Sunday, October 27, 2013

Painting on the Eastern Front

Since this is a new blog thing I suppose it is only proper to insert some of my life's goings on.  My wife and I had a beautiful little girl named Madeline Leilu Brow on October 9th, 2013.  So my pursuit of my hobby and gaming is balanced by well, life.  That is a good thing.  To much of something tends to make it not be as special.  I mainly get to do some painting on the weekends.

I have been working on scratch built trees and painting my Blitzkreig era German soldiers.  What I usually do when I work on models is paint up a batch of models.  While things are drying or I need a short mental break I work on a piece of terrain.  This breaks up the work into smaller bite sized chunks.  I do not know, maybe I have AdD.  I also listen to NetFlix or Mystery Science Theater on the tube of U's.

My movie perusal list included:
Donnie Darko (we have a bunny in our house.  It looks and talks exactly like the bunny in this movie.  I do not hallucinate though).
Revolution (This is not a movie.  I have a healthy diet of roughage and Sci Fi).
Phase 7 (an odd foreign film about a epidemic and the survivors.  It was really good.  I recommend it).




This is my main project for the next few months.  There is a KV-1 (1942) tank, the German infantry platoon and the scratch built trees.  The KV-1 is a Hobby Boss 1/48 scale model.  I cannot abide the 1/56 Warlord games vehicles.  The infantry is huge next to the tanks.  I will rant erm... post more on that later.  



This is the first squad.  I have changed my painting strategy as of late.  I used to paint on model at a time.  My usual painting affair with 28's was Warmachine.  Most of the models in that game are individual character models.  It worked to give all my attention to one model.  It took alot of work but I am now trying to paint all the base coats up front and then focus on one part of all the models at a time.  I still have a few base coats to paint.  You should always paint from the deepest recesses out when painting.  This means I will do the skin of all the guys and then the uniforms, etc.  I did one model's skin.  The guy with the MP40 is finished.  You may be able to see his five o'clock shadow and eyes.  The three guys advancing are the mg34 squad.  You may notice an absence of the mg34.  That is b/c a hourglass eyed orange monster decided to bat the poor guy around.  I doubt many German soldiers signed up for that!  The gun barrel broke off and I have no idea where it went.  Another mg34 is being primed and re-attached.  That is a bummer b/c that model is one of my favorites.  

Rifle Squad 2
Rifle Squad 3

These photos are the MG34 teams.  I am really excited to see how the prone team turns out.  I try to tell a story with every model I paint.  



 These guys on the pumpkin cup have been primed.  I modeled them after photos I have seen of German soldiers firing the weapon over the shoulder.  It seems impractical to me.  The weapon is probably not ranged for accurate firing since they are not at a fixed position.  Maybe these guys are so good with guessing range by feel they were effective.  Or they could be blasting at a bunch of fleeing soldiers.  (I am not a thrill seeker with the horrors of warfare.  I am only wondering at when this firing position was ever used).  It occurs to me that this position could just be poses for photographers behind the lines.  I added a caption to capture the feel.

The last model photo is the command squad.  This may not be a full sized command platoon.  I do plan on adding some more guys into the squad if they require it.  Keep in mind that no army is ever at full strength.  My tank platoon had cooks and support guys attached to get up to 16 men (full strength) for Kosovo.  I do not think we had a full platoon with the extras.

"Brave Wermacht soldaten engulf the terrified Russian rabble".





This is a scratch built tree.  I got the idea from another blog = http://mdarrow.blogspot.com/
He does some really great terrain.  If I have not already mentioned it I have an all consuming passion for making great terrain (as cheaply as possible).  I will post some pics of my 3mm terrain and models next week.

Finally we come to my scratch built palm trees.  I also plan to venture into wargaming in the pacific.  As of yet I do not own and Japanese or US Army guys.  I will eventually.  One of these days I will do a tutorial on how I built these trees.  It is pretty simple and someone with rudimentary skill could make great trees.  

That is it for today.  I will keep posting photos of my progress.  I hope you enjoyed looking at my work.  

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