April 2022 – Lair of the Lagomorph

The Chosen One!

I don’t know if this happens to everyone, but when I come home from a tournament my mind goes directly to wondering about my next project in that game system. As I mentioned last week I played in my first Star Wars Legions tournament, and of course had the urge to paint more models for the game. A quick chat to a friend with unused Legion models later and I’m apparently starting a Galactic Republic army!

First up on the painting table is Anakin Skywalker! I’ve already painted his future self so it only seemed fitting! The model is one of the newer Legion offering and was very nice to put together and a beautiful cast all around. Far cry from the early models which were made from that terrible boardgames model plastic.

As I’d done the glow effect on Vader’s lightsaber I felt I should do it here too, although I was very apprehensive about putting blue all over the face I’d just finished painting. Luckily I think it turned out ok.

I used the airbrush to sketch in the glow itself, and went back over and picked some highlights with a brush to accentuate the effect.

The lightsaber I painted after having done the airbrush work, as it was very much in the line of fire! I just did a somewhat textured gradient from blue to white using a brush.

When it came to basing him I wasn’t too sure what to do, but settled on a swampy look. This was nice and quick to do and should look nice over a whole army.

I also painted some terrain this week, but I’ll wait till I’ve received the new mat that goes with it before showing it off!

Sailing on the High Seas, Sweltering in the Desert

Board Games, Bolt Action, Terrain

This week saw me paint a few odd things, starting with a sudden urge to paint models from Dreadfleet, a 10 and a bit year old standalone naval game from Games Workshop, set in the old Warhammer universe. I bought my set upon release, built all the models and then never painted any. Never too late to get to that though, just had to wait for inspiration to strike! There are quite a few ships and its of terrain in the game, so plenty more to paint before I can call it done, hopefully I won’t wait 10 years to paint the next batch!

First up we have Grimnir’s Thunder, the dwarven ship. Some ships in the game have small pieces they can send out, and in this case this is a dirigeable. You can barely see another ready to launch peeking out of the deck.

The second one I tackled was Seadrake, the high elf ship. This one has dragons!

These are very cool models, if a bit challenging to paint as they have a lot of overlapping pieces and are a smaller scale than I’m used to painting. They have however been quite enjoyable to paint! The mat that comes with the game also provides a really nice backdrop for photos!

This week also marked my first foray into painting terrain for my North Africa WW2 project, with these two houses. I printed these on my 3d printer (you can find the files I used here) and based them on pieces of MDF. The palm tree is a cheap plastic model I found on eBay. I have a whole batch of these so expect to see them on other terrain pieces in the future!

I painted them with craft paints using a series of progressively brighter dry brushes, nothing fancy but it looks ok.

I used a lot of cream grout to make the sand on the base. This ended up being far too bright for my desert mat so I airbrushed some warmer tones to get it closer to where it needed to be. It’s quite a bit brighter but looks reasonable to me now.

As a parting note I played in a Star Wars Legion tournament over the weekend with my Galactic Empire army. This was my first attempt at playing the game (nothing quite like diving in head first!), and I really enjoyed myself. I didn’t do particularly well (won one of my three games so not all bad!), but I did manage to leave with the best painted army award so am happy with that!

Royal Engineers

Bolt Action

To break up painting basic infantry I decided to put together and paint my 8th army engineer section this week.

I wanted them to stand out from the infantry sections and therefore did a bit of research and found some great reference photos of royal engineers in the North African desert, with the ever present Polish metal detector. Now as far as I can tell 1941 is too early for the detector to have made its way to North Africa (most sources point to 1942), so it’s a bit anachronistic to include one here, but sometimes the rule of cool trumps accuracy!

*SOUTH AFRICAN FORCES IN NORTH AFRICA DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR © IWM (E 18844)*

*ROYAL ENGINEERS AT WORK IN THE WESTERN DESERT © IWM (E 12778)*

Royal Engineers with a mine detector, 1942 (c) https://collection.nam.ac.uk/detail.php?acc=1999-07-14-1

From a painting perspective, again nothing new, these are done the same way my infantry were painted.

More interesting perhaps is modelling of the engineer with the detector I did using bits of wire and some plastic card.

Warlord games makes a model of en engineer with a detector, but he’s done up in late war uniform and uses a later mark of detector. So I decided to make my own. Not the most skilful job, but I enjoyed myself and I think it looks fine on the table!

Update on the master list:

1940-42 Commonwealth Infantry Brigade (British)

– 2nd Lieutenant – 2 Extra men

– Artillery Forward Observer

~~– 10-Man Infantry Section – LMG, SMG~~

– 10-Man Infantry Section – LMG, SMG

~~– 5-Man Royal Engineers Section – LMG, Anti-tank grenades~~

– Machine Gun Team

– Medium Mortar Team

– Field Artillery (25pdr)

– Bren Carrier – Pintle-Mounted LMG

– Matilda II

1940-42 Commonwealth Infantry Brigade (Australian)

– 2nd Lieutenant – 1 Extra man

– 8-Man Infantry Section – LMG, SMG

– 5-Man Infantry Section – LMG, Anti-tank grenades

– Bren Carrier – Pintle-Mounted LMG

– Matilda II

More desert Brits!

Bolt Action

Back with a continuation of the 1941 North Africa project, this time with more of the same!

There isn’t too much to discuss from a painting standpoint, these were done in exactly the same manner as my previous post.

I built the Bren team prone for a bit of variety.

I was pretty happy with how some of the eyes on these turned out so here’s a look at that!

There will be plenty more where these came from, I have a whole lot more infantry to paint for this army as you might expect (and plenty more on the German side when I get to them!). This leads me to talk about what I’ve got planned for this army. As I mentioned last time, this army was partly inspired by my Great Grandfather having been part of 8th army in WW2, hence building these as British (the Warlord kits provide a ton of different heads for troops from all over the empire). I also plan on adding some Australian troops to the army as a nod to where I live now.

Here’s my planned army list with the currently painted models crossed out in red:

1940-42 Commonwealth Infantry Brigade (British)

– 2nd Lieutenant – 2 Extra men

– Artillery Forward Observer

~~– 10-Man Infantry Section – LMG, SMG~~

– 10-Man Infantry Section – LMG, SMG

– 5-Man Royal Engineers Section – LMG, Anti-tank grenades

– Machine Gun Team

– Medium Mortar Team

– Field Artillery (25pdr)

– Bren Carrier – Pintle-Mounted LMG

– Matilda II