Tally Ho! (Desert Light Armour Platoon - Part 1)

I started work on my Flames of War 8th Army Light Armoured Platoon yesterday and pretty much finished up the platoon commander. The unit is comprised of a Command Crusader II tank and two Crusader III's. I tried to do a bit of research on camouflage schemes  and so forth as I wanted my force to be roughly based on troops that were present during the 2nd Battle for El Alamein and so went with the following scheme.

The lighting washed out some of the shading in these pics. That oil drum for example looks a lot more "rusted" in real life than this picture would otherwise have you believe. 

Poor commander only gets a pitiful 2-pounder to play with. This gun will barely bail a panzer III!

As with my previously shown armoured cars, these will get a little weathering once I've worked out correct markings for them and applied the decals. I painted this tank up entirely by hand, which is a bit silly what with my airbrush sat downstairs (just waiting for me to make this whole process easier and quicker), and so this one tank managed to take up most of my painting time yesterday - about 4-5 hours! The other two tanks from this platoon are both ready for highlights and so forth and I should have them done by hopefully Friday.

Next up, as a really quick side-project, I finally managed to get my rpg character's miniature done! Here is Pillip the Grippli - Priest of the Croak Mother. This mini is bloody small, like, a tad shorter than my 15mm Flames of War infantry figures! O_o So lots of careful application of paint required. Saying that, because he's so small, it only took me maybe an hour and a bit to get him finished? As he's a gaming mini (And our campaign storyline is almost over), I'm not putting all that much effort into him, but I think he looks pretty cool as is.

Lastly, I also started work on another random rpg mini. I let my wife choose it out of the 140-or-so random roleplay figs I have waiting for some colour and she picked out an old plastic 1980's  Heroquest playing piece, the "Chaos Sorcerer". So far I"m only managed to get basic colours on and highlight the skin some, so no pics as yet, but it was fun to get working on such an old silly sculpt. :) I'll post finished pics soon.

The kitsune that could.

My good friend Steve turned 40  recently. He's a member of my regular D&D group, so for a birthday present I decided to buy and paint up a mini to represent his character for our current adventure.

It's a home-brewed adventure run by one of my best mates, Rob and in it I play a Grippli priest (For which I have a mini to showcase at a later date.). Steve on the other hand plays a Kitsune Hunter with a magic sword. For those not in the know, a Grippli is a treefrog person, typically 2 feet tall and a Kitsune is a traditional Japanese mythological creature that can shape shift between the form of a human and a fox - only, Steve's character, due to some sort of trauma got stuck half way and so is a "fox person".

So using his character description as a guide, here is the mini I chose for him. It's a fresh sculpt by a small company that recently finished up a kickstarter for a range of half-orc miniatures called Stonehaven Miniatures. Charming sculpts all, you should check them out - very reasonably priced as well.

Pre-dull coat. I ran out right before this chap was done - figures...

 

This month is also Zomtober! Over at the Eclectic Gentleman Tabletop Gamer blog, pulpcitizen is running a fun painting pledge for the month of October that I've jumped on. Here's the very easy rules:

"The rules are simple. To take part just paint one Zombie or Survivor (or more!) each week, in any scale you like, posting it to your blog by the Sunday (we use Sunday's as the end of each Zomtober week). So that means one or more minis each week on or before the 5th, 12, 19th and 26th of October. Simples."

One painted zombie a week? I think I can do that. Here's all the zedheads I own and that will be painted by the end of this month! 

Lastly - it was my intention to post a separate AAR for my recent Flames of War Market Garden game versus my good mate Densmol. Sadly though, all the pictures I took turned out to be utter pants. So even though my Canadians were superbly victorious versus his stubborn Germans (I won 6-1 for those counting) in a very entertaining and bloody game, I really don't have anything more to offer, afterall, this is a hobby blog and pictures paint the scene, right? No pictures, no scene. Sadly.