More Modern Brits

Once the test figure was down, I was happy to plow on with the other seven of these guys.

I found the camo quite time consuming to do in a batch, and I have to admit it sapped me of a little bit of motivation at one point. However, I soon realised that once you've done the camo on these guys, your pretty much done, and they didn't take too much time after that:

I have to say again, and I've said it lots of times before, the Empress Miniatures are lovely - so much detail. I am sure a very skilled painted could have a lot of fun with these!

These guys were one of the last few things on the desk before I go back to 20mm WW2 so it will unfortunatley be a while before we see anymore of these.

Modern Brit Test Figure

One of the many projects that I have on the back burner is to play Force on Force games set in Afghanistan. I mainly want to focus on the British fighting in and around Helmand, as I think it will make for some cracking games.

To that end you may recall I bought a load of Empress Miniatures last year at Partizan and then painted up the Taliban contingent fairly soon after. The Brits themselves took a while longer due to me trying to figure out how to paint multi-cam.

After some advice from a chap on one of the forums I populate, I had a go with various greens and browns and came up with this:

Not too shabby an effort I am sure you will agree. The technique I used gave and overly pleasing result, athough it certainly falls within the three feet rule of miniature painting. I was also going for a slightly less orange look on the glasses, but oh well, I guess everyone in my force will be wearing Oakley's!

Another seven of these to get done, along with another 8 Taliban and Insurgents I got at Salute. 

Boom, Boom, Boom! German 10.5 Howitzer.

In the ever going quest to one day beat my Bolt Action nemisis Steve, I have finally got around to adding some heavier firepower to my 28mm Germans.

I have gone for a leFH 18/40 10.5 cm Howitzer to hopefully blow a few infantry squads off the table.

Quite a fun model to paint this, combining a different range of techniques. I painted the crew exaclty as I would my infantry which was a simple enough job. However, the gun got a similiar treatment to the vehicles in the force, and I made use of oil washes to hopefully give it a beat up look. Some pigments to represent soot and a matt varnish sealed the deal.

One thing that I did do different to this was to mount the crew on the base in a way that they can't be removed. I normally prefer to have them detachable, but for speed they were simply glued on to the base. I did leave the gun loose for ease of tansport.

Plenty of other stuff for my Bolt action guys sat on the shelf, but it's 20mm next up!