Painting update - 28mm Arthurians and 40mm moderns

Probably the last painting update from me for a while - although I have stuff on the paint desk making progress, I don't think that they will be finished before packing overtakes them!

Something of a odd collection this time - more 40mm moderns,  including a couple of conversions (head swap on uzi guy and adding the cossack hat) and some test pieces to check that I can get away with just a paint conversion to 'shift' the African milita figures to eastern Europe.  I think they look good - a bit more ragged than some of the others, but I can atleast use them as bandits. The wattle fences are Rendera - I did the entire packs worth, but decided that too many pics would just get dull!

The werewolf is a Reaper bones model.  My first, and I must admit that I am generally impressed.  Once I've got a few more they can be set loose on a Arthurian village... ('The wolves are running master Kay!' - perhaps not quite the sort of wolves they meant in The Box of Delights, but they'll do! )

The little people are my take on the Alfar, although they owe more to the Brownies from Willow than Tolkien's elves. They are, literal, little savages - with bronze and stone weapons ( fey folk not liking iron), animal (rabbit? Squirrel?) furs and green clothing (from Scandinavian folklore, along with the pale skin tone and dark hair). The painting isn't my best, but I fully intend to field them enmass as per the 'action shot', where hopefully the limitations in painting won't show so much. The blood stains on the weapons were to add a touch of savagery to the figures,  and I envisaged some sort of sacrifice and dipping weapons in its blood to empower them.  Ib game each stand will get multiple low strength attacks, and I will use the chittering horde rule so that additional bases can support as if they had spears (to represent them swarming all over people). The chap with the owl is a shaman, and the single warrior with the downed germanic a hero of some sort.  Figures are all 15mms - a mix of Mick Yarrow prehistorics and unknown celts and zulus. I'm planning to do a fair few more of these...

There is a collection of hairy germanics of varying flavours.  I have too many of these chaps, unless I plan on gaming something like Mons Badonicus or Dyrham in 1:1 ratios.  And there are more to paint. (Put it this way - Cerdic began conquering what would become Wessex with 2-3 ships worth of men. Depending on the size of the ships, that could be anywhere between about 80 and about 240 warriors. I've got somewhere around 200). The eventual plan is to be able to form two mid period armies, to game the various wars between Christian and Pagan saxon kingdoms.  And maybe a separate force of Frankish mercenaries.

The Romano-Britons are segregated by shield designs based on their ability.  The levy have plain whitish shields (there's a vague reference in the Gododin to white washed shields,  as I've probably said before) whilst professional warriors and retainers have shield designs. All the red and white shields in this batch belong to a semi uniform group (matching tunics) which I envisaged as the guards from a Civitate eager to cling to its roman lineage, and trying to hark back to the Legions of old (heavily inspired by Tudric of Gwents troops in the Bernard Cornwell Warlord trilogy). The rest just have a mix of designs in assorted colours.  The bulk of the 'uniformed' troops are GB plastic dark age warriors with metal Westwind heads...

Amera ruined buildings

I recently got lucky on eBay, and managed to pick up a lot of second hand amera buildings, some of which had been a bit beaten about in their past life.  I've got 3 assembled so far, and thought I'd share them before they got bogged down in the paint que. (Along with one which I did the other year, but I don't think I posted up here). The figures are a mix of 40mm and 28mm (Artizan, Dixons Yakuza and an Offensive rioter), all based on penny washers. It is probably worth saying that the interior floors can be lifted by a few mm depending on whether one glues them to the top of the floor below's window surround (as I did) or at the bottom of that floors window surround. Anyway.  On with the pictures!

Monument

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I finished off the monument using the irregular renaissance cossack musketeer - I'm pretty pleased with how it came out.  As this is going to be fairly prominent in my ruined city scenery (or atleast the 40mm incarnation of it) I am tempted to add some graffiti to it. Not sure yet. If I do add graffiti to the ruined buildings then I can always come back to this.  My main issue with graffiti is what language to use - the ruins will be seeing duty as post apocalypse UK as well as a war torn Eastern European city... maybe I need to use some fairly neutral names? I might go digging through pictures of Grozny, Vukovar, etc to see if any 'authenti graffiti'would look ok in the UK....

Painted 20mm stuff...

The glue/flock is finally dry, and so I've been able to get some pictures of the other stuff I've been working on recently... 

First up - another HO railroad model, again repainted using the original colour scheme...

A group shot of my British Para section (and I must apologise for the pictures from here - they are in the rather odd format of being broken up by pack, as I had promised Tony at ERM some pictures for the website...)

Here are the Brits so far - enough for a section of Paras, a 2 man blow-pipe SAM team, and a couple of Infantry chaps.

The start of the resistance - Liberation miniatures armed civilians...

More partisans - this time Hotspur/Combat figures. I've left off arm bands on these guys, as they might also be used for other things

Here are the Soviet Motor rifles (and a pair of partisans in red arm bands)

I've got 2 packs of these painted up, but only took photos of one... 

There are some more Hotspur figures on the painting desk (partisans & some converted GSG9 guys) along with more houses and a T-72.... At some point I'll be putting an order in to Liberation for more partisans, more Motor riflemen and more Paras... I think it's fair to say that I'm happy with my decision to pursue this project in 20mm, and realistically I think all my future modern gaming ventures will be in 20mm... (The Elhiem PMCs have caught my eye, and I am tempted to get some Afghans to give my Soviets a slightly different challenge)

Some new bits...

Being able to easily source vehicles and scenery is a mixed blessing - great availability means that 'pocket money' rapidly dwindles!

Deagostini diecast 1/72nd 'Berlin Brigade' Chieftain, dirtied down with a light black wash. Figure is a Platoon 20, to give an idea of size...

Oxford diecast (1/76th) Volkswagens - The pickup will get a 'lift out' MG in the back at some stage, to make a technical for my NATO partisans. At that point it'll probably also get a very gentle weathering. the golf is really just to use as scatter scenery - I'm not sure how many cars I'm going to want/need for games. On the one hand, most people are likely to have used their car to flee the oncoming fighting (inspite of the West German authorities telling people to stay in their homes), so there won't be many about, but on the other, if a large number of refugees have moved through an area I imagine there will be a reasonable number abandoned (run out of petrol, broken down, or just ditched as people try to make faster progress/seek cover on foot)  

Thanks goodness the continentals like model railways. At one point I thought 'Modern' German scenery might be nigh on impossible to find...  HO (1/87th) scenery is readily available (and, on eBay second hand, cheap). This house came to under £3 including postage. Now, I've had to paint it (the producer - and I don't know if it was Faller, Vollmer, Pola, Kibri or some one else - supplies the different sections cast in an appropriate coloured plastic, so they are pre-coloured but the models look like toys rather than models) but it didn't take too long, and I didn't find myself losing interest as I often do with 28mm scenery. 

A bit of multi-scale showing off. Compared the to the Chieftain, the house really is a bit small, but compared to the car and the figure, it isn't too bad. The figure, without its base of washer, could happily use the doors, however once mounted up he'd have a few more problems. Inspite of that, the buildings should give the table a suitably modern look and won't look too out of scale most of the time. Which is good really as I've got another 5 to finish.

Oh, the grey building in the background is a 28mm '3rd world concrete' house or shop. I've got a couple of them, but thought it'd to to use as a backdrop rather than just having piles of books, etc... (actually, despite being used, there are still piles of books, book cases and coats on chairs.... hmmmm...)

A trip to town = goodies!

On Saturday we went pottering around town, and I discovered further advantages of doing stuff in 20mm: model shops become useful for more than stocking up on paint and glue! Between Antix & Modelzone, we spent £36 and came away with 2x BTR-80 pre paints, an 'army' land rover, a mini & an electricity sub-station (reduced from £30something to £12) - here are some pics, along with some figures for scale. The BTR-80s are both 1:72nd, whilst the rest is 1:76th/OO scale. Technically the platoon 20 figures are 1/6th scale, but that is without their built in bases, or penny washer mounts.

As an aside, on of the scale figures in the Platoon 20 90's British Infantryman which I don't think I ever got around to putting up the other week...

So, the OO scale stuff is a little too small, but doesn't look out the way - especially not at a glance - and looks 'alright' alongside the 1/72nd military vehicles. As I don't really get on well with painting vehicles or scenery, the availability of pre-paints means that my forces are more likely to get finished sooner, and have something to fight around! The only downside is that most of the readily available buildings are very British - good for England invaded & Winter of 79 games, less good for trying to represent West Germany... still, there are some ranges of OO/HO continental railway buildings out there, so some of those might be of use...  

Populating a Carpathian town...

Somewhat paradoxically, I'm thinking about figures to populate my Carpathian town before planning on what to build, in the hope that it'll give me some inspiration, and remind me of some things I'd probably otherwise have forgotten...

First we'll start with the actual civilians/townsfolk themselves. The first set under consideration is the Romanian townsfolk set from Blue Moon manufacturing. There are a variety of 'types', some of which are recognisable from films (the guy in the black hat is a spitting image of the grave-digger from Van Helsing),  whilst others are less so. Most of the figures could work anywhere (burly men with tools, town drunk, richly dressed merchant, old soldier, town drunk) whilst others suggest possible scenery : The serving girls and cook would need an inn; the merchant could have a large fancy house, with a  goods store (either an under croft, or a separate out building); possibly some 'market' stalls for some of the figures with baskets to be standing by; a graveyard or house with coffins outside for the grave digger; fields for some of the workers to tend. Most of the figures look like they are on a fairly similar level in terms of income, although a few are obviously richer or poorer. This means that I could get away with having most of the buildings of a similar (tall, higgledy, piggedly) type, with only a few obviously poorer (smaller, 1 story) ones. The figures are a strange mix of styles, with older fashion items still being worn (britches and stockings) but with some more modern trappings. This makes mixing them with other figures a bit problematic - Victorian London types are too well dressed,, whilst AWI types just look too old fashioned.  However, I'm not likely to ever need masses of the blighters, and these would give a very good core population...
 

Westwind do a set of 'villagers', which have a similar old fashioned air to the Blue Moon figures about them. The bar-keep would fit in well with the chef, etc form the previous pack in an  inn. The lady with the candle is fairly generic, whilst the gent with top hat and bag would make a good doctor (another big house then, or atleast a more elaborate standard size one). The blacksmith deserves a forge to work in, and currently I'm unsure as to whether to do a separate forge building (1 story, open to the air on one side) or whether to build one into an under-croft under a house (with the chimney at the end). 

Westwind also have line of 'Transylvanian mob' packs, which will generally be used to form, well, mobs. A couple could be usable as villagers as well though (e.g. the chap with the scythe). These are also old fashioned types, with what fire arms they do have being a mix of flintlocks and more modern weapons, and a strange mix of clothing styles. Luckily WW make 5 packs of these fellows (enough for two 10 man mobs) as otherwise their style could be quite hard to match (that said, the guys with tools from the Romanian civilians pack could be used without looking too out of place I think...)

Westwind also have several packs of gypsies - some of which are suited to being 'characters' whilst others are better suited to being used as towns folk (such as the dancing girls). Being Gypsies, they don't need 'permanent' houses, although some wagons/caravans and maybe a tent or two might be useful for other areas in Carpathia. Luckily, these are available commercially tents from Rendera, the caravan from Westwind)

In addition to their mob; Westwind also do some 'Eastern European Polizi' which look like they'd make good additions to a Carpathian town; as well as being useful for 'rescue from the peelers' games. These guys definitely deserve a police house of some sort - I've got a vague idea of a low house, with lanterns outside, and possibly a cell or gaol house out the back. In terms of reinforcements for certain games, I should be bale to make something similar from ACW figures in sack coats and kepi's; and I'm also hoping to make some Austro-Hungarian or other similar soldiers for when things get bad enough to call in the militia! 

Old Glory's Cossack War range has a set of Cossack Civilians (and some celebrating figures which aren't so applicable). I could almost certainly get away with mixing a few of these guys in - either as drifters from the Ukrainian steppe side of the Carpathians or as country folk. I'm just not sure I can use a full 30 of them, so if someone fancies splitting a pack I'd be interested to hear about it. I'd guess these folks are move likely to be the ones living in any low, Izba type houses I make. 

I'd also like to have some other pieces of moving scenery in the form of carts and the like. The streets of London are comparatively easy to fill, with Hansoms, Coaches (converted from stage coaches), cyclists, steam-carts, omnibuses, etc. However, most of those are a bit too Western and up-to-date for Carpathia. I may be able to get away with a coach (after-all, one drops Jonathan Harker at Bodo Pass in Dracula), but I think the rest will need to be farm wagons and the like. Blue Moon Manufacturing makes a variety, including the one below, although it might need a converted rider...

As already mentioned, Westwind make a gypsy caravan, which could also be used to wander the streets and give the town a more 'lived-in' feel...

A church is essential for the setting, and there are a few Russian Orthodox Priests on the Market - Foundry did one with its Cossack range, TAG have one as a special limited edition, and Old glory do these. Most of them are a bit too militant for general use as towns folk (although, mixed in with West wind's Mad Russian Monks they might make for an interesting take on a  Brotherhood faction...!) Regardless, a church will be essential for the town...

Last, but not least, there is the Blue Moon 'Frankenstein' play-set has a few other Carpathian types. Only the policeman, who is decidedly Teutonic, is particularly suitable for use as a towns person (and not really usable  with the Westwind Polizi, but does open up a range of pikelhaub-ed type which could be used as an alternative.) The Angry mob have quite a primitive feel to them - some look like they've escaped from a band of  English Civil War Club men, whilst others look positively medieval. It might be worth my while looking at such ranges for potentially useful bits, and the odd stray useful civilian.  

I'll summarise the suggested buildings in another post in a couple of days time, along with a few other ideas that might make for good game settings (wood-cutters cabin, with lumber piles, etc)