Painting Frenzy Pt2

The relatives have all gone home, and the wife is in the bath, my son in bed, so time to take some pics of some of the work in progress.

First up the Shermans that i posted pre weathering and decals a few entries back.


The weather was dry and not freezing today so I nipped pout and gave a tentative first coat with Dullcoat to matt the gloss varnish down. I say tentative because in the past I have nightmares with mat varnish and have turned lovely painted 28mm figures into frosty white looking lumps of upset. Anyway, these guys are the first fully painted, weathered, based and varnished vehicles for my BKC US army. Im really pleased with them, especially the weathering and decals (of which you cant really see many due to the positioning of the models- doh!).


Next up is a couple of my recent Minifigs order- a M10 and a couple of jeeps. They are painted, varnished and decal'd but yet to be weathered, based and mat coated. If you can excuse that, you can get a vague idea of what they look like and where they might be heading.




And last but not least- my first company of infantry. These are Pendraken infantry with one or two Minifigs dotted in for variety- they mix fairly well in my opinion.
I initially wasn't happy with how these turned out- I'm used to painting 6mm and 28mm and to suddenly paint at 10/12mm was a wee bit of a shock to the system. What saved these in my eyes was a liberal splashing all over (sounds like Brut) of the new Citadel Washes (Devlan Mud iirc). I reckon it does a great job at this scale. Obviously these are yet to be based etc, but the figures themselves are finished saved for the varnishing.






On the photography front (not sure if anyone is really interested in this bit) I decided to dispense with my nice zooms this time and use my first lens I ever bought. A Canon 50mm 1.8f. Its the cheapest lens in the Canon range and for the money is fantastic. Sure the build quality is piss poor (I broke my first one of these so I guess this isn't really the first lens I ever bought!)having a body made mostly of plastic, but the optics are great and in fact it works really well for taking pics of miniatures. Maybe I don't need to buy that Macro lens after all- more money for miniatures.
Still need a lightbox though- this was a jerry rigged affair again with 2 mismatched light sources. I would also like to bounce a bit of flash around, but seeing as my Sigma flash is still broken and still awaiting a new hot shoe. I think I could be waiting for ever though, as of yet despite emailing Sigma about 10 times I have had no reply. Apparently the part is buyable and costs $15! A replacement flashgun will set me back £200 quid. Not happy at all.

A new scale, a new addiction...

All the talk on the forums at Specialist Military Publishing, home of Blitzkrieg Commander and Cold War Commander, of a new version of BKC has got my juices flowing. My gaming group have a ton of 12mm World War 2 stuff that they use for Rapid Fire. They have tried to get me interested a number of times, but a mixture of other projects getting in the way, and me not being a huge fan of the rule set, has meant that the few 12mm models I had were stuck in a box somewhere and done nothing with.

That was until this week, when I dug them out and decided to start another new project, an American army for BKC! I was very inspired by some other forum members work on similar projects, mainly NikHarwood , and Tony Barr's work.

So far I have painted 2 companies of Shermans ( I had to convert a British Firefly model I had, but that was made easier by the fact that one of my Sherman 75s had 2 MGs and 2 main guns in the pack) and a single lonely Stuart tank. I am awaiting some more stuff from Minifigs to add to it, and most importantly a sheet of transfer. I will leave off the weathering and mud until I have put those on.