Carts!

I have had these two carts for ages. I bought them from Warbases at Colours back in 2019. I thought it was time to finish them off.

 

As you can see, one is a water cart and the other is for ammunition. As I said, I bought them from Warbases, who also provided the horses, but you need to buy them separately, they don't come as a kit. I've got another cart from Warbases somewhere, which I'll make sometime but I don't currently have any draft animals for it. The tufts are from Gamer's Grass and the base texturing is AK Terrains Dark Earth gunk.

I decided to make the bases look like a spot of rough going, because it adds interest, hence the luxuriant grass and foliage.

I've posed them with Austrian pioneers here, but they will be useful for lots of different 28mm armies. Ammunition and water carts are useful support options in Sharp Practice.

The rest of my Austrian Fusiliers

Here are the last three groups of my Austrian Napoleonic Fusiliers;

So, I now have six groups of eight figures, which is a pretty large force in Sharp Practice terms once you have added in Leaders, skirmishers and possible support options.

Obviously I don't have to use them all in a game, but it does give me various options. For example, I could field two equal commands of three groups with a couple of leaders each and bulk things out up to around 85 points with different additions, perhaps some Grenzer skirmisher groups of six, or maybe Landwehr militia groups of ten. Cavalry would also be an option. It all depends on the scenario.

I am pretty pleased with how they look and that is it as far as like troops goes, but I've just started work on three groups of Grenzer.

 

More Austrians

Here are some more Austrians for my Sharp Practice project;

 

These are three NCOs, who will be Status I leaders in Sharp Practice and below are the three Pioneer figures I mentioned previously.

As I said before I'll have to find a use for these. I suppose I could use them as part of a work party for specific tasks, maybe just escorting wagons or as characters in a scenario. 

Finally, below is a third group of eight Fusiliers;

A note here about how I painted the white uniforms. The figures were all undercoated with Tamiya pale grey spray. The uniforms were painted in with slightly-diluted Vellejo ivory and once the figures were painted given a wash with Army Painter Quickshade acrylic Soft Tone, the stuff in the dropper bottles not the tinned one. This took the bright edge off of the ivory white and added depth around the belts and straps on the figures. I think it worked out pretty well.

Bad Squiddo Winter Soviet Kickstarter update

OK, so there is more news about the Kickstarter. It will now be happening on the 7th of April, for administrative reasons and will run for seven days.

Anyway, I have now finished the two sample figures Annie sent me.

We have an officer, with a pistol and a crumpled map, and a infantry figure with a PPSh sub-machine gun. 

Here is a rear view;

Lots of nice details on the two sculpts here, so plenty of scope for really going to town with textures and shading.

I decided to go for a nondescript grey greatcoat for the ordinary soldier and a better quality sheepskin-lined coat for the officer. The officer is also wearing a nice pair of leather gloves.

I didn't want to overdo the snow effects, so restricted it to a bit of frosty ground and frost on the dead grass around the feet of the two soldiers.

These were really nice to paint. Lovely crisp casts with plenty of detail and character to the minis.

I used Vallejo paints, Army Painter strong tone wash and Gamer's Grass tufts.

Here is the announcement for the Kickstarter;

I've started another army for Alien Squad Leader

Yes, I have now embarked upon a third army for Alien Squad Leader. Once again, all of the figures (with one exception) are from the excellent Ground Zero Games 15mm Stargrunt range. I've been planning this one for a while now, but couldn't decide on some aspects of the army, which is an Alien Imperial one. I always knew that the main components of the force would be made up from the Crusties minis and models, but the issue I had was how to fill the ranks of the Primitives (who are a mandatory selection). Anyway, the Primitives will be the subject of a later post. At the moment I am going to show you my Imperial Elites, who are power-armoured infantry, and the Robotic element of the army, which consists of both light and heavy Droids.

First, here are four stands of Elite troopers. The one with a figure in red is a command stand.

And here are the Heavy Droids, accompanied by a character figure, a Champion of the Elect in red power armour.

I wanted this army to look completely unlike my two Human ones, both of which have a fairly sensible camouflage/military fatigues colour scheme. It occurred to me that alien lifeforms might have eyes that have evolved under completely different circumstances to our own, being attuned to different wavelengths of the spectrum. To try and get this idea across, I decided that this army's armoured troops would follow a rather bright, not to say garish colour scheme. After undercoating them in pale grey, I gave them a wash of Windsor and Newton purple drawing ink, which I drybrushed successively with Vallejo Brass and Silver, before adding in some other colours. I also decided that commanders in power armour would be given red as their command colour. 

Although the colour scheme is pretty bright, I am happy with the results.

My Robotic Infantry are the only non-GZG figures. They are "Taranis Repulsar Drones" from The Ion Age. I originally bought these for another purpose, but I really like their quirky appearance and I reckon that they make pretty good combat droids for my Alien Imperial army.

These have a simple metallic colour scheme, the idea being that they are churned out in huge numbers by colossal automated imperial manufactories as disposable combat units so therefore they don't get a top quality paint job.

Anyway, That's where I am so far. I've got other figures almost ready, but I am waiting on a delivery of more 5cm square bases to complete the Imperial troops, before moving on to the Primitives.

African huts and cooking pots for Congo

While some of us from the club were at the IPMS show up at Thornbury last Sunday, we bought some resin models from Wargames Terrain Workshop's stand. I'd already bought some graveyard items from them but these were a club purchase to be used in African-themed games, Studio Tomahawk's Congo in particular. There is a growing amount of interest in this game at the club, I've even bought the rules and some minis myself. They aren't painted at the moment, just undercoated, so they aren't going to feature here for a while yet.

Anyway, I volunteered to paint the stuff we bought for Congo and here they are;

There is one large hut (described as a Chieftain's hut) and two smaller ones (presumably for hoi polloi) and five scenic items for scattering around the village. There is a nice cooking fire and four other sets of pots of varying sizes. I've included a 28mm figure in the photo so you can see the size of the models.

I can report that these are excellent models, no bits of flash or bubbly or pitted surfaces and they paint up really easily. The huts are hollow, to reduce weight, which is nice. These models took me around four hours to paint, in total. They were undercoated in Army Painter Desert Yellow and the colours were built up on the straw parts of the huts with progressive drybrushing in suitably bleached-looking dried straw-like shades, given a wash with Windsor and Newton nut brown ink and then given a final drybrushing with Vallejo Beige paint. I used a similar palette of colours for the scenic bits and bobs, with the addition of Vallejo Red Leather on the pots (I also used this for the mud walls of the chieftain's hut). The mud walls were inked with W&N Deep Red ink and the pots had a wash of W&N Sunshine Yellow ink. Finally, they were varnished with Army Painter matt spray varnish.

I have to say that I am pretty pleased with the way that they have turned out. It'll be good to see them on the table in the not too distant future.