Painting Challenge entries 14-16: Teddy Bear Romans, Saxons and Commandos

Phew! It's been another hectic three months with the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge going on. The last week saw me rushing to finish all projects that were still underway.

The first to finish was my Curtgeld entry. Being a product development engineer I did what I do best and that is copy others and improve :) No time for ingenuity with managerial pressures on your back and a need to get things done! So I went ahead and copied our challenge overlord Curt's first entry of Caesar crossing the Rubicon. I'd actually been struggling to think about what kind of a risk taker I should do, but when I saw the Teddy Bear Romans sculpted by Mike Broadbent I knew that was the thing to do. With them being manufactured by Eureka it was simple enough to add a few to my Saxon reinforcement order.

Next up were yet more Saxons with two more battalions from Regiment von Steindel. With these done I have all the line infantry finished from the first Division and about a third of all the infantry done. As Fighting 15s still hasn't got new moulds for light infantry and grenadiers I'll have to stick to painting line infantry for a while still. Slightly annoyingly the distribution of poses in my last batch was horrible with over 80% consisting of only two poses, and only a couple of examples of one of them. I threw in a mounted officer and a casualty to account for the issue, but I have a feeling in the future I need to start doing some conversions as well. Even with an even distribution of poses there's still only 4 different ones so probably some minor conversions to French figures are in place.

And lastly my Secret Santa gift from the exchange organized by Ian of The Blog With No Name fame and his wife Catherine. I received a blister with a Warlord Games Commando Mortar team. A bit underwhelming as I don't really have any Commandos and it came in an amazon package, but nevertheless it's fun to receive unexpected hobby gifts! These were really a breeze to paint as there's basically just two main colours covering most of the minis. So base shades and a few highlights later they are ready for battle. I've given them to a clubmate who has Commandos so they did find a good home quite fast!

Painting Challenge entry 13: Wehrmacht reinforcements

Yet more Wehrmacht forces with the last of the Germans that I had bought and based somewhere around 2013-14 when we first got into Bolt Action at my club. Like the previous batch, I stumpled upon them when cleaning some cabinets and figured it was high time to get everything painted up. My clubs Bolt Action game day and my Market Garden scenario needed some troops which provided the perfect excuse to slab some paint on them. Considering how fast it was to get them done it's almost shameful how long it took for me to get started on them :)

Red Devils digging in around the town of Oosterbeek ready to repel the dastardly Germans.

5 teams altogether with a Forward Observer, a 81mm mortar, HMG, Panzershrek and a flamethrower team. All of them are Warlord offerings. They are bit of a mixed bag with some very nice poses that can be used to create small diorama bases, but then again at least on some of them the sculpting is chunky and looks dated and I had some problems with massive flash and deformed details especially on the flamethrower team. Still even with their issues Warlord minis are definitely on the plus side for me. Some variation between product lines as especially the Red Devils were of far better quality than the Wehrmacht minis that I have done now.

After the last effort I decided to try improve the camouflage that I've done on them. Nick of Moiterei's bunte Welt fame has an excellent camouflage tutorial that I took some tips from. I decided to simplify things a bit and left out the rain drop pattern as I hadn't done it before on any mini and I figured you wouldn't see it on the game table anyways. Looking back at them some areas do look a bit bare so I think I might just have to go through all my Germans and update them as in the end it's a rather simple task and shouldn't take too long.

I also dabbled with Object Source Lighting or OSL effects on the flamethrower team after painting the flames with an airbrush. It ended up looking horrible so in the end I painted the miniature in my normal way again. But OSL is definitely an effect that I need to learn as it would definitely add a lot to miniatures like these.

There's only a couple of days left in the challenge and I've been busy finishing up different projects that have been half finished on the desk for a while. They should see me comfortably reaching my 1000 point goal and even go past it a bit. Two more Saxon regiments should finally get based today and my Curtgeld entry is in a similar state as well. I've also gotten started on my Secret Santa gift and it has all the base colours on now and is waiting for a wash before I start highlighting things.  That should keep me busy for the next few days.

Painting Challenge entry 10: Sturmpioniere

Back in business with something totally different this time. I'll let a gem of Australian TV introduce my subject this time!

So with the formalities done it's time to present my Sturmpioniere! I was cleaning the cabinets last weekend and came upon a box full of readily based and built Germans. When people at my club got into Bolt Action a couple of years back I quickly built a large Red Devils force and figured I'd build a German army as well to have the opposition ready as well. I built a  large force, but only really got a few squads painted before something else came up and they got packed away. With a Bolt Action game day coming up and I promised to run a scenario, I figured it would be a good time to paint them now that I uncovered them again!

So 23 foot miniatures and the Goliath demolition vehicle, which probably counts as another infantry figure as well as it's rather tiny. 120 more points to add to my target. I'm still a bit behind schedule, but with over 600 points out of 1000 I'm starting to feel a bit more confident about being able to reach my target. After these there's still most of the support weapons left, but as I don't really need them for the scenario they will unfortunately most likely just go back into the cabinet.

Two evil officers. Warlord has a knack for doing these Commando style evil nazis. Great looking minis, but a tad bit cliched.

All are from Warlord, with most minis from their Pionier box. I spiced them up with some head swaps and some later equipment from the Grenadier box. The officers are metal offerings. The plastics are pretty nice, but I still prefer the metals that Warlord has. Much more character! Paint job wise I went for quick and dirty again with a wash and highlights for the uniform and major equipment. I had an autumn theme running on the previous germans bases so continued with the same on these.

Regular Pioniers with varied equipment

With the end of the challenge looming I really need to start finalizing some projects. I have a lot of Epic Armageddon started that I've been slowly painting every now and then. My Curtgeld entry is still in it's infancy with the models cleaned, but nothing else done. Add to that the random single minis that I have on the desk.

Specialized Pioneer equipment. Goliath, flame-thrower, Sturmpistole, breaching charges and all kinds of other equipment.

As an afterthought this is pretty much what I had in mind when going through my cabinets... Too many projects, too little time! Probably should minimize random purchases, but that would be slightly boring...

Painting Challenge entries 11 & 12: German WW2 personalities and guards

I've been keeping busy with another two entries again. As they are similarily themed and due to Curt's holidays were posted just few days apart instead of the normal week I'll just post them here at the same time. I've been working longer hours since starting at a new job in the beginning of the month so no spectacular progress on the painting front, but still something to show for a few weeks of work. With these done I'm at 999 points with 1000 being my goal. The entry mini is still to be finished as are the 4 Infinity models that I started already in December so I'll be achieving my goal even though I didn't paint even half of what I had lined up in the beginning. Then again I've painted quite a bit of things I had no plans to do when the challenge started.

I painted these up for a club Bolt Action games day where I was hosting a game featuring a British assault on a German HQ and needed some guardsmen and other miscellaneous figures. The first batch is Warlord Games with their Feldgendarmerie and "Guarding the Chateau" packs both included here as well as some extras like the surrendering Jerry and Sgt Steiner. Quality wise these "new" packs are definately of a lower quality than some of the previous Warlord metals. The difference is very apparent especially in their faces. Might be a new sculptor or then these are some really old moulds that they've just dug up again.

The second batch is from Wargames Foundry. These are some of their older Perry sculpts and do include some wonderfully characterful poses. Especially the guardsman with his arms crossed, head held down with eyes almost closed while trudging along on his route, is just perfect and pretty much sums up what most soldiers feel when having to stand guard.

Painting Challenge entry 8: Converted Beutepanzer

After some mishaps the looted Universal Carrier is finally finished. First looking for suitable readymade rivets, before settling on using putty, delayed it a bit and then right when I thought I was done I noticed I had forgotten decals... Well here it is in all it's glory

But first I'd really like to thank my mysterious benefactor for this Christmas gift! It was definately a very thoughtful gift and there must have been quite a lot of thought put into it with all the bits and pieces gathered with the instructions! So a big thank you for an extremely fun build and a great model that will definately stand out on the gaming table!

The kit consists of a plastic Warlord Games Universal Carrier with a PaK36 and it's crew from one of their 251 sets. The gun actually doesn't require too much modification with only a small part being cut off from it's mounting and a gun shield being built from plasticard. The driver and machine-gunner are both the original British crewmen with just a headswap. The uniform looks remarkably same as the German one even when checking it close up.

As my other German stuff is painted with a soft tone 3-colour camouflage I decided to do the same on this one. I just painted it randomly with my airbrush trying to leave about equal shares of each paint shade showing. After adding chipping I applied a gloss coat followed by a few different enamel washes. The washes were allowed to set in before being wiped off vertically. This already provides nice variation to the paint scheme, but I decided to add some streaking with rust and oil shades. When removing the shade I had some issues with the basecoat peeling off again. Vallejo grey primer doesn't really seem to bind very well to flat surfaces. Luckily all of the areas where this happened were in the bottom part of the model so I was able to hide them with the final muddying up.

Sturmpioniere Vorwärts!

I got around to finishing some of the lingering projects on my table on sunday. With Rammstein now available on Spotify I queued up their production and got around to finishing the Pioneers that had been sitting on the desk for nearly two months already. After these there is only the 40k Hellbrute left, but I doubt I'll ever finish it as it was only for airbrush practice and all the airbrushing part is done already. So from now until the end of March only challenge entries :)

I really bit of more than I could chew with these guys as painting up 15 infantry at the same time was just too much. One of the reasons it took so long to paint was that the table just seemed so full all the time and painting one shade at the time on all of them seemed like nothing really progressed. Add to that the fact that these were the first 28mm Germans I did so I had to decide paints and do a bit of research to at least get the shades somewhere close to the originals.

They are all Warlord plastics and metals from the Pioneers box and some kitbashing with left over parts from our club German army and additional metal heads from Warlord. Unit composition is far from historical as I basically just picked 10 guys and the command from my prepped minis box and when building I couldn't resist using all the metal extras that came with the minis :) The 251 was already painted up in September, but the crew was being painted with the rest of the minis so took a while to finish it up as well.

I tried to keep the paintjob simple with only a couple of layers on the uniform and most details just done with one layer and a wash. Works well enough, but maybe still bit too slow to do. Funny enough painting the camouflage uniform models is a lot faster as you can get away with just a wash and no highlighting. With the basing I went for a more late autumn look for a change. Looks quite nice and it's a bit different from what I normally do.