Little Tanks & Tiny People

I already teased in  my 2024 roundup that I was working on an Athenian hoplite army. I’m now a fair way into what will be my largest army to date. I’ve finished 48 hoplites, 12 archers, 12 slingers and 8 cavalry, for a total of 80 figures. I’ve still got another pack of 48 hoplites to go, but I think I may take a little breather and paint something else for a little bit. All figures are from Victrix. Assembly is rather complex, with each figure consisting of a separate body, head, arms, shield, spear and sword. Just assembling the hoplites took four or five hobby sessions. These hoplites are from the older Victrix kit. I really like the sculpts, but there could have been a bit more variety in the head sculpts. I would also have liked some more heads with Corinthian helmets. Both of these problems are solved in the new kit, however. I did pick up a spare sprue from the new kit on Ebay, just to add in some alternative head sculpts. Spikey phalanx! Shield transfers are from Little ...

Quick update: I bought and built another Sarissa Precision kit, a Dutch house to go with my Dutch farm . I also scratch-built some road sections: 9 straight sections and 1 t-junction. I kept it simple for now, but I can always add corners and other shapes later. I used 6 mm thick polystyrene, which should prevent the sections from warping. I bevelled the edges slightly and added banks using a full packet of Milliput. I then  gave the pieces a quick sanding and applied two coats of brown paint mixed with sand and coffee grounds. After letting that dry overnight, I gave the pieces a quick drybrush and then added flocking and some tufts.

Painting is done! I first primed the whole thing by hand with regular wood primer and then gave it a couple of coats of Rustoleum chalky finish furniture paint from a rattle can. According to the can, the colour is called ‘jute’. I’d call it off white or bone white, though. Anyway, I then gave the whole thing a very heavily thinned down black wash, followed by a light dusting of the ‘jute’ again and a drybrush of white.    I then painted all the details such as the arches, seats, pavement and arena. Considering the size of this thing, detailing took a fair while. I probably spent about four hours just painting the individual cobble stones on the pavement. Weathering the amphitheatre was a lot of going backwards and forwards, adding a colour, not liking it, removing most of it again, trying another colour, removing most of that as well, and so on. But I think I ended up with something pretty nice looking. I used predominantly acrylic paints, apart from a final pass with some ...

Time for a change of pace! If I’m honest, I was getting quite fed up with painting Rohan warriors. They’re very laborious to paint and there’s so many of them (12 down, 38 left to go...). I’ll get back to them at some point, but for now I need to do something completely different.   And what better project to get your mojo back than to build this epic amphitheatre by Sarissa Precision! I had been ogling it online for years, but last week it arrived on my doorstep as a birthday present from my wife. I’m not quite sure where I’ll put it once it’s done (it’s huge!), but it is insanely cool. I didn’t count the number of parts, but there’s a lot. For reference, each (semi)column consists of 12 parts and there’s 34 of them! I’ve made a few tiny changes to the design. Most significantly, I permanently attached the removable arena by gluing the entire thing onto a large sheet of polystyrene. This gave the whole piece some additional strength and also meant that I could hide the large...

Well, that escalated quickly! Sometime back in August , I decided to buy a handful of minis for each of the four countries featured in the book ‘Hitler's Blitzkrieg Enemies 1940: Denmark, Norway, Netherlands & Belgium’. Less than two months later, I now have a completed 500 pt. Dutch army for Bolt Action and components to build Belgian and German armies of similar size! Those armies need some terrain to fight over, so I also bought this MDF kit from Sarissa Precision . I think it captures the look of a Dutch farm pretty well. The only thing I didn’t like was the look of the tiled roof, so I used an old towel to represent thatching. The towel required a lot of glue to stick it down, because the towel and MDF both kept soaking up the thinned down wood glue. With some perseverance, though, I think I got a pretty convincing result. The pattern on the window shutters was a lot of fun to paint and is based on designs common in my area. Every farm needs fencing, so I made a bunch of...