Having painted enough infantry for my first platoon of 8th Army, it was time to paint some of their antagonists: the Afrika Korps! Just like for the 8th Army models I’ve painted so far, these are Warlord Games models and being some of their relatively new plastics are quite nice to build and paint.
It took me a couple of attempts to get the colour I wanted for their fatigues, having at first started with a much yellower green that ended up not looking very good. I’m not sure how accurate this green has ended up being, and I should probably have highlighted them further to simulate the sun-faded look that would have been prevalent, but these look nice to me and were a nice balance of looks to effort! Additionally they stand well apart from the 8th Army models in their almost cream uniforms this way.
Plenty of fun details to paint on these models, with the face coverings offering the opportunity to add a bit of colour to this sea of olives and khakis! The goggles were a fun detail too, I wasn’t to sure how to paint them, but the references I found seemed to be tinted so I painted them in the silver and filled the lenses with GW Contrast Wildwood which turned out ok I think.
The kit comes with heads sporting the pith helmet the AK wore early in the campaign, and considering the time I’m roughly painting these for (1941) they maybe should be wearing them, but I do like the look of the steel helmet and apparently they were available also early on so this lets me build these in a more generic manner (i.e. if I want to play scenarios in 42-43 as well).
As always when painting the first unit for a new army I made myself a painting guide, very useful for me as I like to jump between projects all the time and need a refresher when I get back to something. Let me know if you find it useful yourself!
Anyway that was a fun project and will keep progressing this over the long term, to hopefully get two sizeable forces that can do battle with each other!
Lair of the Lagomorph 
These look really nice, Nicolas! 🙂 The uniform colour looks good to me, a nice faded reed green and I think I’d have gone with steel helmets as well!
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Thanks John! Currently reading through another book on the desert war and I think it’s going to be hard to resist painting up Alamein era tanks at some stage so making the infantry somewhat generic makes sense!
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Isn’t it funny how hard it can be to get your shade of green right sometimes? I struggle with that too though blue might even worse with how many shades are on the market. Regardless, I think these guys look great and there is a lot of personality across each mini too which is always nice to see when you’re dealing with an army like this.
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Thanks Jeff, at the end of the day everything is a compromise and as long as you settle on the shade you like the look of (as opposed to the strictly correct one – if there is such a thing) you’re doing alright in my book!
I’ve been very impressed with the newer warlord games models, some really characterful sculpts as you say.
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Agreed! Its nice to nail a particular color but sometimes its best not to. I run into that with MESBG minis myself sometimes where movie accurate doesn’t always look the best. I’ve never painted anything Warlord before but I’ve certainly been tempted! 🙂
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