With my newly refound ability to paint, I’ve been looking for things to paint (which I’m not short of) and where better to direct that energy than at a new project rather than work towards finishing one of the many existing ones I have!
I got a book in the mail last week I’ve been looking for for a while, and said book triggered a flurry of conversation between my regular gaming partner and I about campaigns in the Warhammer world. The book in question is The General’s Compendium, a book published during the 6th edition of the game which contains a lot of ideas for what we now call narrative games, including a whole three ways to run wargaming campaigns. I read the book cover to cover over the last few days, and I really want to run a campaign now!
One of the map-based campaign systems in the book has the factions involved in the campaign have “banners” on the map, each representing an army. Rather than tracking army composition, the players just pick a game size they want for the campaign and each time enemy banners meet on the map, a game of Warhammer is played at the size specified at the start. The players are free to alter their army lists between games, that being rationalised away by reinforcements and units being shuffled between banners.
The details are still fuzzy, but the leading idea for our campaign is to each have a number of factions under our control. As we are just two and that will be a lot of games and a lot of painting, we decided to keep the point size for the banners to 1000 points. The opportunity to paint multiple small armies is one that I very much welcome, and here’s the start of that:
This cannon and its crew are models from the Battle For Skull Pass starter set which was released for the 7th edition of the game. I’ve had these dwarves for quite a long time now, and in fact dwarves were my first ever Warhammer models way back when (over 20 years ago)! It’s one of my biggest Warhammer regrets to not actually have a painted dwarf army considering how long I’ve owned some of these models. Time to fix that!
I decided to go with the Karak Hirn colour scheme (i.e. green), as that was the studio army that was done up in the army book back then, and I have fond memories of looking at those pages back in the day. It’s also the scheme that I used for that first box of Dwarf Warriors I got at the time.
Most of the painting was done using contrast paints as a base coat, with the exception of the green tunics which these models acted as a testing grounds for. I wanted to make sure I matched the green of the studio paint job back then, and luckily for me the army book had a nice guide on how to paint it … with 20 year old paints. Luckily I was able to match the paints with some in my collection, and it’s quite simply Vallejo Heavy Black Green as a base coat followed by successive highlights of that same colour with more and more Scale75 Sherwood Green. I’ll do up a proper painting guide when I paint up the first block unit and have finalised how all of this is going to look.
Anyhow that’s it for this update, these models were very quick to paint, upside of their relative lack of detail due to being ~15 year old single piece plastic models. I have plenty more from that starter set to get through, so expect some more stiffly posed dwarves to grace these pages soon!
With the wrist on the mend and itching to get back into some painting I decided to tackle something with limited amounts of brushwork: tanks!
I’ve had a Panzer 3 half built for my North Africa Germans sitting in a box for a while and this seemed like a good occasion to finish it up. I then decided that the two P3s I painted for my late war Germans would make much more sense as reinforcements for North Africa, so decided to repaint them as well.
The two already painted had the longer later barrels, so step one was a bit of surgery to shorten them down to match the new one. I think it turned out pretty well, can you tell which are the cut down ones*?
Painting-wise these were pretty straightforward, just an all-over coat of Vallejo Model Air Sand Yellow, followed by painting the tools attached to the outside of the tanks, and a lot of chipping and the rubber wheels with Vallejo German Grey. The fun came from the oils and the pigments, I wanted these to be very dusty so I went much heavier than I have on tanks in the past. These are covered in a variety of sandy/cream oils, and covered all over with pigments in the same kind of colours.
I did not enjoy putting on the turret decals last time, and was dreading it again this time! Things went much the same: a lot of repositioning and dousing on decal setter and crossing my fingers in hope! Overall though, I can’t complain with the outcome, I think they turned out pretty good.
Good to be back at the painting table, and I hope to be able to keep going!
* 201 is the new tank, and 202 and 203 are the repaints.
I’ve unfortunately suffered from an inflammation of my wrist for the last few weeks and have not been able to paint while I wait for it to recover. While the cause was my work and some heavy mouse use, the repetitive motions of painting also trigger those bits of my arm that are currently inflamed. I figure then that I may as well show some old work while I can’t produce anything new. Fingers crossed this is the only such post I’ll have to make, but we’ll see how we go!
Today I’ll showcase this unit of archers I painted a few months before I started this blog. I painted these just before my son was born, and therefore was at home a lot with a heavily pregnant wife and had a lot of painting time on my hands (This was 2020 and I was in full work from home mode due to covid too which meant I was basically at home 7 days a week). I’ve always loved these Empire archers, I think the models are extremely characterful and they were a joy to paint. I spent “character” amounts of time on each effectively painting them one by one, which meant I wasn’t particularly quick, but it was a very enjoyable process.
At the time I was really enjoying the background of the Cities of Sigmar faction for Age of Sigmar, especially with the idea of the Living City, a city in the realm of life, part human-built, part elf-built, and overgrown with trees. I decided to paint these archers as if they can from there, hence the greens of their tunics and the mossy basing.
The mossy bases were done by painting sand in greens, which was quite a lot of fun and I quite like the effect. If you’ve followed the blog for a bit you might have noticed I quite like my forest bases, and this was another attempt at trying something different in that genre.
I spent a lot of time on the tunics, having a few weeks before watched a video by Sergio Calvo on YouTube where he ran through his process for leather. Going from cold brown, to warm brown, followed by ochre and bone for the final highlights. I loved the look and wanted to try it hence why these models are covered in scratched up leather!
After painting these models and having enjoyed the process so much I toyed with the idea of making a full army for the Living City and I painted up a couple more models, first up this character model my brother in law printed for me as a gift (thanks!).
This was my first time painting a resin 3D printed model and I was blown away by the detail available on what was a relatively cheap resin 3D printer.
This was a very fun model to paint, lots of details. If you look really closely you can see some of the print lines but you have to know where to look.
The final model in the collection was a bit of an experiment and got a bit rushed if I’m honest, and I think is the poorest paint job on these models. This is an old conversion of mine, with the upper half of the plastic Karl Franz riding griffon glued to a pair of Empire Greatswords legs. This was right at the start of my playing with GW’s contrast paints and I was keen to see if I could get a convincing peacock feather effect by using them over metallics.
The result is ok, it looks a little bit better in real life, but photographs a bit poorly. If I were to do it again I would make sure to not let the contrast layers dry, and make sure to blend them a bit better, you can see some rather drastic transitions between the colours there at the moment.
I hope you enjoyed looking through this small collection, and on my end I hope I can get back to painting soon, I’ve been missing it!
You might remember that quite a while back I painted some Lord of the Rings Dead of Dunharrow, and said at the time that I’d built the army so I’d be able to slot in the three hunters and make it exactly 800 points. Well it took me a while (and waiting for those models to come back in stock!) but here they finally are.
These are the new plastic set Games Workshop produced for the trio, and like all the new Middle-Earth plastics they’re excellently detailed and go really nicely together. I’ve actually had these on my painting desk since December, with Aragorn completed and Legolas and Gimli only about half done. I finally decided to finish them off tonight after a few months of staring guiltily at them.
The paint jobs relied pretty heavily on contrast paints with some selective highlights over the top, with most of the leathers and cloth areas done that way. The main exception are the elven cloaks, which I decided to paint in a more traditional manner (basecoat – wash – highlights) with Vallejo Field Grey, GW Agrax Earthshade, and Vallejo Green Grey respectively.
I tried to add a bit of texture to everything with highlights, although to be fair I spent a fair bit more time on Aragorn than on the other two, and therefore he has much more texturing on his clothes! I suppose I can rationalise that by his being a ranger with presumably poor access to new clothes!
Part of the fun of finishing these three off was to be able to put them alongside the Army of the Dead and recreate that scene from Return of the King where they disembark from their stolen corsair ship. Although I lacked an appropriate photographic background so picked the one that matched their colours best.
Anyway it was nice to tie a bow around this particular Middle-Earth SBG army, and I look forward to using them in some games!
It’s been a while between updates, I got a bit distracted from my painting by finally getting around to playing Cyberpunk 2077 and getting absolutely hooked on it. There’s a recommendation for you if you’re interested in the genre at all!
Back on topic, here’s the second batch of models for my Cult of Slaanesh army, mounted Daemonettes! I’ve got them all lined up above but they’ll be deployed in two units of 5. Maybe cyberpunk had an influence on me in my painting because these are very pink!
I actually painted them to match the Keeper of Secrets I painted a while back, and I think they ended up pretty close if a bit more saturated. At the time I had no army to put the Keeper in, so I imagined a snow scheme for its basing. I’ll probably rebase it at some stage in the future to match these.
On to how these were painted. Contrast paints did a lot of heavy lifting here, they’re extremely good for organic forms, and daemons are mostly that! I started with an all over coat of Magos Purple Contrast on both riders and steeds, with the steeds receiving a second coat to differentiate them a bit by making them darker. I then applied Volupus Pink Contrast over the scaly areas of the steeds as well as the claws and feet of the Daemonettes. Talons, horns, and hair were all given a coat of Black Templar Contrast, and the tongues of the steeds were picked out in Flesh Tearers Red Contrast. I then picked out the metallic areas with Scale 75 Black Metal.
I then did some highlights over the skin of the Daemonettes and the non-scaly parts of the steeds using Vallejo Game Color Squid Pink. This was applied in multiple light coats (semi opaque, so quite dilute) to create transitions that weren’t too harsh. The black areas were then quickly highlighted with Vallejo Game Stonewall Grey. I picked out the eyes of the Daemonettes in black and of the steeds in yellow and did a very light overall wash/filter of a purple oil paint (Daler Rowney Permanent Mauve) to tie the lot together and smooth out some of the rougher highlights. Overall then this was quite a quick process, and given the amount of effort I put in I’m quite happy with how they look.
Hopefully the next update is faster than this one, Cyberpunk 2077 is finished but who knows what other distractions lurk!
After our last scenario/narrative based game (Battle Report: A Rat in the Woods) we knew we wanted to do something similar again. That is over a few months paint a couple of armies, create a scenario that involves them, and some terrain to suit, then when all of that is done, play the game! We threw a few ideas around, but in the end settled on an idea triggered by the Storm of Chaos book from 6th edition Warhammer. At the end of that book is an army list for the Cult of Slaanesh, which is a really fun list that combines the Dark Elves with the Hordes of Chaos armies and represents the forces of the Morathi (The top Dark Elf sorceress for the uninitiated!) when she re-kindles the cult to the chaos god Slaanesh amongst her Dark Elf followers and joins up with other Slaanesh worshippers (of the human variety!).
During the events the Storm of Chaos book relates, Morathi takes her forces to Lustria (Pretty much Warhammer South America) to hunt for Artefacts of the Old Ones. The locals, the Lizardmen, don’t take kindly to such things and a conflict starts. My friend having a relatively large unpainted Lizardmen army and myself having many chaos models lying about we decided this was a good fit for us and started planning. So far we have both written army lists (3000 points!), although we have as yet to come up with a fun scenario to use these armies in!
3000 points is a fair amount of Warhammer to paint although both our respective armies are quite elite and therefore the model counts are at the lower end. Regardless it will take a while to paint everything so time to get started!
First up then I decided to paint a regiment of Chaos Marauders. These are at the bottom end of the chaos pile being pretty much just regular humans (although very muscly already!). They were a good starting point for the army however as being basic troops I’m not too worried if they don’t look fantastic, which meant I could experiment. Being Slaanesh worshippers (although not being recognised enough to get any cool powers for their devotion!) I wanted to paint them as recognisably so, hence the purply/magenta cloth and the Slaanesh symbol on the banner.
The models are quite old now and it shows in the lack of details in the casts, but I think they’re quite characterful and enjoyed painting them. You’ll notice the champion stands out a lot, he’s a head taller, and is a much newer model. He’s a character from the Silver Tower board game originally although he was later released as a standalone model for Age of Sigmar. I’ve had him for a while and just had to include him in this regiment.
I usually make a painting guide when I start a new army so I have a reference I can come back to as I invariably jump between projects. I haven’t bothered here as this is the only unit of marauders the army will have, and all other humans in the army will be in the full armour of Chaos Warriors and have little to no exposed skin. When I come to painting elves I might do some guides then.
Here’s the short version: contrast paints did a lot of heavy lifting here, tackling the furs, leather and cloth (black and purple) mostly untouched. The only areas with proper highlights are the skin, the metallics and the horns. This is less effort than I usually put into my models but I was painting all 16 at once and I think you can get away with some shortcuts in ranked units!
What I do want to document however as it will be repeated on the whole army is the basing.
I knew I was going to be doing some jungle themed bases for the army to fit the setting we want to set the game in. I’ve done some jungle bases in the past for my Necrons (Jungle Bases pt. 1, Jungle Bases pt. 2), and a fair few temperate forest bases recently for my Star Wars Legion army (Endor bases) and my Lord of the Rings Wood Elves (Wood Elves of Lothlorien and Rivendell). I wanted to try something different on this new set of models and went with a classic: gluing aquarium plants as is.
I’ve never really liked the look of the bare plastic, as they look too shiny next to painted models, but I took the gamble that as I would be matt varnishing the models, the leaves would be tied in to the overall scheme. I think it worked well and I’m happy with the way the unit looks when all ranked up.
You’ll also notice some other details on the bases such as spiders and ruins, these are from an old Games Workshop basing kit which had resin pieces for basing amongst other basing bits. These were glued down and painted with the model. The rest of the basing was done after the models were painted.
Here are the steps for the bases:
Hot glue individual leaves from the aquarium plants to the bases
Cover the bases in texture paint (AK Muddy Ground)
Stick down some small stones
Apply some AK Slimy Grime Dark in patches on the ground and the rocks
Apply some AK Slimy Grime Light in smaller patches. Note this stands out much more so I diluted it with some thinner to help blend it in some.
The base is matt varnished along with the rest of the model
Patches of AK Puddles are applied randomly to add the impression the ground is quite wet
Anyway I hope you like them! I’m always excited when I start a new project (otherwise I wouldn’t;t have started it!), and am already eyeing off the next unit for the army.
As I mentioned in my last post my friend and I had planned a gaming day to play through a scenario of our own devising, pitting my Skaven against his Wood Elves in a game of Warhammer Fantasy. Well the day has come and the scenario fought out! I took a bunch of photos during the game with the hope of pulling together a battle report, and while they’re not amazing I think they do a decent job of capturing what happened during the game!
First up here’s the scenario:
Here are the armies, first up the Skaven:
And the Wood Elves:
The board was set up according to the instructions in the scenario:
If you’re familiar with Warhammer Fantasy you’ll note that is quite a dense table, but as the Wood Elves would do most of the moving around that shouldn’t cause too many issues.
Deployment
Here was the state of things after the deployment of both armies:
I’ve initialised the units as it’s a bit hard to see what everything is in those top down photos!
Thanquol started the game perched atop the warpstone, ready to use its power to blast away any elves straying too close.
While the rest of the Wood Elves were confined to the board edges, the Waywatchers scouted ahead and found a good position to start raining arrows down on unsuspecting Skaven from.
The Highborn knew that taking out the Warp-Lightning Cannon was critical and positioned himself and his dragon as close to it as possible.
Wood Elf Turn 1
The wood elves spent their first turn approaching the Skaven, with most notably the dragon swooping down next to the Warp-Lightning Cannon ready to unleash it’s poison breath on the unsuspecting ratmen. You’ll also notice some of the woods moving around, the result of the Wood Elves making good use of their tree singing magic.
Those missile troops that hadn’t marched fired arrows, with the Waywatchers making short work of the Warpfire Thrower. The dragon breathed poison gas at the war machine to no effect, but some Skaven from the neighbouring regiment collapsed.
Skaven Turn 1
The start of this turn was rather horrid for the Skaven, with the presence of the dragon terrifying the crew of the Warp-Lightning Cannon to such an extent that they cut and ran straight down one of the burrow holes! I had great hopes for the cannon and it never even got to fire!
The clan rat regiment closest to the dragon turned to face it, and the Warlock Engineer and Thanquol blasted all they had at the dragon in the hopes of preventing it from rampaging through the tightly clustered Skaven army. The barrage of magic grievously wounded the highborn leaving him on a single wound, but the dragon was miraculously untouched, its tough hide impervious to the warp lightning. Deciding that discretion was the better part of valour, Thanquol used the Skitterleap spell to teleport behind the dragon, where it could not charge him in the next turn!
Thanquol also commanded Boneripper to move to intercept the dragon in the hopes that it could at least provide a bit of a road bump!
Wood Elf Turn 2
The dragon charged Boneripper and the closest tunnel entrance in the hopes of collapsing it and crushing the rat ogre, while the rest of the army closed in further. The Glade Guard on the right of the table discovered the hard way that the Storm Vermin were equipped with a banner that magically shielded them from shooting and the rain of arrows fired at them failed to achieve anything.
During the ensuing close combat, Boneripper was torn apart by the dragon, and the tunnel collapsed.
Skaven Turn 2
Once again the terror caused by the proximity of the dragon took its toll, with the clan rat regiment closest to it also turning tail and fleeing down one of the passages. Unfortunately for me that regiment was sheltering the Warlock Engineer and unbeknownst to my opponent was also hiding the Assassin! In one fell swoop I’d just lost a regiment and two heroes, ouch!
It did mean I got to use one of the scenario special rules and bring back on a fresh regiment of clan rats from the leftmost tunnel to block the dryads that were threatening it. Thanquol was more successful this time, finally killing the Highborn with magic, but still failing to wound the dragon.
Wood Elf Turn 3
The new riderless dragon charged the clan rats facing it, while the dryads charged the newly emerged clan rats below. The Waywathers rushed forwards to collapse the leftmost tunnel. On the right side of the battlefield the Wood Elves were much more weary, staying well clear of the Stormvermin. At the top, the Treeman turned to face Thanquol, ready to deal with him.
In what turned out to be a very eventful combat phase, the dryads defeated the clan rats and sent them running down the tunnel just in time for the Waywatchers to collapse that tunnel on top of them.
In the other combat however, clearly disturbed by the loss of its rider the dragon failed to do much damage to the clan rats and was forced to flee from the horde that faced it. As it turned to run, the rats saw their opportunity and dragged it down by sheer weight of numbers! Finally the dragon that had done so much damage was gone!
Skaven Turn 3
The Stormvermin finally managed to find a target, and rushed to meet the dryads that were trying to get around them.
Meanwhile another fresh unit of clan rats emerged from the last tunnel remaining open to close the way to the glade guard that were threatening it.
Thanquol moved back close to the meteor to be able to draw on its power, and using it managed to destroy the Waywatcher unit. In the combat phase, the Stormvermin broke and ran down the Dryads, ensuring they could no longer try to collapse tunnels but unfortunately that pursuit moved them very far from the tunnel, making it very unlikely they could get back in time to protect it from the other approaching Wood Elf units!
Wood Elf Turn 4
The Wardancers charged the clan rats closest to them, while the remaining dryads advanced towards the last tunnel entrance. The Glade Guard were checked by the clan rats that had just appeared in front of them and resolved to just stand and shoot them. The tree man came towards Thanquol, ready to unleash its roots on the unsuspecting Skaven.
Unfortunately for Thanquol, the Treeman’s strangle-root attack was successful and inflicted enough wounds on Thanquol to kill him outright! Gone was the chance of a Major Victory for the Skaven!
As consolation however the clan rats in combat with the Wardancers beat them and run them down after forcing them to flee! That clan rat unit had now slain a mighty dragon and a troupe of elite fighters!
Skaven Turn 4
At this stage of the game I realised that I had no way of stopping the Treeman from reaching the last tunnel entrance on its next turn. My units were either too far away or facing the wrong way! I therefore decided to risk a few charges and take the noble way out, which with hindsight was clearly not very Skaven of me!
The unit of clan rats facing the Glade Guard made short work of them, but the other clan rats after the attrition of fighting the dragon and the Wardancers succumbed to the Dryads. With that, the game was well and truly over!
Wood Elves Turn 5
In their turn 5, the Treeman and the Dryads advanced on the last tunnel and collapsed it, achieving a major victory for the Wood Elves with a turn to spare!
Conclusion
This game was a ton of fun to play. It was the culmination many months of planning and work from the two of us to prepare the scenario, the terrain, and of course painting the armies! Getting to finally play it after all of that was extremely rewarding. While the Wood Elves ended up with a convincing victory over the Skaven, it was pretty close for most of the game, with the requirement to close all three tunnels and kill Thanquol looking far out of reach for a fair few turns. The scenario then seemed to work quite well which was uncertain going in as we’d done no play testing.
We enjoyed ourselves so much that we’ve already started planning the next one! If you made it this far I hope you enjoyed reading this, and by all means send me suggestions on how I could improve this format. I’d like to make more of these in the future and do them as well as I can.
It’s been a little while since I’ve posted anything, almost a month! A few local events in the card gaming sphere have gotten my interest lately and regular painting sessions have been replaced with card gaming and deck building! This is all mostly over now and the paintbrushes have been dipped in paint once more.
A few months ago I planned a narrative game with a friend pitting my Skaven against his Wood Elves. The game would be centered around a chunk of warpstone falling into Athel Loren (the forest the wood elves mostly live in for you non-warhammer fans!), and the Skaven tunnelling up into the forest to seize it!
The scenario requires me to make some terrain to represent the meteor and the tunnel holes dug by the Skaven, and the date for the game being set to mid next week it was about time I got to it!
This was a relatively quick project, and like most terrain a lot of fun to put together! The meteor was made from polystyrene that I roughly shaped with a knife and then sprayed with a spray can right up close. Aerosols melt polystyrene when blasted up close which is really undesirable usually, but I thought it might give some interesting texture here, and I think it worked out nicely!
The tree stumps are just interesting looking sticks from the garden, and the whole thing was brought together with some sculptamold for modelling of the crater and give some form to the ground areas.
The tunnel holes were also done using sculptamold, with some planks made from balsa wood added to show that lovely Skaven craftsmanship!
I’m now all ready for the game next week, and will try to remember to take photos to post up!
The latest Gotrek and Felix novel to be released as an audiobook, Giantslayer, came out late last month and I was pretty excited to listen to it as I’ve been thoroughly enjoying them so far. The stories are fun and the voice actor does an incredible job. This felt like a good time to paint up the titular characters!
These models are almost 30 years old now (released in 1993!), and sculpted by Michael Perry (one half of Perry Miniatures, and sculptor of many great GW models). They have the classic flat pose of the era, but are really nicely detailed and were tremendous fun to paint.
While not trying to do anything like paint to a display standard, I wanted to spend a bit of time on these and do some detailing I might not in my usual army standard. This included some attempt at forcing light and shadows on the metallic paints (TMM for the initiated!), and toning the faces with some reddish hues and stubble.
Here’s a close up of Felix’s face to show the extra work I put in the face
Stubble on Gotrek’s shaved sections of head
For the basing on these I used some old GW resin basing bits, designed to fit on the old standard 20mm square bases from the Warhammer pre Age of Sigmar era.
I thoroughly enjoyed painting these models, and am really pleased with how they turned out considering they were painted on and off over the course of a week. I still haven’t finished the audiobook, but so far so good and I look forward to them releasing the rest of the series! In the mean time I hope to have these hit the tabletop at some stage in the future. I went on a collecting spree a few months ago for 6th edition Warhammer books and found one of the old annual collection of articles that contained the rules for Gotrek and Felix to be taken as Dogs of War (effectively Mercenaries/Allies). I now have the models painted up and the rules to field them!
Back with a Western Desert post this week, with some more progress on the Allied side after dabbling in some Axis infantry last time around. This time with some armoured support for the commonwealth infantry I’ve painted so far, the famed Queen of the Desert: the Matilda Infantry Tank or rather three of them!
These are the Warlord Games plastic Matilda kits, more specifically their “Tank Troop” set for the Matilda which has three included for some tank heavy games. Usually a good way to get a bit of savings over buying three of the individual kit which is no bad thing. I painted these in the colours of the 42nd Royal Tank Regiment, probably the most famous desert Matildas, with model kits usually coming with the decals for “Phantom”. This kit came with enough decals for three named Matildas, Phantom included. I’m not sure if the other two are made up or historical names, I couldn’t find much (any!) info on them.
The 42nd RTR colours speak to me for a multitude of reasons, not least of which being that it’s just a nice scheme! There is some nostalgia there for me too, as the three bands (white/red/white) present on the 42nd’s tanks seem to be the inspiration (I’m guessing here, could be very wrong!) for a lot of the similarly banded markings that were made for Imperial Guard tanks in early editions of Warhammer 40,000 which I gazed at for many hours in the pages of White Dwarf magazine.
Some of you may be familiar with the rather eccentric camouflage scheme visible on tanks early (circa 1941) in the desert war, the infamous Caunter scheme! I say infamous because it clearly has started a vigorous debate on the colours used in its application, the most famous of which is the sky blue middle section visible in so many books/museums/model kit box arts. Reading up on the scheme was a rollercoaster ride to say the least! It seems that the ever-present blue paint is in fact not accurate and rather the result of a museum painting their Matilda incorrectly followed by a great number of copies of said mistake! More recent research seems to point towards the Caunter scheme making use of much more subtle colours indeed, and model paint companies have created sets that match the latest information. I elected to buy Vallejo’s attempt at this more “correct” Caunter colours, but I believe AK Interactive also make a set that’s supposed to be accurate.
With the problem of the colours to use solved (or solved enough for my standards! I’m sure there are some strong opinions on which of AK or Vallejo (or neither!) are accurate), now came the issue of application. As you can see from the photo above, the scheme makes use of some rather strange geometric shapes, with long straight lines right across some rather intense details. My first thought was to try to mask these and apply the colours with the airbrush.
I got as far as masking all of the dark green sections on the bodies of all three tanks before throwing in the towel, there were so many gaps under the tape, there would have been overspray all over the place! I’m sure masking is a solid option at larger scales, but for 1/56 (28mm) I’m not sure the effort is worth it. Clearly then, I was going to have to hand paint the scheme…
I did this by carefully sketching out the shapes using dilute paint, before filling them in and repeating the process 3-4times to ensure good coverage. The Vallejo Caunter set is made up of airbrush paints so quite dilute already, which made the process longer but did mean even with 3-4 coats I had a nice smooth finish at the end. Understanding where the patterns go was a battle in itself, and I used a mix of references: photos from the era, the Warlord Games painted Matildas on the box cover, and other modeller’s attempts at Caunter on Matildas.
You can see the dark green done on all three tanks in the photo above.
I followed the same process for the silver grey sections.
This was followed by a pass of chipping, first by sponging on the base coat colour of Portland Stone back over the dark green and silver grey sections, followed by painted on chips with Vallejo German Grey. This gave me two levels of chipping for a bit more realism.
I then basecoated in the rest of the kit around the tank, tracks etc.
This was followed by an all over gloss varnish, then decal application, then chipping of said decals to blend them in. The models were then re-glossed all over and hit with some simple oil washes for some shading and some dusty streaks and rust spots for added interest. I then added dry pigments to the tracks and bottom and sides of the tanks, followed by a pass of matt varnish and they were ready for photos! This is all pretty standard historical modelling, but I don’t think I’ve shown process shots for it on the blog before, so hopefully it’s interesting to look at!
I really enjoyed painting these models, and glad I’ve gotten them painted after putting them off for a long time as I was dreading painting the Caunter scheme. Sometimes you just have to jump in and go for it! As is currently planned I only have two more vehicles to paint in the scheme: two universal carriers, but who knows, models are constantly adding themselves to this project! Regardless, I now know how I paint Caunter, which means no more worrying about how I might go about it.
Lair of the Lagomorph 