On The Painting Bench

This weekend is mostly dedicated to cracking on with these mounted and dismounted Yankees and getting them finished.

I've needed some US cavalry for my ACW collection for some time, and particularly for my ongoing email campaign. The mounted figures are mostly Perry, with a three ancient RAFMs, and the foot figures are Foundry. The Foundry figures are especially nice, and I have some lovely GMB flags to adorn them when they're done. The impetus for getting them done is the April 30 midnight (UK time) deadline provided by the Guildwargamers website for its year long Build project,which has helped me decide to focus this painting year primarily on the ACW. I'll report progress Sunday, and hopefully Monday have some finished figures to show off here. Wish me luck.

Speaking of the ACW, here are some 1/600 scale ships in progress:

These two ships represent the Confederate navy for the above mentioned ACW email campaign I am running - the ironclad is the fictional CSS Joshua and the cottonclad is the CSS Maccabbee. They are both from Throughbred Miniatures, and I can't say enough good things about Toby Barrett, his models, and his customer service. As soon as these two get done, I have the Union fleet to work on for the campaign.

It's not all ACW, however. Here are some 20mm WW2 late war British/Commonwealth figures I bought from TQD Castings.

These figures will be useful for skirmish gaming, and will stay individually based.

More TQD stuff in progress. I placed an order with TQD when I discovered they made a Padre figure, who you can see here on the right. The officer in the middle will represent Lt. Denis Audet, the callow French Canadian whose Normandy adventures are chronicled on this blog. The fellow on the left seems to be a motorcycle dispatch rider who is doing temporary duty as a traffic cop.

Finally, I mentioned the Guildwargamers site, and last week I noticed that they have an eight week challenge to make some buildings. I have had these two kits for a year or more, and haven't really come to grips with them because they are rather Italian - definitely would be out of place in Normandy. But now that there's a challenge, I think I'll jolly well build them and use them for something.

Any ideas what to use them for?

Finally, I am both pleased that I discovered how to do manual paragraph breaks in html and annoyed that the new version of Blogger requires me to do it. Perhaps its the older version of Vista I am running, since I am getting an odd message when I load the Blogger composer. Can't say I'm impressed with the new look of the Blogger back end, but it is free, so I'll live with it.