Models and Painting

By Kreighton Long

Last week Warlord Games made the new book available for pre-order. This latest addition to their inventory of Bolt Action supplemental materials provides just over 150 pages of new content for fans of the 28mm World War Two skirmish game.

Focused on two campaigns in the South Pacific, this book attempts to provide engaging scenarios and unique unit and theater options for players representing the Japanese and United States combatants of the war.

The battles for the Marianas and Palau Islands all occurred during the summer and autumn of 1944, half a world away from the violent crescendos of the Normandy landings and Operation Market Garden in western Europe and Operation Bagration in eastern Europe.

by Dennis ‘Matt Varnish’ Campbell

Everyone has that model or unit that is just… well… it’s not your best work. For my Napoleonic French army in 28mm, that unit is my battalion of Old Guard. Here is the story of how they are my worst unit and how I fixed the situation

First of all, in preparation for a big game of a while back, I had decided that I needed an Elite unit to back up my glorious Line infantry, and so painted all 24 figures in one day.  Naturally, the plan was to come back later and re-work them.. so its very basic.. main colours then a wash over the whole model with GW Nuln oil. My pot of Nuln Oil was bad so that it left pools of white residue everywhere and a super gloss finish.

I still used them for the game.  On my way back, I had to slam on my brakes for some lady in a white SUV who cut me off, and I could HEAR my boxes of miniatures in my trunk tipping over.  I could only imagine the carnage. Almost every single model that had rifles facing forwards were broken, and I had to re-glue so many bayonets, that I only used them in one other game after that,

The 28mm size, if you ask me, is the perfect balance between playability and modeling/painting. You can buy and assemble pretty good armies for any ruleset from ancient warfare to sci-fi skirmishing without investing too much money or time to paint them, with striking results. So, even if I prefer 15mm when it comes to competitive games and recreating full-scale battles, I often spend some time to paint and play 28mm miniatures.

However, on gaming tables, I equally often see very good painted miniatures with anonymous green bases. I think bases are so significant for the final look of an army (by the way, here are for Team Yankee, and ). 

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.