A growing town

      A belated Merry Christmas to everyone reading this, I'm only two days late. . .

      This post is a mix of a model painted and a bit of my Christmas haul, but it's stuff that all ties together quite nicely. The four buildings in the picture below are from two different ranges, three of them are conflix, merchant's, guild master's and money lender's houses respectively, while the last is from the Ziterdes range.

      Ziterdes is a manufacturer that I have heard about before but never really had much to do with. I bought a couple of small bits of theirs from a little model shop I stumbled across a few weeks back, and then talked myself into going back and buying another couple of much bigger bits from the range. This building is the first of those two bigger purchases and took quite a bit more work than the last two bits I bought. The models don't come anywhere near as nicely painted as the website seems to suggest they do but an hour's work repainting it and I still think they are good value for money, especially when mixed into my current collection of buildings.

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Eyes front, officer present

        Although I still haven't managed to organise a game of Bolt Action using my own figures, I have been putting some effort into getting a decent mix of figures ready for proposed games in the new year. Finished and packed away into their case are the minimum two squads needed for a platoon, a couple of specialist units, an armoured car and various tanks, a list of figures I was pretty chuffed with. So onto my painting desk went an infantry support gun team and another squad of infantry, then I sat down to work out how many points I had just so I had an idea of how big a game I could start looking to organise and I realised something, I hadn't painted up an officer.
       So this week has been all about painting up the odds and sods of the left over German figures that have been floating around the periphery of my painting desk, not including the whole squad which got pushed back in priority, to try and get this particular project to the playable stage.

German officer, his adj and a light artillery team

                                   

An officer and his adjacent

                                   

75mm LeIG I8 light artillery

       I think the reason I hadn't painted up an officer was because this guy had worked his way onto my painting desk a while back, he left me with the vague feeling that I did have a German officer painted, just a pity it turned out to be a vampire one.

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Bits and Pieces



      After another busy week at work that spilled over to the weekend, my hobby time was severely limited but I managed to get some painting and gaming time in.

       First up are a couple of bit of scenery I bought ready painted so I can't really claim the credit for them, but I like them so much I thought I would put them up. They are made my a German company called Ziterdes, and are made from a solid foam so they are really light. I found them in a little old model shop that I stumbled across by accident and liked them so much I had to grab them, all I have had to do to make them table worthy is add a couple of clumps of grass just to blend them in a bit.

 

     Next up is an actual hobby project. I have wanted a centre point for my planned town scenery and I have been struggling to settle on an idea I really liked, but I was fairly sure I wanted it to involve the gripping beast Alfred the great figure I bought on the spur of the moment at salute a few years back. Then I came across the components section of Fenris games' site and found the base of some kind of magical water fountain and knew I had the basis of my statue. The pillar, however, was just from my bits box and I have no idea where I got it from.
     I'm not sure if its too tall as it towers over everything else I will be putting in the town, but then I suppose that is kind of the point of it. It's obviously not being maintained or looked after so it will suit any period of war I plan to put it in.

 

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Rock and roll

      I named this post rock and roll, as it was something I found myself thinking as I carefully tried to take the best photo of my weekend's painting achievements. How did I get to the point where I would have a cart and five barrels to show for a quiet weekend of painting?
      The cart is a warbases' mdf model and the barrels are from an O gauge railway scenery pack which I bought at the same railway show I got the hedges from in a post I did last month. I'm on a proper scenery drive at the moment and this is just another step in that process, filling the role of street cover.

      On a completely separate note, I had a play around with the way I shoot the images I use in the blog, and I think this way looks so much sharper and clearer, so I am hoping this will be the end to the apologies about terrible photography.

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Infantry advance

     The models into this post aren't newly painted, so I won't represent them as such, but they are newly based, as when I painted them earlier in the year I wasn't sure how I wanted their bases to look. My current German spurt of interest spurred me to get everything ready to play with, and not just the tanks which have been taking all my time up recently.
     So far, ignoring my tanks, I have 2 squads of infantry, a panzerfaust team, a medic and an armoured car finished. All I am missing is an office of some sort and that will be a minimum platoon plus a few extra toys to play with.
   

     The Germans advance through an, oddly British looking, village constantly on the look out for the allies.

     Now back to the painting desk, I have a lot more to get finished as a big parcel of unpainted PMC buildings turned up in the post this week, and I want to get another squad of infantry painted up.

T-Rex

    Before I even start my normal spiel about what I have been painting, or apologising for the photography or any of the normal stuff I tend to do at the beginning of the post, I want to go straight in with accusations. So here it is, I blame Michael Awdry for this post, it is entirely his fault. There I was, minding my own business and boom, yet another blog on dinosaurs, and there I was buying yet more toys online on a website I had never heard of before, but now have saved . . .. So when I got home I figured I had better get one of the dinosaurs sitting in my backlog of 'to do' projects moved into the 'done' projects pile. So here it is; my T-Rex, how can you do dinosaurs without a T-Rex?

 

 

     He hasn't been painted or touched up at all, just stuck to a base and based like everything else. Much as I wouldn't have picked this colour scheme if he was being painted from scratch (he'd probably be a reddish brown colour), I quite like it.

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More on the scenery front

      On a wargaming front, I had two major plans for this year;

1, Get as many games in as possible. I had been too long without getting my gaming fix in and I wanted this year to be the year I really scratched that itch, so I could just settle down and play games when ever I was able afterwards.
2, Sort out my dire scenery collection. My collection comprised of a few random bits and pieces that didn't really come together to form a full table of anything.

      The first one has been going pretty well so far, I smashed my aim of 52 games back in August I think, but the second aim was being slightly more elusive. I had a vague plan that the scenery guy that I bought the walled field I use to take photos on would be the main supplier of my new scenery collection, but as I managed to miss all three shows that I normally see him at this year, and I gather he doesn't have a website, that plan hasn't worked out. So, plan B; pick up scenery from other sources on my travels, which is something I would have done anyway to supplement.

      On Saturday I was at the NEC in Birmingham for the National Railway Show with my dad and on my wander round I found a few different guys selling their own stunning looking trees (if you see their willow trees you will understand just how nice this things can be) and I had an idea. To supplement the weird mix of trees that I am slowly buying (First set of trees & Second lot of trees) I decided to buy myself one of their silver birches, as, for a small outlay, this tree should really stand out in a dense forest, and set of their flexi hedges. 

       So my collection now has about 3 and a half foot of hedges and another tree in it, and all I have had to do is base them up in the usual way and I added a set of stiles from the warbases' range to add a bit of interest.

     Next time I see this particular tree making company I will have to pick up another couple of silver birches, a willow and another few foot of hedges, as these things seem to do the job quite nicely. I need to organise some time to get a photo of my whole forest now really.

Thanks for reading.