Painting Challenge entry 4: Armored Rifles

After a short hiatus in entries I was back on the boards again with some more Flames of War infantry. And boy were they a pain in the ass to paint. Everything except the light anti-tank guns are the newish Battlefront plastic US infantry.

The US infantry sprues were some of the first plastics that Battlefront did and it does show quite a bit. Many of the poses are a bit odd and there are a lot of distorted areas that couldn't be done properly with injection moulding. In addition to the lost detail the sprue actually contains multiple duplicate poses, which seems a bit lazy design wise. Now there is a lot more repetition in bases that could have been avoided had Battlefront decided to just do a few more sculpts so that each sculpt in the sprue was unique. Same goes to the design of the miniatures as slightly different poses could have allowed for better moulding and less lost detail. Probably with more design experience they will start producing better plastics, but for the moment these are far below the level of their metals, and even those are at best just average in quality when comparing to other 15mm manufacturers.

It took quite a while to get them done as frankly the painting felt more like a chore than anything else. Still I resolved not to paint anything else in between as that would probably have pushed them to the back of the queue and it would probably have taken me months to gather up the motivation to touch them again. Finally after about two weeks of painting them on a rather loose pace they are ready for gaming. Luckily not much in the form of infantry left in my US project anymore so I'm finally getting done with all that Olive Drab.

With these done my excel sheet is starting to look rather green already! At the moment I have all the remaining half-tracks on the painting table and they should be done within a week. After that a short pause with the yanks again before painting the last missing vehicles. I also still need to buy the dismounted mortars and some 50 cal and 30 cal teams if I ever want to dismount them during game. But for now I can just proxy them with equivalent Para teams that I already have. This project actually took quite a bit longer than I expected, but then again I haven't really been painting near as much as I used to before. Painting mojo is still somewhat missing, but at least it seems to be coming back slowly but surely.