Vikings in 15mm

And another few elements get added to the Viking army for DBMM:

Knorr - Viking supply boats

Archers

Archers (rear)

Baggage1

Baggage 2

Bondi

Bondi (Rear)

Viking Raiders

Viking Raiders

Viking Raiders (Rear)

And again...

More Tiny Vikings!

Ragnar Lothbrok lives on, or at least, some miniature cousins do.. some more 15mm Vikings joined the forces arrayed for an invasion of Ascot in November, assuming we (and Ascot), are still there.

So here they are.. the big guy with his axe across his shoulders is one of my favourites.

Bondi

Huscarles

These drunken and injured Vikings will be Hordes

Vikings? On Horseback? Whatever next?

Another of my favourite figures.

Isolation Audit

Well, that's that then. My contract finished, and right now, with plague stalking the land, apart from pasta shortages, contract work has dried up like tears on a desert planet.... or something.

So it looks like I am facing a period with a funding shortage, but potentially a fair bit of time to do some painting. This morning I even got into the shed - which has had a horrendous leak, and dragged out a very mouldy cardboard box. In among the warped bases, rusted spears, rotting cardboard, mould and spiders eggs (hopefully UK spiders, not Oz ones.. there were millions of them), I discovered my 15mm Milanese Italian Wars project, last seen as these were (literally!) thrown in a box as we fled the rooftop of the US embassy, Canberra.

So now I have a whole range of potential projects to do, some odd, some straight forward, and maybe it is time to think about prioritising them. Figures, except where noted are largely already purchased. Some of them are asterisked, as I already have some of the required figures completed or started at least.

I've laid in a stock of bases, plus some wire spears/pikes. So now it's just a matter of selection.

WRG DBMM1 Ancients 15mm
Milanese (Italian Condotta)*
Spring & Autumn Chinese (though they could pass as Han I believe)
Vikings* (these ones are being prepared speculatively for Warfare 2020 in November)
Picts
Normans for the First Crusade, ( Crossbowmen needed, so these are on hold till I am in funds).
Later Roman/Patrician Roman

WRG DBMM1 Ancients 6mm
Sasanians
Late Romans

Too Fat Lardies - Sharp Practice 28mm
AWI - British/Hessian/Loyalists/Indians*
AWI - American Continentals & Militia*
Napoleonic French for the Peninsular War
Napoleonic British for the Peninsular War
1745 Jacobites
1745 Hanoverians

Too Fat Lardies - Chain of Command 28mm
Malaya Campaign British*
Malaya Campaign Japanese*
WW2 Italian
German Fallschirmjager
US Airborne
British Airborne
US Army

Too Fat Lardies - Infamy/Infamy 28mm
Republican Roman
Carthaginian
Celts (Northstar)
Hoplites

Lion Rampant 28mm
Medieval Scots
HYW Scots*
Generic Early Medieval

WRG Horse Foot & Guns 6mm
WSS French army
WSS Imperial army
Napoleonic French*
Napoleonic British*

Then there's a whole bunch of other stuff;

28mm English Civil War or TYW
20mm '1980s USMC*
American Civil War Ironclads
1/1200 Galleys & Galleons
1/3000 German Kaisermarine pre-dreadnoughts
15mm Cold War Soviets/East Germans*
Various 1/48 plastic kits
28mm schooner kit
1/72 WW2 kits

And probably a whole lot more I've forgotten.

So I wonder how many I will get through before going back to work? And what I should start on first? I'm already working my way through the Vikings, and there are some of these, where part of the work or force is already started. So do I prioritise those? Or just do something off the wall?

Answers on a postcard.. Or in the comments.

More Vikings

Gradually working my way through the War & Empire Vikings.. another small batch of Bondi to add to the tally.

Steady progress, but I will need some more bases or production will grind to a halt. I just have to remember who I ordered this batch from.

**Update** it was Tony at Tiny Tin Troops..  very prompt. Recommended.

A Viking we will go!

I bought into the War and Empire III (Dark Ages) Kickstarter some time back, and ummed, and ahhed about what to get. I originally wanted to get Byzantines, but on looking into the various lists available for DBMM, I thought they were a bit too much like some of my other armies, such as the Sui Chinese.

I eventually settled on Viking and Later Roman, and they arrived last week. I have been tentatively planning a trip to Warfare in Reading in November, and so the Vikings would fit into the theme.

I finally picked up a paintbrush today, and my goodness, these are tiny figures, I have not painted any 15mm in several years, so slapping paint on these little guys was a real change.

Normally, my painting pattern is to do a whole swathe of figures at once. So for example for a Viking army, I might do all the Huscarles as a batch, all the Bondi as a batch, and so on. This is efficient, but it can also be very tedious as you spend a long time with a single colour. Applying it to pants here, tunics there, cloaks etc. This time I thought I would just grab up a few elements worth and tackle them together.

So here they are:

From L-R, Bondi, Archers & Huscarles.

I really like these figures, and they have a heap of variety. Looking forward to polishing off a few more batches over the next couple of weeks.

And some more..

Raiders, Berserks, Huscarles, General

Longships, 6mm models from Irregular.

Airbrush Adventures - and Tanks!

It's been a long time organising, but I finally managed to get everything together to airbrush a bunch of stuff that has been sitting around for a while. The saga of the airbrush has been going on since November, when I got a brand new shiny Iwata Eclipse for my birthday - hurrah! Unfortunately, when I tried to run it using my little electric air-pump from HobbyCo (Japan), no paint..   arrgghhh.

The model I was given was the BCS, which is a siphon feed, so I suspected that I needed larger volumes of paint or a higher air pressure.

In the meantime, I sent the airbrush back to the vendor: air-craft.net to be checked (and also to see if they would consider replacing with a gravity feed model). Of course, in their hands, the airbrush worked perfectly, so back it came. Tried various tests: yep, my little pump wasn't managing enough pressure to get the siphon effect working.  So I needed a new compressor.

Much research later, I decided a Sparmax for around £100 would do the trick, got back in touch with the vendor, who had been brilliant  - sorry, no Sparmax in stock, but they did offer me a demo Iwata PowerJet Lite shipped for £100. Ok, done!

So the siphon thing means a bit more mucking around than with a gravity feed airbrush, but it just works brilliantly. I like to use Tamiya acrylics for airbrushing. With the Tamiya X20 thinner, even with my old setup (cheapo airbrush & electric pump purchased online for about A$40), I had much less clogging and issues than with other brands. With the new Iwata brush and compressor, it's an absolute dream.

The whole session lasted about two hours, and I worked out a new technique that minimised issues and cleaning. I had purchased a whole bunch of small plastic bottles online, so I would fill these approximately 50/50 with Tamiya colour and X20. Shake to mix, then decant into the siphon bottle. Spray - NO clogging! not even once!  When I finished with one colour, detach siphon bottle, pour what was left back in to my plastic bottle, rinse out the siphon bottle, spray out the remaining colour with the siphon bottle detached, and repeat the process with the next colour.

Over this session, I used 6 main colours, 5 variations with added white, and it was absolutely trouble-free. This is how airbrushing should be!

You can judge the results for yourself, apologies for the photographs, but they were taken under artificial light.  And I can highly recommend https://www.air-craft.net/ whose customer service through all this was just great.

AFV, a blockhouse, hut and Malayan jungle des-res

Oh, and some more terrain - rocky areas, an oasis and some palms for desert games, on the left, MDF and clay making some paddy fields for my Malaya setup.

More terrain!

Ha Go in the jungle

As I have been putting together a Japanese force for Malaya, I acquired a couple of type 97 Chi Ha tanks from Warlord, one plastic and the other resin, in various sales etc.

Reading through accounts of the Malaya campaign though, by far the most common armour in use was the Ha Go Type 95 light tank. This model equipped the armour component of infantry divisions and was used very successfully by the Japanese forces in Malaya. As far as I was aware the only 1/56 Ha Go available was a resin and metal model from Warlord, and as I wanted to field at least two, at £18 each, that was expensive for a support option that might only get a stand-in role in one Chain of Command campaign.

As luck would have it, a chance conversation on Twitter with Garry, who runs Paint and Glue Miniatures, revealed that although not on the website, yes, P&G did a Ha Go, for the princely sum of £7. (plus postage).  Less than a week later I had two Ha Go on my desk, in a fetching shade of blue.

Ha! Who Go's there?

The print lines from the 3d process are minimal, the models very neat and clean, (I just gave them a quick scrub with a stiffish old brush to get rid of some wispy print residue). 

I am very impressed with the quality, price, and speed of delivery, so Paint and Glue are likely to be my go-to for support options from now on. 

So now I have four Japanese AFV to get painted, and the Japanese camouflage schemes are very interesting and appealing. I can see these playing a significant role in future campaigns. 

Here's their natural habitat:

In the jungle, the mighty jungle..

I'm not sure what more to add to these. In a real jungle, creepers and fallen trees, but I also want to be able to place figures, so these may be left as is, they have had two coats of dilute white glue to seal the ground cover, and some added flock and tufts, but not much real change. It's time to find a place to store these, till I get them out to play.

Finally, I am also experimenting with making trees for European settings. I have a bunch of the smaller Woodland Scenics plastic armatures, so I glued them together, twisted them into shape and glued some coarse chopped foam to them using rubber cement.

Trees, Mark I

Not very impressive..

The Mark II version used a strip of rubberised horse hair, cut into lengths, teased out and stretched over the armature, the foam was then glued to the horse hair and branches, again using rubber cement.

Trees, Mark II

Much better! I have given them a first coat of thinned white glue to seal them, and we shall see how durable they are. I am expecting some larger armatures to be delivered soon, as these are too short to be anything larger than ornamentals or fruit trees for an orchard.

It's all progress, I had better get on with painting some of the core infantry platoons now!