From SanderS: More Stalingrad Russians!

 Hoi,

 

Still beavering away at the big Warlord Games Stalingrad commission. I try to alternate between a unit of Russians/ Germans and something I like to paint for myself, today it's time for some more Russians. I batch paint them by priming colour and these chaps are all based in Valejo English Uniform since they all wear the padded/ insulated winter gear so typical for Russians at the Eastern front. As such there's too many submachine guns and the poses of the LMG team don't match up.

Another 10 chaps done still about 100 to go!

Cheers Sander

From SanderS: I blame Curt and Sidney! and some Germans (50points)

 Hoi,

 2021 just keeps on giving... While I thought I was able to get some more painting done, here I am correcting papers again. 

In the few moments of spare time I have managed to finish 10 WW2 Late War Germans that I had started already but wasn't able to finish during the Challenge proper. The Stalingrad Collectors edition box from Warlord games that I am painting as a commission, has sooooo many plastic Germans that I promissed my employer Martijn, that I'd paint him a squad of late war troops for use in his store demo-games. 

The fun part for me was getting to try out the Valhallan Blizzard snow effect from Games Workshop. Now and then they actually get something useful done and this is some awesome stuff indeed! It is so easy to use and gets a really good and rather realistic effect of snow on the bases. I am going to try the snow on some of my SW Legion Snowtroopers next, when grading permits.The pictures are rather dark due to a lack of light over here and with artificial light on they were too over-exposed even for photoshop to get right.

In the catergory "Other News": a round of calling 3 different Public Health Services during 2,5 hours of my day off last week, I found out that I MIGHT get a summons to be shot, eeeehh get a shot somewhere in May. So it's possible I get the summons in May but probably later and the actual shot will be set even further away because I was set up to get Astra Zenica, which due to the Trombose thingy is now on-hold for people under 60 years of age, lucky me. That means I will be here a while longer which is great since there's two gentlemen from the Challenge that have gotten me in trouble. 

First up is our beloved Snowlord Curt; I asked him what glue he used to stick metal figures to clear acrylic bases without getting the haze on them due to the super glue fogging over. Greenstuffworld says he, the result may be guessed:

And than there's mister Roundwood who has done such an awesome job of creating the Laarden Project. I read Arthur his posts and the Lad has now persuaded me to visit Laarden in the future so quite a lot of orders have gone out. One of those was to Colonel Bill's shop and has arrived over here by the time of writing.

There's a lot of prepped figures left over from the Challenge and I will get as many of those done during the coming weeks but first I have to get all the papers graded so I am off!

Cheers Sander

 

From MartinN: A premature end to my Vaccination Challenge [108 points]

I wouldn't have thought to be one of the first to drop out. But apparently miracles do actually happen as After a single entry to the challenge blog I already had my first jab. Long before schedule. 

Originally I had big plans of "finishing" my 20mm Soviets, getting the opposition to a playable size as well as doing lots of other things that now will have to happen elsewhere. But in this case I certainly will not complain.

So first for my final submission we have some more Soviets to go with those I painted earlier. Again these are lovely sculpts from AB Figures. 

Then we have the first squad of German Infantry to oppose those above Soviets. Again these are AB Figures. For flexibility I painted up enough men to either field them as regular Infantry with just one LMG or as Panzergrenadiere with two LMGs.

While I went with a completely different paint scheme with my Soviets than in 28mm, for the Germans I very much stuck to my standard recipe .

26 upright and 2 prone figures in 20mm make for 108 points to add to my total. So 611 points this year thus far.

Apologies for this rather short post but I don't really feel very talkative today. So I hope all of you stay safe and get vaccinated as quickly as possible.

From MartinN: Full throttle into the Vaccination Challenge [26 points]

Well, usually I feel somewhat exhausted after the three months of AHPC but not this year apparently. I'm still on fire and chomping at the bit to crack on with my foray into the world of 20mm wargaming. Thus this Vaccination Challenge thingy should be just the ticket to keep me focused.

So to follow on from my last post over on the AHPC blog we have the ZIS-3 AT gun for which I had already painted most of the crew (bar one). One of the things really appealing to me in 20mm or 1/72 is the sheer amount of stuff you can get. 

Whereas in 28mm you'd be hard pressed to find a crew of six for your AT gun, let alone one that could be arranged in almost mini-diorama style, all figures below except the gunner are AB Miniatures. Best of all they sell the crew without guns so you can take full advantage of all the model kits out there. I went for a rather cheap but cheerful gun by Zvezda, the gunner came with the kit. The gun is not overly complex and went together easily. But I still managed to loose a small but important part I had then to scratch build.

Anyway, I'm rather chuffed by how the gun turned out. It'd have been nice if there'd been a few more shells with the set but you can't have it all, right?

Next is a set of Soviet medics with casualty. As AB only released a set of Soviet medics this last saturday (and I of course had placed my latest order on Thursday) I went with Zvezda again. I've to say I really like their offerings as they scale well with AB and for the most part have excellent detail.

I didn't paint on any Red Cross markings as I believe to remember to have read that these were, due to the nature of the conflict, rarely observed on the Eastern Front, thus likely to have been omitted by the troops anyway.

I re-positioned the head and left hand of the female medic as to better interact with the casualty, but other than that it's the stock kit. In retrospect my Soviets might probably be a little too uniformly dressed with no variation in their clothing at all. That said it sped up painting no end and actually looks quite nice when arrayed together.

I've decided to carry on counting my points throughout this year till the beginning of the next Challenge. Both to motivate me and keep track of my progress. Thus with a Challenge total of 477 points plus the 26 points of this submission I'm currently at a 503 points. 3 points above my target for the Challenge.

With my government currently making a complete laughingstock of itself I'm rather sure to be among the last to submit to this blog. Hopefully it's the last time we "need" a Quarantine Challenge though.

OK, that's it for the moment. Next up some armour maybe.

From NoelW: This week I painted a complete army!

Although it was only 2mm:

I'm developing rules for 2mm land battles that interleave with Warlord's Black Seas naval rules. My rules are pretty simple, as the idea is to cover joint land/sea operations, in which the naval game is the priority. I'm thinking about the Finnish War between Sweden and Russia (1808-9), for example, much of which involved island hopping with various actions involving transporting land forces back and forth, bombarding of besieged fortresses and so on. But there’s no shortage of joint operations in the Black Seas period – in the East and West Indies, the Mauritius campaign, actions against pirates in the Persian Gulf and the Barbary corsairs of the North African coast, the French invasion of Egypt with actions around Alexandria and along the Nile, several Russo-Turkish wars, the Greek War of Independence - the list is temptingly long.

At 2mm, there’s little point in trying to represent all these different armies in their specific detail, so I’m creating “abstract” forces, roughly Napoleonic in appearance, built around brigades of four battalions/regiments. This one is the blue army, currently representing Sweden. Next will be the green army, for Russia. I’ll hope to follow that with a more irregular force to represent the Ottomans/Mamelukes/Greeks/Tripolitans and so on. Then a Red force for Britain and maybe eventually white and black, too.

At this scale, I’d be hopeless at trying to represent either plausible uniform facings or flags, so each brigade has battalion flags of the same colour. Effectively the “battalions” are counters representing the current strength of the brigade, with attrition of the brigade represented by removal of a battalion. The idea is closer to a board game representation like Risk, rather than a true figure game.

In painting I took most of Curt’s always useful ideas, (thanks, Curt) though not delivered them nearly so well. I blame the figures I’m working with! Curt has beautiful, custom-printed 2mm figs, whereas mine are Irregular – perfectly serviceable, but rather undefined sculpts and somewhat variably cast, too. A little irregular, in fact. 

I shouldn’t complain, though – I was lucky enough to buy these at a show where the reseller was clearing them, and sold me several thousand figures for £30! This single army contains about 500 figures, for example, and takes up less room than a single battalion in 28mm so if you want the “mass look” and aren't looking for detail, there’s nothing better. Or cheaper.

As is usual for me, my final offering for the Challenge is quite large, but also a hotch-potch of bits and pieces. Lest you think I've had a sleepless week, I should point out that several of these pieces have been ongoing throughout the challenge, only completed in the last few days.

Going up a couple of scales, I finished the artillery for my 15mm French army for Minden. This is progressing slowly (2 years now, and counting) but slowly getting there. 8 guns of different calibres:

Moving to 28mm, I painted four resin walls that had been colonising the bottom of a terrain box, using a painting scheme I hadn’t tried before, looking for something like sandstone. And, actually, I’m quite pleased with how they’ve come out: basically an initial wash of slightly thinned Citadel Contrast, drybrushed with Vallejo’s Pale Sand. One thing that I think has improved these quite a bit is to paint and flock the bases in the same style as my 28mm figures.

Next, a Warbases Rolls-Royce armoured car, painted for the Western Desert. I found this model a bit of a pain to assemble correctly, partly because the apparently comprehensive online instructions aren’t perfectly clear about a couple of details, but mainly because of my awkward fingers. I shall rely on my wife for all future model building.

As this is my only contribution this time round to the Bolt Action side duel, it brings my total here to 785, so I defer once again to StuartL. Next Challenge, young man, I promise I will paint you into a corner!

Next, a Scorpion. That’s not another armoured car, but rather an actual stinging arachnid the Rolls Royce might accidentally run into in the desert. This, I think, is a Citadel figure possibly from their pre-slotta days and will join my D&D/Frostgrave monsters. (Look how good its camo is - you can hardly see there's any figure there!)

Moving on to human figures, I finished a few more for my Punic Wars collection. A herd of 21 Warlord Cisalpine Gauls:

and a contingent of 9 Carthaginian Citizens (Victrix):

My original plan had been to paint dozens of Ancients, for a side duel on ancients but these are all I’ve managed in the whole challenge – a mere 150 points, so apologies to all concerned. (Just noticed the bent spear, too, presumably happened during photography - so I need to replace that now. A general's work is never done...)

Another command base, this time Prince Rupert of the Rhine.

I’m not sure who sells this model, but it’s clearly a Copplestone sculpt – a beautiful piece of work. I’ve now two Ruperts, not being able to resist this second model, so one will probably double as Prince Maurice of the Palatinate.

And finally, a smattering of Italian Wars figures. Here is Niccolo da Tolentino:

and again with a few companions. 

Tolentino was a condottiero most famous for winning the Battle of San Romano (1432), immortalised in Paolo Uccello’s painting of that subject, from which the Perrys took the image for one of their Mounted Italian Command (from their European Armies range).

Together, this gives me imaginary points in this last post of 451 and takes me to a final tally filling 34 of my 46 rather over-ambitiously planned slots. Though some of these additions are rather less than I’d hoped, and the overall total of imaginary points for the Challenge as  whole is rather less than I’ve made in the non-Quarantine challenges, I’m still pretty pleased, as there's only 3 projects in my list of "projects I really ought to finish one day" which have not progressed through this Challenge. (Final details below).

Thanks to Curt, as always, for his hospitality, forbearance and brilliant contributions. Thanks to every one who has posted for some great painting and a fair haul of good ideas. Thanks to everyone who has given me comments - always uplifting, and often giving that necessary kick to motivation. 

That's it till November, I guess. It seems a long time to wait. I wonder if lockdown will be over? And, who knows, maybe I'll have painted my entire collection by then... (Excuse me, there's a knock at the door. A big black van and a couple of men in white coats. I wonder what they want...)

FINAL TALLY:

Project	New Task	‘Points’	Old Task	‘Points’
Agincourt
AWI	Farmstead	3	US Butterfly British 16 foot	30 80
Black Seas (1/700th)	2 merchants	20	25 2mm units	150
British in Egypt: 1801			Generals de Rolls’ regiment	30 60
Cape Wars	12 infantry	60
Carthaginians	21 Cisalpine Gauls	105	9 Citizens	45
Crusades	Command group	20
ECW	4 walls	2	Prince Rupert	10
French in Egypt: 1801	Guns	50	Command Gun crew	75
Frostgrave/fantasy	3 Treemen	24	Frankie Scorpion	5 5
Italian Wars	Niccolo da Tolentino	10	4 miscellaneous infantry	20
Lord of the Rings	Swan Knights Denethor Hama	60 5 5	Harad cavalry Harad infantry	60 45
Minden (15mm)			8 artillery pieces and crew	96
Ottoman
Peninsular War			12 Spanish	60
Republican Romans
Sikh/Afghan Wars	Command stand 8 Irregulars	15 40	11 irregulars	55
1860s British IF	Command base	15	Union rebasing	0
1880s, the Sudan	Buildings	15	18 British	90
Walmington/Sealion	6 landing craft	30	3 Civvies 6 zombies Bandstand	15 30 2
Waterloo			Congreve rocket	20
WW2 Desert	3 trucks 39 Afrika Korps Rolls Royce A/C	30 195 10	15 Italians	65
Zulu War	NNI Frontier Horse Natal Carbineers	30 60 50	Pearson & Chelmsford 4 foot	25 20
TOTAL		854		1093