license from TSR to make AD&D branded paints. I remember thinking that was pretty awesome: here I was using the official D&D color for whatever it was that I was painting.
I still have a few Polly S paint pots. I have not opened them recently. I should to see if they are still any good, and, if so, allow them to serve their purpose.
My concepts of color theory were simple and shaped by Judy Apple and her color wheel. To this day, I think of colors in terms of paint and not light (BRY instead of RBG). My concepts for basing were also simple. Initially, cardboard squares, most likely cut from twelve-pack (Coke mostly) boxes or the shirt boards that came with my father's starched and folded button down shirts. Maybe they have a proper name, but we called them shirt boards. We had tons of them floating around the house. Mom used them for lists and as scrap paper effectively. I used them for miniature bases.
This was before I knew about super glue, and I attached my minis to my bases with candle positioning wax. It worked, but it was not an optimal choice.
Eventually, I graduated from cardboard to popsicle sticks that were cut to size. I still resorted to cardboard for larger minis, and I upgraded from the super thin stuff to corrugated. Fancy.
Somewhere in this period, I learned the very earliest of thoughts about highlighting with a brighter color. I did not have blending in my skill set. Highlights came before washes came before dry brushing. But all still pretty rudimentary.
After the Yellow Boxes, I started getting some individual minis from The Rusty Scabbard. I think Gary was the owner. He used to have little rows of minis glued in rows on top of the cashier's counter. You would tell him which one you wanted, and he would go open a tool chest drawer and get that mini out for you. No blisters. The only identifying information perhaps stamped on the base. Most of them were the aforementioned Ral Partha. I would go in and buy 1 or 2 at a time as I had budget. I also expanded my paint selection from my starting three, but still Polly S.
Denizens of the Swamp
The cover art; the subject matter; the newness. This was a great first box. The box photo is not mine. If it is yours, please let me know and i will give credit. If I can find my box, I will replace with my photo, although if I still have it, my box is not in this good of a shape.
Note that I also subsequently got a second box of this and painted it much later in my life. I also repainted a few of these. In some ways I regret that because of the milestones that they represent. In others, the newer paint jobs are substantially better and I may be more likely to use them in my games. So mixed bag.
Halflings. I had more colors, but was still just caking on the paint and the varnish. Although for at least some, i did switch to a matte varnish.
I made the mistake of trying to strip some of these. Hours of Simple Green and a hard brushing with a toothbrush, and I had to admit that the varnish was just too strong. And see my thoughts about losing those early paint jobs. They were bad, but they were my creations. Now, my efforts to repaint are forced to try to overcome the caked in paint and varnish and salvage something. Lesson learned. You can touch up, but if you want to do it over: start from scratch.
Chaos warriors - Ral Partha
Some of these got painted as late as 1987 for a school project. Others were painted earlier. The Champion of Chaos, with his axe and forbidding pose remains one of my most favorites. I have 1-2 more copies of him in my stack to be painted and I hesitate because I fall into the trap of wanting to be able to do him justice. Also, note, NMM before NMM was a huge fad. Not because I thought NMM was cool, but because I only had grey and no metallics in my paint collection at this time.