Detroit's Finest are ready

Back home from a short retraining. It was nice to have a break from the normal everyday routine by training in new tasks even if it was quite exhausting with multiple sleepless nights and all the action. It's also been quite a few years since I last wore an uniform so it was fun to be back attempting to be soldierly for a moment again.

10 years, quite a few kilos and another rose on my chest hasn't exactly changed my look into a more soldierly one. Funny enough these pictures are actually taken nearly exactly ten years apart and within 10 meters of each other.

With me back home it was time to finalize the tank company that I'd been working on. A quick coat of gloss varnish followed by matte varnish to reduce the glare was all that was needed to get these bad boys ready for gaming. 12 tanks altogether with two platoons of 4 tanks and a further 4 to provide different HQ options. Being a cheesy competitive gamer in Flames of War I've put together platoons of 2 E8's, a Jumbo and a basic M4A1. Depending on points my HQ will be an E8 and a Jumbo, with a M4A3 in the 75 and 76mm variants and a 105mm M4 available as well. The plastic M4A1's are from Plastic Soldier Company while everything else is from Battlefront. In the future I might paint up some Battlefront A1's as well, because the PSC ones are quite a bit smaller and definitely stand out from the rest. But alas that's what I had available so I went with them. To distinguish the platoons from each other one is laden with equipment with the other one running with empty decks. I prefer vehicles looking worn and filled with equipment, but to make gaming easier you have to make sacrifices.

I've painted quite a few US vehicles in the last few years and the process really does go forward quite routinely now. A base coat of Brown Violet has colour modulation added with dark yellow to enhance the edges. Decals and chipping with a sponge is followed by Ammo of Mig washes to create streaking and shade the vehicles, before a liberal application of mud effects. I've been thinking about going with a more pronounced colour modulation effect on them as after the washes most of it disappears. But as I have tens of vehicles in this scheme already I think a different painting style would stand out too much from the crowd.

As I said in the previous post I tried some new mud effects from Mig. I'm still not completely sold on them as they are more of a wash consistency and don't really have much of a "body" to them. I've read that they could be used with some fine sand or chalk mixed into them to give an illusion of clumps of mud, but with nothing suitable at hand I'll have to try that as a later time. I tried blowing small droplets from a brush by blasting it with air from the airbrush and applying it by hand with a brush and a sponge. Using an airbrush as assistance is the recommended way, but I found it too tricky for such a small scale. The instructional videos are for 1:35 scale AFV models so it probably works there much better. Sponge and brush seemed the way to go on these, but I did apply them too thick on a few tanks with almost a solid paint like look on them. Still from a distance they look good so I'm not going to attempt to remedy that.

With these out of the way it's 40k time while I wait for my Dropfleet Commander Kickstarter pledge to arrive. I'm really starting to find my painting mojo again as these tanks were actually really fun to paint. US tanks are quite simple to paint so things advanced swiftly with only the decaling stage being a bit dreary with over 100 decals applied altogether.

And finally a couple of pics from the barracks. Welcoming you inside there's a duo of T-34's that Finland used quite extensively in WW2 against their former owners. And quite a nice looking little AA vehicle from Sweden (Lufvärnskanonvagn L-62) with the older insignia that has nowadays been abandoned for quite obvious reasons due to it being very similar to the swastika.