Last Few Bits - Winter

    With the realisation of how little I had left to paint for my Winter WW2 Germans, I decided to just crack on (with the bits that I knew where I'd put them). A second MMG just because and some infantry from the sprues I had left over. I'd built my last 3 squads to match what a German squad should be on paper for late war, 2x smg, lmg and a panzerfaust, so I used the opportunity to add more options which meant 3 more panzerfaust and rifles, then 9 assault rifles (3 with panzerfausts).

   Its been really nice being able to just sneak 5 or 10 minutes of painting in at a time and just getting figures moving again. I've still got a kuberwagon for this project somewhere but it's got to turn up before I can paint it, otherwise I'm done for the time being.

Thanks for reading

Marder III

    Completely unintentionally I've made two posts in a row on the same project, nobody is more shocked than I am. Painting the Howitzer from the last post turned out to be motivating enough, that the next day I sat and built the tank I have picked up to go with the project and then went on to paint it the day after that.

   It's a Warlord Games plastic Marder III with a couple of crew head swaps and a metal winter figure to replace the plastic commander, I just felt like someone in the tank needed slightly more heavy duty winter clothing. I'm pretty sure I picked this tank up instead of my normal Panzer III or IV as it was about as close a tank to the Soviet SU-76 that the Germans used, and I do enjoy playing with my SU-76's.

   The kit is by far the most fiddly tank I've ever put together, not helped by the fact the sprues don't have part numbers on them so you have to constant flick back to the first page of the instructions where each part on the sprue is labelled*

*It took me far longer than I am proud about before I realised I should tear the first page out and use it as a reference.

Thank for reading

Medium Howitzer

    The first new non-new project post for a while, but there are more coming I suspect. The other thing that got our juices flowing at Salute were not new releases at all, my brother talked himself into buying both Necromunda and Bolt Action, both rules I would recommend trying. While Necromunda initially worked onto my desk first, a unit for Bolt Action beat it to being finished and that's a medium howitzer for my late war winter German army. It was built and sprayed ready, but had just fallen behind the new shiny, which made it a great candidate for jumping the queue.

   As you can probably tell, I've added the front of a Rubicon Models WW2 horse and cart set as a horse drawn limber for it. I've just got it into my head that I want my Germans to be a tad less mechanised than they are usually gamed as and once I saw the Rubicon kit I had ideas straight away. I probably need some kind of ammo wagon, though.

Thanks for reading

Eldar/Aeldari Guardians

    The very first army I ever bought for the purpose of wargaming was an Eldar army. My colour scheme was bright yellow, white face plates and bone guns, so they blurred into a mess of bright. I used the army for years until the Daemon Hunters codex came out and became popular at my club at which point my Eldar army started getting tabled really quickly every game and I swapped to a Chaos army.

   My Eldar have been repainted and restarted so many times over the years but I've never been happy with the colour schemes I've tried. The recently I had an idea on how to modernise the old yellow scheme. The guns would need to go black to give the model some real contrast and this might have been enough, but I had the idea of making the uniform shift tone from yellow to orange. The yellow is just Iyaden yellow Contrast over Wraithbone and the orange is 2 layers of wash, one starting at the elbows and waist going down, then the second starting at the knees and wrists, also going down, to give the impression that it gets darker as you go down.

   In hindsight, I think the weapon platform needs something on the big flat yellow area, but otherwise I'm really happy with the project.

Thanks for reading 

What, More Romans?

    I've said it before this year and I'll say it again, smaller scales are starting to fascinate me. The idea of playing those big famous battles basically one for one and seeing how the tactics worked (or didn't) just feels like an area of the hobby I don't see enough. I've basically fallen in love with 15mm but have hit a bit of a painting block on it as you really need to finish a unit in a sitting or at least be able to leave stuff out between sessions. Then I saw Mark Backhouse was writing a 2mm game, which inspired a few companies to start doing blocks of 2mm armies, while I'm unlikely to buy his rules, the figures do interest me.

   At Salute I picked up 2 bases worth of Roman Legions and an Alae of Roman Cavalry* (although I bought the wrong base size for the cavalry) and decided to give the idea a test.

*and some buildings but that's another story

  I also wanted to test some of the terrain ideas that Mark has been using and the cheapest and quickest was forests made from bath mats. Actually really impressed with it.

I'm not sure how quickly this project will progress, I need to do a bit Warbases order before I can carry on but I've been really impressed. With very little work I can get two massive armies on the table to try out ideas.

Thanks for reading

Awakening The Tomb

   I am pretty confident that the next few posts will all be the first units of a series of different new(ish) projects instead of me actually getting on with something useful in my limited hobby time. The first of these new projects is a Necron army for 40k. I've said before and I'll keep saying it, while I don't play 40k a huge amount - normally a small game or two a year with someone who is thinking about getting back into it, the universe has a grip in my head that I'll never get rid of and I like the idea of having armies ready in case I ever fall into a group that does play it regularly.

   But why Necrons? Honestly, cheapness and speed to paint. I've got so many projects where units take ages to paint, and I like the idea of one where I don't need to think a whole lot while I'm painting. Plus I can box them up when done and due the cost of the figures (mostly the other halves of other people's starter sets and magazine freebies) I'm not going to cry about how much money is stored in those boxes if/when I don't use them for years.

   The first finished batches are a unit of Necron Warriors - although I think my basic unit will be boosted up to 20, a Necron Spyder (the only thing I've bought in separately from GW) and 5 packs worth of Necron Scarabs. There is nothing too special about the colour scheme, as I have gone for a dirty version of the classic metal and black, however, I've been using the technical paint Tesseract Glow for the green bits and that pot is what's making this project work.

Next time, something completely different.

Thanks for reading

Adventures in 3D Printing

    A bit of a mixed post and its not how I planned to blog about these vehicles but as I finished them at the same time, I thought I could make a point of them.

   The 15mm WW2 British vehicles (2x Matilda and a Daimler Dingo) are from Butler's Printed Models and my first thought when they turned up still attached to all the supports was that I had completely wasted my money. There was no way I would get the supports off without ruining the models, so I dumped the box in a pile of other stuff, leaving the decision of when I would just call it a bad job and throw them out to another day. It took a few months before I decided to just take a pair of cutters to them figuring they would probably end up in the bin anyway, so I couldn't really do any damage, but to my surprise the supports came off fairly cleanly if you just pulled them.

   I'm pretty pleased with the end paint job although the next lot I do will have more of the blue and grey camo to them.

   The next thing was a bit of an experiment. I've got a new-ish project that's been floating about in my head, but one of the main criteria for it was cheapness. The project is a 40k traitor guard army but I wanted to use as few STL Imperial vehicles as possible, and make those I was using look captured but this meant I needed a source of alternative 40k vehicles that weren't going to blow the bank. I found a shop on Etsy called Culverin Models which looked like they fitted the bill, so a quick test order placed and I was away.

   This vehicle is called a Boar troop carrier and it seems to be a 40k version of a Universal Carrier, in my case I plan to use it as a command Salamander. I chaos-ed it up a little bit to hide some of the printed lines and got painting. I'm fairly pleased with the end result but it is obvious that it's 3d printed.

   Thanks for reading