A Somewhat Productive Week

Despite being somewhat tired every evening this week and spending much of yesterday trying to catch up a bit on sleep, I've actually been reasonably productive. During the week I was painting up some artillery for my SYW Russians. I'd pretty much finished them on Thursday night so I did the final details on Friday evening and varnished them. A bit later on I stuck them in a container with water in it to help loosen the PVA glue holding them onto the painting sticks. A couple of hours later I took them out and as I was plucking the figures off I noticed something frightful - everything seemed to have white splotches in random places. I then realised what it must have been - the varnish wasn't fully dry and the water must have been warm, causing the varnish to go cloudy. I decided to try something a little drastic, but it seemed to do the trick - a  mix of satin and matt varnishes with some of my ink washes.

Yesterday I got the figures stuck onto their bases and added basing gunk. This morning I added flock and glued the limbers into place behind the horses.

And without further ado, here are the pics:

4 pounder, 2 x 8 pounder, howitzer

As before, the guns are loose so that I can choose what gun to use depending on my army list and also to turn them round to show limbered/unlimbered.


This afternoon I've been having some fun with the airbrush. You may recall that toward the end of the Challenge I assembled a bunch of extra vehicles (mostly hover tanks) for my 15mm NSL force. Well, as they'd been sitting in the drawer ever since and I didn't have anything else primed and ready to go (OK, nothing else that I wanted to paint today) I set up the spray booth, sorted out the paints I'd need, found my little scraps of mesh for the camo patterns and got myself ready to go. And then I spotted that I hadn't added radio antennae to the vehicles. A couple of minutes with a cheap plastic brush, a hobby knife and some superglue and the antennae were in place.

I did my best to replicate the paint scheme of the original vehicles. The colours were easy as I'd made a note of them in a blog post at the time. It was more the technical side - I'd forgotten how much of a pig it was using the meshes for the camo.

Anyway, some pics of the various stages of WIP:

Dunkelgelb primer

Hull Red stripes

Dark Blue Grey diamond pattern

Diamond pattern close up

Camo Light Green dot pattern

Dot pattern close up

A few weeks ago, I was contacted by a small miniatures company in France, asking me if I'd be willing to review some of their figures. I had seen some of their figures during the Challenge and really liked the look of them, so I agreed. They then asked if there were any in particular that I would like to review. The list was very long, even after I knocked it back to a few examples of the singles and groups, so I just said "surprise me".

Anyhoos, earlier this week the package arrived:

On opening the package I was surprised - the figure they'd sent wasn't one of the ones which had made it to my pared down list, but was a very suitable one for me:

"Tania the Tanker" from Raging Heroes, whose pose and look is clearly inspired by "Rosie the Riveter" from the WW2 posters. The pic shows everything (except the delivery slip) that came in the package. I have opened the blister pack to take a look at the figure, but no pics for now - I'll be saving those for the review post. Let's just say it looks great and I look forward to painting her.