Forgotten and Glorious ACW Minis Are Unforgettable AND Glorious

My order of ACW 28mm miniatures from FG Miniz Forgotten & Glorious Company of Art arrived on Monday and did not disappoint.   F&G are a relatively new French company, and seem to be additional proof that trans-Atlantic hobbyists like myself don’t just have to look to Great Britain as the centre of gravity for our hobby.   European companies like F&G and Black Hussar are doing cracking work these days, and I am sure there are many other Eur minis companies that I don’t know about.

I was considering F&G’s Kickstarter campaign for their 14th Brooklyn figures (they seem to specialize in early ACW) but when the announced a new line of Iron Brigade sculpts, I was hooked.  I have several regiments of this iconic Union brigade and thought that these F&G figures, especially the command figures, just had loads of character.  There was also the thrill of getting figures from the first production run of minis from brand new moulds.  

Here’s a command group, taking the air on my patio table.  I love the look of the colonel with sword on the right.  He seems to be saying, “Now then, Padre, you seem like a fellow with the right mettle, I’m sure you’ll move us to the front of the painting queue."

 Another thing I love about F&F is that their national standard flagpole comes with a US eagle.   I’ve never seen a company do that before, and I’ve always wanted one.

 

 These figures compare well in size with other lines of 28mm ACW figures.  Seen below on the far left is a Perry plastic figure, and on the right is one from Old Glory.  I would say that the F&G figures are slightly larger than the ACW line from Foundry, and perhaps a tiny bit smaller than the ones from Redoubt.

There is stiff competition for the painting queue, but I suspect I’ll get on to these fellows sooner rather than later.

Blessings to your dice and brushes!

MP+

"Zee RAF Bimmers Are Farting For Freedom"

I know there are very serious events and ceremonies happening in Normandy as I write this.  

However, in a less serious note, this image got me wondering, is it too much to hope that somewhere in Normandy, among the throngs of reenactors seen in these fab photos, are some who are recreating the liberation scene from Allo! Allo!?  We can only hope.

Still More Soviets: Tankodesantniki! 20mm Britannia Tank Riders

Last year I posted here about two Italieri ISU-122s that I’d completed for the 2013 Analogue Hobbies Challenge.   Shortly after painting them, I learned the hard way that Dullcote does not interact well with pigment.  While the models weren’t ruined, exactly, most of the pigment turned a wintry white and I had to redo them.   A little heartsick, I put them in a “To Do Later” box and sort of forgot about them.   Then I dug them out while working through a pile of Britannia 20mm Soviet infantry, including a half a dozen tank riders.   Finishing them off gave me the motivation to pull out the ISU-122s and get them back into shape.

I like these Britannia figures, and their combination of uniform items - greatcoats, fur heats, etc - matches the Italieri AT gunners I showed here previously, making them perfect for a winter/spring 1945 assault force on the Reich’s cities.

With only six figures, total, that doesn’t allow me a whole mob of tank riders, but it does suggest men who have been detailed to ride with the assault guns and protect them from snipers, Hitler Youth with panzerfauts, etc.  I figured the easiest course was to glue them to the tank models, since otherwise they would only fall off when in use and rattle around in boxes when not in use.  For game purposes we can decide whether the figures are in play or not in play.

 

 

I won’t count the two tanks towards my 2014 totals, since really they were finished and blogger last year, but I will count these six tank riders.

 

 

 

 

These figures bring my 2014 totals to:

28mm Mounted: 13

28mm Foot:  22

28mm Artillery: 1

20mm Foot:  26

20mm Artillery: 2

20mm Terrain Pieces:  1

15mm Foot: 26

15mm Terrain Pieces: 3

6mm Buildings: 2

Kilometres RunL 621  

Blessings to your brushes!  MP+

 

 

More Soviets: Italieri 20mm ZIS 3 AT Guns and Crew

A year ago I declared the six weeks of Easter to be the time of my Resurrected Armies project and one of those goals was to finish off and fix up my 20mm Soviets.   While I didn’t formally declare that this Easter would be another Resurrected Armies period, that goal was still in my mind, and so I dug out this Italieri kit that I had started on last spring.   The kit is a hard(ish) plastic, a little softer than, say, the plastic figures from Warlord, but quite easy to work with.  I am by no means an expert on cannon, but the AT guns appeared to be well cast and fit together quite easily.   I rather liked the box cover which said that 12 “Servants” are included.  One of those harmless translation errors that made me think of Downtown Abbey with loud explosions.

 

Because the figures are dressed in overcoats, fur hats, and quilted tunics, the gun crews give off a winter vibe, and made me think of the last terrible months in Berlin or other Fortress Cities like Konigsberg, so I stole an idea from Sidney Roundwood and designed these bases for them, something I’d tried last year for some Soviet tank destroyers.  For the bricks I chopped up some of the wooden sprues from a 4Ground kit, and while a little on the large side, they worked alright, I think.  

 

I’m not sure if this project qualifies as another pigment disaster, but I wanted to give the impression that the guns had been hauled through and coated in concrete dust, in a manner reminiscent of those pictures of Manhattan after the Twin Towers collapsed, when everything and everyone was coated in grey dust.   I used a slate grey pigment, but when it dried it looked more like snow than dust, so I had to scrape some off the bricks on the bases with y fingernail.   When I tried scraping it off the cannons, the paint started coming off, so I abandoned that plan.

 

 

This last shot is to my mind what AT guns would have been most useful for in Berlin - not fighting off the few remaining German tanks so much as winkling defenders out of buildings.  I believe that was a favourite use of 6pdr AT guns by Commonwealth and British troops in Ortona and Caen and other FIBUA situations.

These figures bring my 2014 totals to:

28mm Mounted: 13

28mm Foot:  22

28mm Artillery: 1

20mm Foot:  21

20mm Artillery:  2

20mm Buildings/Terrain Pieces:  1

15mm Foot:  26

15mm Buildings/Terrain Pieces:  3

6mm Buildings/Terrain Pieces: 2

Kilometres Run: 610

Blessings to your brushes!  MP

Some Britannia 20mm Soviets

A few years ago I bought a platoon’s worth of Britannia Miniatures Red Army infantry in summer dress.  With all due respect to the late Dave Howitt, I confess I didn’t like then too much.  The sculpts seemed a little rough and clumsy, and they all had shaggy heads of hair, whereas I suspect that the average frontovik kept his hair close-cropped.    I tried painting up some and didn’t much like the results, but the spirit of guiding spirit of May here at the Painting Chapel has been to clear the old projects out of the way.

You may notice that the colour of the uniform is a bit off, and perhaps too yellow for everyone’s tastes.  I was not happy with the thinness of my Vallejo Russian Uniform and tried adding some other colours to it to thicken it up a bit, perhaps not very successfully.   Anyway, this gives me a start on a 20mm platoon for Too Fat Lardies’ Chain of Command and/or BG Kursk, though I need to find the rest of the bag of unpainted figures and paint them so I have complete sections of riflemen and SMGs.   

The NKVD officer reading from Stalin’s latest patriotic proclamation (Fight Gloriously Or Be Shot) will make for some tabletop colour, and of course there is the customary junior officer waving his pistol in the air.

What do you think of Britannia figures?  It’s good to see that the moulds have survived and the figures are still being sold by the Grubby Tanks people, and I must admit I do like the Britannia 20mm WW2 resin vehicles, of which I have a few.

Blessings to your brushes!

MP

These figures bring my 2014 totals to:

28mm Mounted: 13

28mm Foot:  22

28mm Artillery: 1

20mm Foot:  9

20mm Buildings/Terrain Pieces: 1

15mm Foot:  26

15mm Buildings/Terrain Pieces: 3

6mm Buildings/Terrain Pieces: 2

Kilometres Run:   596

Saturday Paint Table On Sunday

 I’ve been away this last week so just got a brief chance to revisit the paints and move things along on Saturday.   Here, almost finished, are two 20mm Italieri WW\2 Russian anti-tank guns and crew, based for urban warfare.   The little fellows on the left are some 6mm Baccus French Napoleonic infantry.  There are some more Russians there as well, 20mm Britannia tank riders, and lurking in the back and calling me seductively to paint her next is a 28mm Reaper lady vampire.

 

 

Blessings to your paint brushes!   

 

MP+

Almost Wobbled On The Cobbles: Painting the Italieri Stone Bridge

I am happy to say that I am writing this on my Macbook, which I got back from the nice Apple Genius Bar folks yesterday.  I you read my last post here, you will recall that I was bracing for a $300 repair bill, but the good news is that only one part, an I/O Board, needed to be replaced, and so the total bill was $70 and it appears to work just fine.   Happy days.   My happiness level got a further boost when I was about to drive my Kia Soul to the garage to check out why the dreaded Check Engine Light (which should have the shape of a money sign ($) rather than a little engine) had come on on Tuesday.  After a day of sitting in the driveway, the light did not come on and the service guy told me it was probably just a bad seal with the gas cap.   Happy days indeed.

One of my painting projects while watching Game of Thrones with Mdme Padre over the last few weeks was to build and paint this Italieri kit, since I needed a stone bridge that would work for 20 and 28mm scales, and this looked like a sturdy and useful sort of kit for everything from Europe to the ACW (it does have an Antietam / Burnside bridge kind of vibe to it).   It also had the merit of being incredibly easy to put together.   Italieri has really thought out what gamers need in plastic kits.  Simply and strong as a rock when put together.   

But how to paint the blasted thing?   After an undercoat of flat back spray from the DIY store, I had to decide, should I just paint it a simple slate grey with some highlighting, or perhaps a brownish sandstone sort of look?   All the while this image from the box art kept staring at me, as if to say, come on, Mike, you know you want to paint it like this.   Cobblestones are fun, you can do it.   I almost got all wobbly and said no, but then I thought, I can do this on the couch with one eye on the TV, just choose half a dozen or so colours and do one colour at a time.  

Never being one to do something simply when it could be incredibly difficult, I decided I would not back down.  I would not be a cobble wobbler.

There were many, many times when I almost lost my nerve and thought that the bridge was looking like shite.   It was not terribly difficult to paint within the bricks and leave most of the black undercoat showing as outlines, but for this job I was using cheap craft acrylic paints (mostly Folk Art) and the paint didn’t always go on cleanly.  Also, with so much black showing, it just looked odd, but as I persevered and applied more and more colours, with the grey shades dominant and the darker colours as infrequent highlights, it started to come together.   Suddenly, I had a bridge that looked almost as good as the box art!  I’m pretty sure I missed half of GoT season one, something about winter coming, heads on spikes, dwarves with naked women, dragons with naked women, etc.  I’ll have to watch it again, I suppose.

 

 Now that the bridge is done I am debating whether to put some sort of wash on it.   I was thinking of Army Painter’s Soft Tone, but my concern is that since that product is basically a light brown colour, similar to GW’s sepia wash, I would lose the various shades of light fray, particularly along the top and bottom of the span, and the whole thing would look kind of gross.   I’m kind of thinking I might just spray the whole thing with Dullcote and move on, but I would welcome your suggestions as to what the finishing touches might be.

 

 The all important test of the bridge, using a river.  Hey, it works!

 

Why did the Ottiomans cross the bridge?  My newly finished Spahi command group test the bridge by riding across it.   That test was successful as well.  Hooray!

 

These figures bring my 2014 totals to:

28mm Mounted: 13

28mm Foot: 22

28mm Artillery: 1

20mm Buildings/Terrain Pieces:  1

15mm Vehicles: 4

15mm Foot: 26

15mm Buildings/Terrain Pieces: 3

6mm Buildings/Terrain Pieces: 2

Kilometres Run:  520

Blessings to your brushes!

MP+