Pafetikbazerkas foray into 15mm Flames of War

So working from home with 3 kids bouncing off the walls may equate to less time for hobby, but I’ve realised that as long as keep my plates spinning no-one is much minding when I spin them and , as we know, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. So best make time for the things that keep you sane and maintain balance.

I’ve reached a point where I’m pretty happy with the stowage on the Shermans but I want to weather all the tanks together as they’ll have been rolling in the same muck. To that end I’ve added skirts to the germans and preping myself for camo patterns. Still havent decided on the exact method, airbrush or bristle. Maybe I’l try both and see which I prefer.

With all the impending chaos of the last month I haven’t been as focused on this project and instead trying to get in as many games with folk while we can. But there has been some progress

So focusing my research on Shermans took me down a great many rabbit holes and I collected many screen shots of stowage and markings and almost settled on an historic unit to portray.

Turns out the 2^nd Armored Div’ (Hell on Wheels) saw pretty much every European theatre and from what I could find had all sorts of Shermans in all sorts of configurations and markings. The one thing I’m missing is an easy way of reproducing the 2^nd div unit markings as the decal set I have appears to cover the 4^th div. I decided instead to leave the unit insignia off, go a bit generic, but utilize what I had found to inspire stowage.

The tank sprues came with a few useful items including Jerry cans (Yes…he can), track, ammo boxes (I think) and spare wheels. The canvas rollups, felt a little off to me but I found if I cut them down they did pass as smaller rolls.

What I didn’t have that seemed to appear everywhere was lengths of timber, large canvas rollups that looked believable, boxes of stuff and back packs and sand bags bags

I had some square-ish profiled sprue lying about which served for boxes. A toothpick, BBQ skewer and a match or two gave some variety in lumber and split matchsticks work pretty well as planks.

I had a bit of kids Crayola modeling putty laying about so thought to see what I could make out of it.

Turns out its soft and squishy but not overly sticky and found it very good for making rolls of canvas and sand bags (ravioli). It does seem to take days to dry hard and there is a little shrinkage but the super glue still held it fast.

Focused pics of blue fin is really difficult apparently

I still needed a few individual backpacks to round out the effect and remembered I have squads of them and as long as the blue stuff was out I also pressed a few molds of jerry cans and track.

Currently I’m satisfied with about half my tanks and will aim to be satisfied with the remaining stowage sometime this weekend so I can finish painting and start weathering.

So finally a weekend with enough spare time to post my progress.

I thought the flocking process was going to be pretty straight forward and easy but this was first time with static grass

On my first few bases I tried some thinned down PVA, the thinning I think, my first mistake. It didn’t take very well to the base or the static grass and ended up with a mangy, balding effect on a layer of glossy PVA. So I think to myself, maybe some super glue. I source myself a bottle of superglue with brush applicator and set to it.

The super glue was much improved over the PVA but the end result wasn’t exactly what I would call lush and still showed a lot of gloss finish. Certainly didn’t evoke images of the fields of Normandy and by now I’m feeling a bit frustrated.

So I do a little internet searching to work out where I’m going wrong and I come across an observation about how you shouldn’t matte coat after placing static grass as it will stick to your minis in bad places. So I flip the concept and think to dab some Liquitex matte medium down and press my grass to it. Getting my matte finish and lush grass in one.

This actually worked quite well I think in part because I already a bit of grass on for the process to cling to.  Annoying though I did end up with a bit of grass in unwanted places and had to back track and carefully pick and pry. Some of this I just covered with bigger tufts later.

Once I was satisfied that I had enough grass down I dry brushed the balder areas with a little Zandari Dust to make it look a little dry then shaved a bottle caps worth of soft pastel. At first I mixed a little red and brown and dabbed it on in and around my dry areas then made a darker mix and dabbed it around randomly. Then I took a syringe of Isopropyl alcohol and drop by drop set the powder in place.

Lastly I threw down a scattering of grass tufts, used my airbrush to scour any lose grass off, and gave it a another coat of Matte for good measure.

Tanks weren’t forgotten over the holidays either but still need a lot of work

I decide to make the most of optional Sherman types and magnetize the base to interact with the turret magnets so now I have early and late in one!

Current status of 2 boxes of Hit the beach plus 4 tigers. Still plenty to do with American infantry and all the tanks still requiring a lot of detail work , and bases still need to be flocked but the at this point I felt the need for a change, realized I was going to soon need a bit of 1/100 scale terrain so pulled out the Joan of Arc – Time of Legends Boxes

What’s going on with the bases you may ask.

A bit of madness and experimentation.

For the ultimate in flexibility and to assist with storage I’ve magnetized all the bases.

The magnetic bases also make storage and processing much easier as I could line up  the units and shuffle each unit forward as a paint pass was complete. If I had to put the job down for any reason then order was kept and there was no issue with picking it up again.

However I still had an issue of how to handle the units generaly. On a typical table top the magnets are strong enough to lift a unit of men via any one soldier but I still don’t like the idea. And if I was to use steel plates to help store them then the bases become too difficult to move. The solution was to pad the bases with afelt like material with the backing down so as not to pick up too much debris

The end result is I now have plenty of lip underneath to get my clumsy fingers around the chamfered bases, or the sponge effect allows me to press down a corner to get under so no more lifting buy the little men heads, and the magnetic grip is still plenty to hold the units in place for storage

No time for posting in the mad lead up to Christmas or the weeks of laying about in holiday bliss afterwards but that’s not to say I haven’t been hard it.

All Germans from the second box of Hit the beach are now complete bar basing and to mix it up I’ve painted a bunch of them with an abstraction of oak leaf so I could not only pass them off as SS, but also distinguish various platoons on the table.

One thing I do note generally, though I actually have many of actual colours specified in the Colours of War book which I used as guide, I did find I had to punch up the lighter colours a little to achieve a visible contrast  at gaming distance ie. I mixed a little pale green into the Luftwaffe green to make it visible. I also mixed a few grey pants and tunics as well as the occasional autumn oak leaf pattern to provide a little variety over the group