Stuck at Home; Keeping myself sane

Well what have I been doing for the last few days since my last post. Well for starters I cracked open my German Flames of War army from the carry case, and decided to make a start on the infantry.

This is the first time I’ve painted figure miniatures of this scale, apart from about 5 years ago when I painted some 15 mm fantasy for a friend, and then it was a small selection of different characters/villains he was going to use  for a planned RPG campaign.

So at this point I’ve not painted a 15 mm army of humanoids, in fact I’ve not batch painted an army unit in a while, those I have done have been completed over a longer period of time. Last years Spring Clean Challenge is still unfinished, as I’m that bad when it comes to unit/army painting. I became bored of batch painting a few years back when I got rid of my 40K armies (7000 pts Dark Angels, 4000 pts Blood Angels and 3000 pt Empire army). I started playing skirmish level historical games, Bolt Action is the nearest I’ve come to playing large scale historical games, but even then I’ve not built any large armies for the game.

So sitting down and painting a reasonable amount of 15 mm infantry in a couple of days was not a task I was looking forward to. I decided to paint the uniform in a light grey (Administratum Grey from GW), as my plan was to wash this with my limited stock of Nuln Oil.  I initially painted up one base worth just to get an idea of the different steps I’d require to paint all of them. Once I was satisfied with this I pushed on with the rest of them. Thank god for my painting magnifying glasses as I would have been squinting throughout the process. I finally managed to get through it all and I’m happy with the result.

Once I finished these, I decided to crack on and finish a couple of my Bolt Action Tanks, Panzer III, Stug and a T-34. All of these had been previously base coated but I decided i wanted to add some weathering and dirtying them up a little, so that they look battle worn. The T-34 didn’t get too much weathering done it, as I’m planning to use it in the Korean War Campaign, and I wanted it to look like a reasonably new tank. The two German tanks I wanted to look like they’ve been on the battle field for a couple of years or more, so they needed some drastic weathering, This was done using weathering powders, and powder pads by Tamiya.

All this time off locked away at home has meant I’ve been able to catch up on a lot of projects.