Member Spotlight: Kev's Long Way Back to the Hobby

There was a stretch, a few years back, when Kev wasn't sure he'd be back at the table at all. A nasty injury left him housebound and unable to drive for months, with no certainty about what came next: would he be able to work again? How would he provide for his family? It's the kind of moment that can pull a person away from a hobby entirely. Instead, it showed him exactly what the Wildlings were.

"Daryl picking me up and giving me a lift to the club for a night, Lee doing the same to play a game with me and being very patient as I tried to play one handed," Kev remembers. Wildlings turned up at his house to help with DIY. It's the kind of thing that doesn't make it into a hobby blog post about paint recipes, but it's exactly why he's still here.

Where It All Began

Kev's first brush with the hobby came through an older cousin: his models, his games, a trip to a Games Workshop that left a young Kev convinced these were the coolest things he'd ever seen. A few years later, in middle school, a friend got into 40k and pulled him in properly. Money was tight for a kid with no income, so it was a slow start, until his Mam's colleague mentioned her husband was selling his old 40k collection. A full 2nd edition starter set, rulebooks, and a pre-painted Blood Angels army. She bought the lot for him.

"I still have the books, but sadly sold the army, which I'll always regret," Kev says.

Then life did what life does. A decade-plus break followed, the hobby set aside entirely.

The Duke Nukem Detour

What brought Kev back wasn't a miniature at all. During Covid, when half the hobby world seemed to be rediscovering their paint stashes, Kev decided to recreate his local bar in exacting detail, inside the Duke Nukem 3D engine. A thirty-plus-year-old engine. The project meant teaching himself photography, photo editing, image manipulation, and how to wrestle textures into an engine never designed for any of it.

"Eventually that reached a natural conclusion, and once it was over, I realised I was a lot happier in life when I had something creative to put my energy into rather than just consuming video games," he says. That realisation led him straight back to 40k.

Painter and Gamer, Roughly Even

These days Kev calls it a 50/50 split between painting and gaming, though it shifts depending on what else is going on in life. It wasn't always that way. As a kid, painting was a chore to get through before the actual playing could start: a single thick coat, no watering down, no real guidance to be had. Coming back to the hobby after his long break, he found YouTube tutorials and the club's Discord waiting with answers. Once he started seeing real progress in his own work, painting stopped being an obstacle and became a hobby in its own right.

Alongside 40k, the club has pulled him into Kill Team and Marvel Crisis Protocol, both of which he's keen to get more time into if life ever slows down enough to allow it.

Three Models, Three Different Kinds of Pride

Ask Kev what he's most proud of and he doesn't land on just one answer.

Technically, it's Baharroth: a model where old techniques he'd refined and newer ones he'd previously struggled with finally clicked together properly. Emotionally, it's his Avatar of Khaine, painted early in his return to the hobby when his confidence was still shaky. He followed a YouTube tutorial to the letter, half-convinced he wasn't up to doing the model justice, and came out the other side having proved to himself he could take on the daunting projects. "I spent my evenings working on that model, thoroughly enjoying the process and looking at the model in disbelief afterwards that I had been the one to paint him," he says.

And as an achievement, it's his Genestealer Cults: hundreds of models painted over the course of a year, a swarm army that forced him to learn a completely different approach. "Learning to throw paint on the model and accept 'that'll do,' and let the consistency across a whole army do the heavy lifting has been liberating," he says. For someone who admits a tendency to start projects and never finish them, it's the one he most wants people to know about.

Finding the Wildlings

When Kev got back in touch with old gaming friends, one was especially keen to find a club, and the Wildlings was one of several they tried. Familiar faces from that first visit and a genuinely good atmosphere helped, but what sealed it for Kev was the Discord server. Other clubs in the area lean on Facebook groups or WhatsApp; for Kev, Discord was simply the most accessible way to build a real community. It quickly became his first stop for questions, inspiration, or just a conversation.

What the Hobby Gave Him Back

Kev's takeaway from all of this is simple: he's a happier person when he has a creative outlet. He'll also tell you, with a grin, that the brush control hasn't hurt his cannulation skills either.

His advice to anyone hovering on the edge of the hobby, unsure whether to jump in: "Community is the answer. Get involved, ask questions. People will help, the whole thing is a lot less daunting that way."

The One He'd Keep

Asked which single model he'd hold onto if he could only keep one from his entire collection, Kev balks at the question outright. "What a dreadful thought. Doesn't bear thinking about." Eventually he lands on an old metal Farseer, bought more than twenty years ago, primed in white and still, to this day, unpainted.

You can find Kev on Instagram and Bluesky under the handle KevvonCarstein.