Tutorial

By Kreighton Long

For the last year I’ve had a squad of Vietnam War USMC Recon primed and sitting in my queue.  Every time a new project would join them and pass them up I could feel their crayon-craving stares boring into my soul.  Eventually I could take no more of their non-verbal harassment and promoted them from my queue to my painting desk.

After some brief investigating I decided to paint them in the ERDL lowland camouflage that was commonly worn by USMC Recon during the Vietnam War.  While replicating the complex pattern shown below in detail is beyond my skill level and patience I endeavored to replicate the colors well enough to represent the camouflage patter.

The paints I used are Vallejo’s Black (950), USA Uniform (922), German Cam. Medium Brown (826), Golden Olive (857), and Pale Sand (837).

By Kreighton Long

My summer of terrain projects continues with a set of homemade rivers.  I set out to echo the method by which I created a set of ponds several years ago.  The materials I used were chipboard for the base, plastic table covers for the river, Vallejo’s Silver Grey paint, Apple Barrel’s Black and Melted Chocolate paint, Delta Creative’s Trail Tan paint, Craft Smart’s Olive Green and Espresso paints, PVA glue, sand, and various basing flock and tufts.

For the plastic table covers I used LovePads 1.5mm thick clear desk pads.  I prepped the table covers by cutting them to size, ironing them under a t-shirt to smooth out the material, and cleaning them with glass cleaner.

By Morten

In this article I will talk about markings used on Danish Vehicles in the 80s and 90s.
Most of these have been in use since the 60/70s and are still in use to this day, although with some variations and updates.

For some markings there are Army standards that needs to be obeyed, and are generally placed on the same location on all vehicles, although slight variation in placement could occur, because they were put on the vehicle by either the crew themselves or the mechanic echelons on base.

Let’s start with the “easy” parts that are present on all vehicles: License plates, Vehicle numbers and weight classification (for heavier vehicles).

By Kreighton Long

Feeling adventurous, I set out to build a pigsty for my rural Bolt Action terrain.  Most of the materials were easy enough to order online.  The wattle fences came from Renedra Ltd; the mother pig from Warlord Games; and the balsa wood, match sticks, coffee stirrers, and green stuff from my hobby cache.

By Kreighton Long

Slowly but surely I’ve been working on improving my terrain options with the focus on Bolt Action.  My primary army project for this year is overhauling my Soviet forces.  Accordingly, my terrain optics have been focused on the terrain pieces that will best fit the Eastern Front.

By Kreighton Long

Bring on the pain!  I bravely (read foolishly) decided to break out my X-Acto knife and green stuff to try to build a Case Yellow Fallschirmjager force using the Warlord Games sprues.  As I started planning there were a few things I needed to keep in mind.

First was to have as many troopers as possible in the early war step-in smocks.  This was in keeping with the fact that the second version jump smock had not become readily available to the Fallschirmjager corps during Case Yellow.  Second was to use heads with uncovered helmets.

Nearly all the photographs I found online from this period show the Fallschirmjager with neither camo covers or netting over their head protection.  Third was to identify where weapon substitutions or additions would need to take place.  The primary light machine gun for the Case Yellow Fallschirmjager was the MG34 and the flamethrower of choice in 1940 would have been the Flammenwerfer 35 as the Flammenwerfer 41 was not introduced until 1941.  With these three things in mind I got to work.

By Morten A.

Before Battlefront decided to include Denmark in Team Yankee with the Nordic Forces book, I was fiddling around modifying the West Germans into the Danish army, by modifying the BF models to resemble units that were available to Denmark during the 1985-1995 timeline that BF is using for TY.

After the release of Nordic Forces, I continued modifying models and adding some 3D printed ones to either better represent the models in the Danish army or proxy units BF did not include in their list.

By Kreighton Long

I recently stumbled across Father and Son Gaming’s Organic Shapes MDF Terrain Base Set and thought about the improvement they could offer my current terrain set-ups.  For years I’ve collected trees, a couple at a time, from various conventions.

I’ve used those same trees on nearly every table I’ve thrown together.  From time to time I’ve had a minor hiccup where my opponent or I would need to reposition a tree or two to accommodate units moving through  the clusters of trees and in doing so would lose track of the intended outline of the trees.  For the most part these are friendly club games and we’ve been able to work through it for the spirit of the game.

By Kreighton Long

Thanks to Great Escape Games I finally worked up the courage to take a crack at painting horses with their Romanian cavalry.  Fortunately for me, I have a former equestrian a shout away to lend her expertise.  A goal I had for my mounted Romanians was to have an eye-catching amount of variety with the different mounts.

Of course with my partner passing my painting desk every so often to quality control my progress I was able to work with her to incorporate some authentic colorings.  Below are some of the different colorings I ended up with and the corresponding colors. All paints used below are from Vallejo.

By Kreighton Long

As I work on improving my Bolt Action Italian army I found myself needing a little extra firepower and maneuverability by utilizing the Armored Car slot.  After looking through the options for the Italians I settled on an Autoblinda AB 41 and was lucky enough to stumble across one at a brick and mortar store I visit whenever possible.  While looking into different paint schemes for my new speedy-pew-pew I was inspired by photos of Italian armor painted in a three tone paint scheme with a base of tan with blotches of green and brown known as Continentale. 

The Continentale paint scheme was used on a few Italian vehicles predominantly in Italy as the Allies pushed the fighting from Africa to the Italian peninsula.   Gaps between the brown and green where the undercoat showed through created a unique looking vehicle camouflage pattern that I decided to reproduce.  After some trial and error I found a process that allowed me to reproduce the paint scheme I wanted in the least painful way possible.