WW 2 Norwegians (sort of) and the beginnings of a Blitzkrieg German army

I have ticked another small Blitzkrieg nation off my to-do list: Norwegians. Well, sort off, anyway. These ski infantry figures are actually part of Warlord Games’ Finnish line. However, as most of their uniform is hidden beneath a white overall, they look pretty similar to their Norwegian counterparts. Most clearly out of place is the PPSh submachine gun carried by one of the figures. Who knows, one day I may build a little Finnish army to accompany them... For now, though, I’m really happy with how they turned out. They’re probably some of the most unique and characterful WW2 minis out there.

I had a bit of a mishap with the snow effect on the base. After drying it turned a very dirty brown colour, probably because I hadn’t given the underlying paint enough time to dry. Luckily this could be fixed with a quick drybrush of white, which actually gave the snow a really cool semi opaque-semi transparent look.

I’ve also made a modest start on an early war German army to take on my Dutch army and a Belgian army that I have yet to build. First up is a Sd.Kfz.251 Ausf. C, again by Warlord Games, and a Sd.Kfz 7 by Rubicon Models.

As the early war grey colour scheme is pretty boring, I made an effort to really make every individual armour panel stand out. The process isn't difficult and yields nice results I think. I just apply all the base colours and then cover everything in light tone Quickshade, at which point the model looks absolutely horrendous. After two days of drying time I then carefully paint over the quickshade with the original base colours, taking care to leave some of the Quickshade visible around the panel lines and rivets. I'm sure there is a quicker way, but I quite like the process and love the results.

The Warlord kit of the Sd.Kfz.251. comes with some nice stowage, but the one-piece MG34/42 gunner is pretty poor quality. The detail is pretty shallow and the area between his lower arm and shoulder is entirely filled in.

The very high quality Sd.Kfz.7 from Rubicon. Look at those cute little rifles in the racks! The kit does not come with stowage apart from four jerrycans. That's where having a bits box comes in handy.

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More simple Warhammer 40k terrain: craters and rubble piles

Time for some more simple 40k scenery: craters and rubble piles. Both are pretty easy projects and pretty quick too, if unlike me you plan out your work a little so you don’t need to continuously correct your mistakes along the way! For the craters, I started with two old writeable dvd’s. I first closed off the central holes with mdf miniature bases. I then broke off semi-triangular wedges of cork from a pan coaster and hotglued these to the dvds, forming circles (see the picture below). I then applied wall filler to the craters to hide the mdf circles covering the central holes and to add some texture to the cork. I then glued smaller bits of cork in between the larger wedges and added coffee grounds for texture. After this step I noticed that the cork wedges didn’t look very natural. Tapering them off made them look a lot better (picture below). I then gave everything a coat of black paint: I still thought the craters didn’t look quite right, though. They were a bit too uniform ...

Holy cel-shaded abs, Batman!

I thought I’d do something a little different for my first post of 2023. I picked up this Batman figure second hand about 15 years ago. Back then he wore an all black suit with the Tim Burton yellow logo and a yellow utility belt. I had repainted him years ago, but never really liked the result, so over the Christmas break I had another crack at it. I sculpted a new bat logo out of Miliput, filled in some of the joints, and repainted Batsy in a cel-shaded style somewhat similar to Mike Mignola’s artwork. I did this by illuminating the figure from the top left and then tracing the shadows. I tried to paint him so that the effect works from all angles, but I think it’s most effective from the front and left. The colour palette is very limited: Vallejo Medium Sea Grey 70.870 and Black 70.950 for the suit, Flat Earth 70.983 and Charred Brown 72.045 for the utility belt and Basic Skin Tone 70.815 for the skin. By the way, it may not come across in the pictures, but at 30 cm Batsy ...

Gloomhaven characters

Back in the winter of 2020/2021, my wife and I played a lot of Gloomhaven. After several months of playing multiple games a week we put it away for a while, but recently we picked it back up again. Gloomhaven is probably one of the best tabletop games I’ve played. The only downside in my mind is that it can easily take you 15 minutes to set up a scenario, especially if you don’t invest in some aftermarket box inserts to organise the literally thousands of tiles, tokens, cards and standees. But once you’ve set everything up, the game plays really well. Plus, I really like that it is a cooperative game in which the players need to work together to get through a scenario. Anyway, the game comes with 18 plastic ‘heroic’ 28 mm or 32 mm scale miniatures. The monochrome grey plastic really stands out against the beautifully colourful floor tiles, so obviously these had to be painted... The plastic is a bit softer than your average model kit, but a lot harder than the soft plas...

Little Tanks & Tiny People

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