October 2021 – Lair of the Lagomorph

More Tanks!

I decided that while the motivation to paint tanks is there, it should be fully utilised! I still had 3 Cromwell tanks to paint up before we could play this big tank battle, so after finishing up the last post, I decided to keep going.

I decided to paint them as 7th Armoured tanks, as North Africa is also a campaign I’m fond of and the Desert Rats are hard to pass by! The kits came with decals for the 7th which made life easier, although I don’t believe the regimental number decals are correct, as all the reference photos I could find had them with a stag head in the top half and the number in the bottom half. Still I’m not enough of a stickler to let get in the way of finishing these!

British tanks are somewhat simpler to paint than the German camo, being simply a single colour all over, but I otherwise replicated the process I used on the German tanks last post. The decals are a mix of the ones that came with the warlord kits (the regimental numbers, the unit symbols), the allied star warlord decal sheet for the stars on the turrets, and the registration numbers from the Italeri version of the same kit (while these are Warlord branded, Italeri produces them, and sell their own version of the kit). I’m glad I had all these on hand, I think together they make a pretty complete picture, and am a little disappointed that all the decals I think are needed are not just in the box.

Some of the decals aren’t the straightest but then I remember that a lot of these were hand stenciled on, so some variation may be somewhat more realistic (at least it’s a useful excuse 😉 )

These were fun and very quick to paint, now I just have to figure out how and when to have this big tank battle!

Tank War!

Bolt Action

A friend of mine gave me his Bolt Action army last weekend after a year of not doing too much with it, he felt he’d rather not have it than having the pressure to complete it, and focus instead on Star Wars Legion. He’d amassed a pretty large collection of models, so this was very generous of him indeed. I’ve been itching to get a game of Bolt Action in after all this time so decided to act quickly and paint all his tanks so we could play the Tank War set of rules for Bolt Action, with the goal of painting the infantry later. After tallying up his vehicles (1 Puma, 2 Panzer III, 2 Tigers), I ended up at around 1500 points, so decided to round that up to 2000 by buying a couple of extra tanks to fill out the numbers (a Panzer IV and a Stug IV). This would let this army play against my own 1000pts of British tanks and another friend’s 1000pts of Russian tanks.

I decided to go for a late war scheme (the famed Dunkelgelb, Olivgrün, Rotbraun camo) to match my own armies which I mostly picked because of their presence in Normandy. The Panzer IIIs are a little bit out of place there, but I found three sources that mention there being a handful present, good enough for me!

With that goal in mind I decided that for time efficiency I would paint the lot together as there are a lot of efficiencies to be gained there. Tank painting with oils washes and layers of varnish has a lot of drying time in between steps, while the steps themselves are relatively short. Here’s a quick summary of the steps:

Undercoat – Vallejo Dunkelgelb Primer through the airbrush for the tank bodies, Vallejo Plate Mail Metal for the tracks (Kept separate where possible)
Camo – Vallejo Olivgrün and Vallejo Rotbraun through the airbrush, I decided to do a loose striped pattern.
Basecoat the bits that are not tank bodies (Rubber on the wheels, tracks where attached, attached equipment etc.)
Gloss Varnish the lot
Apply Decals
Gloss Varnish again
Overall oil wash – Abteiling 502 Dark Mud
Streaking rust, applied dots and streaked them downwards – Abteilung 502 Oxide Patina
Satin Varnish all over
Used Graphite pencil to wear the edges
Applied mud to tracks – AK Wet Mud
Applied dust – Mig Europeant Dust Dry Pigment
Matt varnish all over

Some of those decals were very tricky to apply! Luckily decal solvents saw me through! (I used Mig Decal Set/Fix for this)

Very happy with the outcome of the rust streaks, I’ll definitely use that technique again.

Here’s a gallery of all the vehicles

The Tigers – Warlord Games/Italeri Plastic kits

The Panzer IIIs – Warlord Games/Italeri Plastic kits

The Puma – Warlord Games/Italeri Plastic kit

The Stug IV – Die Waffenkammer resin kit

The Panzer IV – Die Waffenkammer resin kit

Very fun little project, now I need to paint my British tanks otherwise this will all be in vain!

Warp Lightning Cannon

AoS, Uncategorized

To keep things from getting too boring when painting this skaven army, I’ve decided to space out the blocks of infantry models with single models. First of these to hit the painting table is the Warp Lightning Cannon! One of the Skaven’s most powerful (and therefore extremely likely to blow up!) war machines.

This model was painted following the same recipes I detailed in the post on the clan rats with the exception of two new materials: the warpstone chunks and the copper wiring.

The warpstone was painted by first covering the yellow ochre undercoat with GW’s Ork Flesh contrast paint, followed by a pure white highlight on the edges of the stone, and finally a very light misting of Vallejo’s Light Livery Green through the airbrush to tint the stone and the surrounding areas for that faint glow effect.

The copper was painted using Vallejo Metal Color Copper as a basecoat, followed by the overall coat of GW Agrax Earthshade the rest of the model gets, then GW Reikland Fleshshade to give it a nice reddish tint. This is followed by a fine highlight of the copper basecoat to bring that metallic look back in.

Overall I’m happy with how it turned out, painting time was relatively quick which is what I’m aiming for with this army, too many models to go slow! I also had a bit of fun with the “in-universe photo”, lots of squiggly lines seemed to do the trick!

In the background, I’ve been bitten by the historical bug again, so next post will be a WW2 interlude before resuming the skaven!

Skaven Clanrats

AoS

With the new edition of Age of Sigmar coming out in the past few months, I wanted to start a new army, specifically one that was not at its core just a rebasing of one of my old Warhammer armies. So I went about GW’s catalog to look for an army that inspired me. At about the same time I started planning the follow up campaign to my recently finished Icewind Dale Dungeon and Dragons campaign which had been going on for the last year. We decided to try out the newest Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay edition, and I set about to refreshing my memory of the old world by listening to Warhammer audiobooks while painting. The Gotrek and Felix audiobooks have turned out to be excellent, with great voice acting and plenty of background colour I could use in the campaign. More relevant to this post though, is the abundance of Skaven antagonists in these novels. The descriptions of the Skaven and their machinations, mistrust of each other, and readiness to blame others for their failures makes for very fun storytelling, and of course, made me want to paint some.

I’ve actually had these models painted for a few weeks now, but was waiting on the basing materials to arrive in the post to finish them. These 20 models were my guinea pigs (lab rats?), and were used to find a scheme that would satisfy two criteria: 1) look good on the tabletop, 2) be quick! My current plans for the army involve 100 troop rats (80 Clanrats and 20 Stormvermin) and I don’t want to spend the next year painting them.

In the same vein, I wanted the basing to be quick so I decided to try out the base ready range from geekgamingscenics.com, specifically their Grimdark City Rubble. My aim for the bases was to represent Skaven tunnels, which I picture as dark earth and broken supports, which I made out of balsa wood, stained with brown and green inks.

As with my previous armies I made a record of the paints used so I can refer to it as I continue painting the army (a useful precaution against becoming distracted by another project and forgetting how the early models were painted!).

Overall I like the look of these and am happy with how long 20 took to paint. I have a 1000 point list in place and am playing around with how to expand it to 2000 points in the future. Painting on this army continues and I should have another post on it soon.

Star Wars Legion Desert Terrain

Middle-Earth SBG, Star Wars Legion, Terrain

I played a Middle-Earth SBG tournament yesterday (more on this at the end), and was inspired by some of the tables I saw there to paint some terrain of my own. I’d done all the preparation for these buildings while recovering from my eye injury a few weeks back, but never got around to painting them as I got too excited by being able to see well enough to paint models again! My 15-month old had a three hour nap this afternoon that provided a window of opportunity to put my new found motivation to good use.

The buildings in question I 3D printed on my filament printer from models by Imperial Terrain who produce great Star Wars Legion terrain. To add to the look of them, I textured all of the walls with tile grout, which provided a great surface for drybrushing as well as hiding some of the layer lines from the printing process. I really love the look of this technique and will keep applying it to printed terrain where it makes sense.

For the walls of the structures, I started with an all over coat from a cream spray can, followed by a reddish-brown wash I made using a mixture of craft paints, water, and some window cleaner to break the surface tension. Once that was dry, I drybrushed a mix of ochre and white craft paint, followed by another drybrush of the same mixture with more white added.

The crates were painted in a variety of flat colours and hit with the wash and drybrush steps of the walls.

The rusted elements were done with a burnt sienna craft paint, followed by a mixture of burnt umber, red, and yellow inks all over. The same ink mix was used to do the rust streaks. The pipes were then hit with sponged on orange paint to add a bit more variety.

The roof of the tall building was done in a brassy-coppery look, which is something I’d seen on the painted examples on Imperial Terrain’s website and really like the look of.

I’m not sure how they did theirs, but mine was done using the airbrush, with an all over coat of Vallejo Metal Colour Copper, followed by a shading step done using Burnt Umber Ink. The verdigris was done using GW’s Nihilak Oxide through the airbrush (to avoid the wash running in the print lines), followed by some stippling of the same paint to add a bit of texture to the effect.

Overall very happy with the outcome, and the little guy woke up just as I was putting the finishing touches on the buildings so thanks a lot to him for giving me the time to get these done! I have a fair few more pieces to tackle before the table will be done, so expect some more Star Wars terrain posts in the future!

Radagast goes to war!

As I mentioned above, I played a one day tournament yesterday with the models I showcased in the last post. I ended up with two wins and two losses, finishing up somewhere in the middle of the field which I was happy with. For the tournament I put together the small display board you can see above and the effort paid off as I took home the best painted army award which I was very happy with. All in all a good fun day, and as always has motivated me to paint even more Middle-Earth armies!