Wednesday 18 October 2017

Latest work

The 15mm WW2 American units have made it across the painting table. They are all winter units in greatcoats so essentially have been drybrushed, washed and highlighted. The thing that took the longest was the bases. They needed 2-3 drybrushes with progressively lighter grey to give me the right melting snow look I needed. As the entire point was to develop units for the Bulge, they have been worth the effort. I have lots of Shermans in my XXX Corps army, and I have deliberately left off decals that would prevent me switching them from UK to US ownership. I'm sure someone will point out that they're the wrong colour green for one or the other, but I don't care. Since they are all basecoated in Vallejo Nato green and then washed in green or brown ink, they are meant to look generic. After all, a sherman is a sherman is a sherman.

Most of my hobby stuff is in storage after the shed collapsed, so I am limited to what I can do. For example, I've just done a load of 10mm ACW but have realised that the 1'x3/4 bases I was using for F&F are in the storage unit and right at the back. So I've moved on to some Imaginations stuff. I have 300 20mm SYW Austrians, and at the moment I'm experimenting with colour schemes. One of the nations represents Prussia, but I don't want to follow Austrian colour schemes as the whole point of imaginations is to be as wacky as you want. I'm toying with the idea of Bavarian Blue coats with pink facings and white breeches for the first regiment. They will be the La Reine's Regiment de Fru Fru, commanded by his lordship Le Baron du M'Oncle, who once left his pen somewhere he can't remember.

Eventually these two nations will be joined by one based on AWI British and US Militiamen. I'm doing all this in 20mm plastics, and buying units when I see a likely job lot on ebay. Although set in the Horse and Musket period, I might bring in some Napoleonics, especially for cavalry and artillery since there are few sets of these for the SYW/AWI period, meaning I may have to pay full price for them. Alternatively I could pad them out with a few 20mm metals.