Dear Santa

Another year with another Christmas. And with Christmas it's time for the funny bearded man to come again courtesy of Ian of The Blog With No Name fame and his wife Catherine. Secret Santa is at it again with everyone having been given their target and instructions to come up with ideas for them to help with picking gifts.

With Dropfleet Commander coming out I've got tons of stuff coming from their Kickstarter, but more ships never hurt anyone and I'm definitely thankful for any UCM or PHR ships.

Flames of War is always high on my list and there's always room for one more tank or another platoon of infantry. Bigger German Cats can always find a good home at my house. My King Tigers and Jagdtigers can always have more friends to keep them company.

I can always use more fantasy monsters. The only things I'm really more or less fully stocked with for games are skeletons, zombies and small crawly critters. Trolls, ogres, goblins and what not can always find their way onto the table.

And even though my Saxon project has slightly been on hold now I'm starting to kick it off again with the start of our campaign looming ahead early next year. I've been using AB Saxons and I'm still missing a lot of Grenadiers and Light Infantry. Line Infantry is more or less all either painted or already bought as is cavalry.

Finally I've been meaning to get in some games of Konflikt '47 so any Weird War British or German troops or some suitable occult paraphernalia will definitely come in handy

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.

Progress on Detroit's Finest

It's been quite a hectic week at work, but I've still managed to squeeze in a good few hours of painting time getting my tank line rolling and almost out of the factory doors.

All detail is now painted up, tons of decals have been applied and weathering done. I tried some new mud effects from Ammo of Mig on these guys. Still not sure if I prefer these over the Marutechnics ones I've used previously or not. As they are enamel based the drying time can take hours and I'm waiting to see if they change shade or consistency at all. I've liked ones with more granularity before and these seemed to be more of a thick wash consistency. I have a feeling they might benefit from the addition of fine sand or plaster to build up thicker mud layers.

Unfortunately I won't be getting them finished with a varnish layer soon as the mud effects have now been drying for a good few hours and are still wet to the touch. I have an early start tomorrow morning to report for a week of retraining in the military so no hobby time until I return from there. The weather is looking suitable for field exercises with rainfall and +2 degrees being promised by the weatherman. Would be fun to be able to go during summertime for once, but  somehow I always seem to get ordered back during November...

Nebelwerfers, they werf Nebel

Oh boy it's been almost six weeks from the last update. My utter lack of painting mojo has continued with little being done lately. Haven't even had a good game in during the period as work has intervened in my regular gaming days. I had a short streak of painting inspiration in September, which was cut short by a massive varnish problem ruining a half a squad of Chaos Marines.

Still in the last couple of weeks I've been getting back to painting again. It's been quite slow as I've only had time to paint during the weekdays as all my weekends have been spent either in the forest or out to the sea hunting. To have something nice and fast to paint to get my appetite going I dug through my stash looking for something simple and found a small battery of Nebelwerfers that I'd based and put together at some point in the past. Oddly enough my Flames of War Germans have always lacked this iconic weapon that seems to feature in every Late War German list ever made in Flames of War.

Jokes aside, quick paintjobs with my regular 15mm way of painting of basecoat and one highlight layer followed up by a brown wash. It was actually really nice to paint something that only took two evenings from start to finish. Finally some sense of accomplishment. I have a tendency to try to paint too many figures at the same time for effiencys sake, but it really does sap motivation at times with units taking too long to finish.

Basing took a bit longer as they've now been sitting painted for a nearly a couple of weeks and I only got around to finishing them today. Some of the clump foliage is still wet after being doused with thinned out PVA to make them stronger. But being impatient I went ahead and took pictures anyways :)

Immediately after taking the pictures I managed to throw one of them onto the ground braking it in a few pieces... Luckily the paint mostly broke off at the seams in areas where it's hard to see so fixing it wasn't too hard. Still I've gotta admit I was a bit pissed...

After these guys I've been slowly working on a few projects at the same time. I've always played my Americans either infantry or mechanised with Tank Destroyer support so I figured it was high time to add some Shermans so I could field an armored force as well. A simple colour modulation with the airbrush was done and now I've been picking out details. Decals and weathering coming soon.

I'm also working on a Chaos Space Marine squad. And it's actually the second time that I'm painting half of them... I'd painted their armor and picked out all details and needed to apply varnish before decals and some weathering and figured I'd do it quickly with a spray can instead of digging out the airbrush. I'd never used the Army Painter Satin Varnish before, which should already have told me to test it on something first before applying it on all the models. With it being autumn it was quite moist outside and in combination with that the varnish had some freak reaction and it turned milky white on top of the minis. I went through tips found online from applying a thin layer of varnish after the first one had tried to gently removing it with paint removal. Nothing worked and in the end I had to go and strip the paint of the first five that were very near being finished.  That really killed all my painting motivation for a few weeks and I've only lately been getting back. After the first disastrous run I decided to paint the whole squad at the same time for efficiencys sake. Airbrushing is now done (again) and I've started doing lining. Picking out details is next followed by paint chips and decals. Hopefully getting them done in the next few weeks.


Anyway that's the end of my rambling for now. Hopefully the next update won't take as long! I'm anxiously waiting for my dropfleet commander pledge to arrive and the blog will probably be filled with that once it get's here!