Models and Painting

With so many days at home in this pandemic, I painted a lot of “old lead” (and plastic) have in my reserve. One of the projects I was lingering is a WW2 desert Italian army for . The infantry was already done, so I focused on tanks, armored vehicles, trucks, wheeled guns, and some planes. The entire army in a single go: I started to paint it deployed on my table for each step, and I discovered it was a natural “timelapse”. Here are the photos, with some tricks on painting the WW2 tanks!

By Robert Kelly

Photos by the author

Next week we’ll showcase part 2 of Robert’s trip, the Danish War Museum.

My wife is Danish, and we usually travel to Denmark each spring. Though my understanding of the
Danish language is not too bad, hanging around the in-laws’ place for two to three weeks straight tends to get rather boring.

So, I’m always looking for other things to do like going to sporting events, checking out the gaming scene at clubs like Tinsoldaten in Aalborg, or Einherjerne’s in Aarhus. We always take a side trip or two, so when my sister in law offered two return tickets on the Copenhagen to Oslo mini-cruise we jumped on it.

The price of the tickets was very reasonable and included a room with a washroom. We found out that they seem to have made most of their money at the onboard restaurants and duty-free shops.  It was $120 Canadian for a buffet diner for two with water. The cruise leaves Copenhagen each day at 1630 hrs, arriving at Oslo for 0945 hrs the next morning. You get to spend the whole day in Oslo, and then the ship leaves Oslo at 1630 for Copenhagen, arriving at 0945 hrs the next morning.

By Paolo Paglianti

After having completed my British BAOR force and an antagonist URSS army, I wanted to move to a different theatre of Cold War. For a while, I was lingering on Fate of Nations setting, but the Oil War book gave me exactly what I was looking for: a new scenery for a brand fresh force, literally thousands of miles away from the ubiquitous NATO green.

As usual, I am going to create a core force of around 100 points for the two sides: at our club in Milan we like to have two opposing forces for every ruleset, so we can demo players wanting to get into the games we like. For Oil Wars, the first force I selected was IDF, and later this year I plan to complete the theatre with an Iranian/Syrian force. 

By Dennis Jensen

My first painted piece of the new year is the Taco Bell by .  This is an MDF and resin 28mm kit. Before gluing on the roof and the window frames I sprayed the building and the frames with a textured spray paint.  I experimented to see if the textures spray paint would hide the joins.

By Dennis “Wachtmeister” Jensen

On Sunday, January 19th, 2020 the gaming world unexpectedly lost Walt Langhans, an industry professional, and dear friend.  Along with his wife Michele, Walt was one of the owners of and it’s lead designer.

Walt’s designs were excellent and showed what MDF terrain could aspire to.  He was one of the first people to integrate non-MDF elements in his projects, to include drinking straws, acrylic elements and PVC pipes.

Walt also took steps to minimize visible lugs in his terrain, often using other pieces of MDF to cover visible lugs and seems.  He always had excellent customer service.

I remember one time I wrote him to say that a terrain piece I had ordered didn’t come with the plastic drinking straws but I was good to go because I pulled one out from my painted pipe set.  Walt almost shipped out an extra drinking straw because of the error.  I couldn’t accept this of course, but it just goes to show how great his customer service was.

If you play 3d wargames, you will want to have awesome battlefields. And which scenario could happen without some hills? The ones made by producers like Battlefront or Games Workshop are wonderful, but if you need a number they can become quite expensive. So, here is how we can do easy, scenic, beautiful hills with very affordable costs.

An army marches on its stomach: Napoleon Bonaparte was right, but speaking of our games, we should misquote to “our armies march on their rectangular bases”. There is nothing more disappointing in seeing a well-painted army on poorly rendered bases – I’ve seen with my eyes tournament armies with their infantry merely stuck to the brown Battefront bases!

Basing your miniatures is not that difficult. First of all, you need a plan. For example, all my Flames of War Mid armies and my Team Yankee lists have two infantry platoons, as I really like to play with massed infantry. For this reason, I try to base the two units with a different “landscape”, so I can tell them apart at a glance, even when they assault the same target and mix up. For example, my US Armoured infantry platoon 1 is mounted on “urban” bases, while Platoon 2 is on “rural” ones.

By Tyler Stone
Photos courtesy of Rick Casler, Anthony A. Monroe-Warren & Firelock Games

There’s a new ship on the horizon, from . She made her debut at Hurricon 2019, and her victims – err, Firelock Fans – got to see her in action. However, No Dice No Glory got a sneak peek of her stat cards, and I’m here to share them with you. And while everyone else was raiding Area-51, I was able to sneak into the dockyards at Firelock and get some pics of a finished model from the incredibly talented Rick Casler of . So, pour yourselves a mug of grog, and let me regale with my tale.

By Tom “Chairborne” Mullane

I conducted some of my first large scale terrain experiments earlier last year while building a series of terrain display boards for my 15mm FOW armies.  The basic elements I used were pretty effective and I had plans to make some more this winter and spring.

By Paolo Paglianti

Images courtesy BattleFront

Whatever you play sci-fi Warhammer 28mm games or 15mm historical ones, half of our hobby is painting miniatures. If you are like me, you have tons of unpainted metal and plastic miniatures in the hobby room. Those Orks you bought because that fantasy soccer was so good. The space marines you collected because sooner or later you’ll do that WH40K army. And obviously boxes of WW2 tanks and Alexander phalanxes in 15mm.

Something that can’t miss in the wargamer’s shelf is a book about painting techniques. Before the Internet, they were precious as gold. Although you can now find plenty of online written and video tutorials, a good colour reference book is still quite useful.

In my painting “career” I have read books from Games Workshop and the awesome , but Battlefront’s is something unique, because it’s one of the few (actually the only one, as far as I know) totally focused on 15 mm armies. As one of the best and most inspiring lines in the book, it would be crazy to paint a full Russian 15mm WW2 army with the same definition as a 54 or even a 28 mm miniature. Colours of War is totally aimed for your twentieth century armies.