Painting catch up

Over time, I have picked up all sorts of bits and pieces to add to core platoons for Chain of Command, and these bits and pieces have been hanging around, in some cases for years. So I decided it was time to clear the decks a little and get a few things painted.  

Senior British Officers - BTD

Engineers - BTD?

6lb AT, I think Warlord with Westwind crew? 

Kradschutzen squad - BTD

Kradschutzen and an MG34 on tripod

Perry Italian Tanker on Tamiya 1/48 AB41

More Perry crew on a Rubicon M13/40

Warlord resin?

Blast markers and scatter terrain from Sabotag3d

Leanach (Culloden) cottage by Supreme Littleness

And finished...

My present to me.. it's a thing of great beauty

Oh, and it seems that while in my cups I may have accidentally ordered a 3d printer...  so I can foresee some serious misadventures with that coming up. What's an STL file I wonder...?

Redcoats and airbrushes

I've previously used an airbrush to paint 15mm Sasanians, with reasonable results, and I thought I would like to try something similar to get some basic effects on the 1745 Hanoverian red coats.

Overall, the effect I was going for was a somewhat dirty red, pretty bedraggled by the elements. After all, key battles in the campaign were over the winter, from September to April, so everybody should be wet, cold and bedraggled. The image that everyone is familiar with, by David Morier:

Was a studio portrait, using nice fresh uniforms. Contemporary sketches by the Penicuik artist, show a very different picture. Looking at the last few sketches on this page:

https://jacobitereenactors.wordpress.com/photos/the-penicuik-drawings/

You can see tricornes flattened out, coattails unbuttoned, and a variety of equipment. With the exception of the flattened tricornes, the Flags of War figures are a nice representation. So these men will be weary and unshaven, uniforms faded and mud spattered.   

First step was an undercoat of spray-can black. I don't buy or use expensive primers, and the usual car spray paints seem to do a good job.

Then the first step, a fairly dense base coat of Tamiya Hull Red, which is actually a nice leathery colour.

After the first spray

The Tamiya paint airbrushes beautifully, especially if it is thinnned at about 50/50 with their own thinner Tamiya X20A

Dragoons

At this stage, I am just trying to get  relatively even coat. Varying the paint pressure, distance etc provides some basic contrasts.

Red coats

These have now had an overall light coating of Vallejo Flat Red, then a second top down over-spray, to give a nice feeling of light and shade.  I am going to purchase some Tamiya Red though, for when I do the next batch of redcoats. The Vallejo is a great brush paint, but just doesn't spray as nicely as the Tamiya.

When this is all dry, I am going to go back and add some highlights. I am not quite sure what to use, I am tempted to use Vallejo Dark Vermillion for the officers, and a lightened Flat Red for the rank and file, to try and get the effect of the better quality cloth for the officers. A few discreet experiments will be required I think.

And while the airbrush kit is out, time to do some of my WW2 Japanese for Chain of Command. The Tamiya Dark Yellow makes a great base colour for Japanese uniforms.

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!

Weekend WIP

The weekend was a quiet one, so in between various household chores, I managed to get some model building in, and then a brief session with the airbrush. Unfortunately, I have been having problems with the new Iwata, so it was back to the trusty old Chinese knock-off...  So these are airbrushed, and some detail work started.

First up was the Italeri 1/48 AB41 armoured car. A bit of an oddity this kit, 'rubber' tyres, and a partly metal chassis. I reckon it looks pretty good. Obviously still needs further detail work, decals and weathering, but a good start.

Next up, a pair of Rubicon half-tracks. The Sdkfz 251 Engineer vehicle was a £10 pickup at Targe, and the 250 was heavily discounted from Wayland Games.

And a Pz IV. This was given to me, and I have reassembled and repainted it, adding some Milliput stowage. It's not a great model, not sure of the original manufacturer.

This one, again a pick up at Targe from a fellow club member, and again, not sure of the provenance. It's a 3d print, and includes a crashed Me 262, which I am going to disguise somehow so it has wider applicability. Lots of detail on this one, so a lot of work still to do.

An Airfix resin kit, I think originally badged as a Polish Bank. I had to add a lot of debris from MDF offcuts, chopped up cork and so on. Again, there's a whole lot of detail to be added.

So on the whole, some good progress, and I also made up some bases for my Victrix Late Republican Romans that I am going to put together for the Lardies new 'Infamy, Infamy' ancients rules.