Not Lockdown Anymore - Sherman Firefly

A few months ago I added a very nice Rubicon Sherman Firefly to the lead pile and with the lockdown here in NZ coming to an end I thought why not celebrate by painting a tank! Makes a change from 28mm!

This kit was a dream to put together, which agrees with everything I've ever heard about Rubicon. Even better you get an extra hull and turret so you can build a regular 75mm and swap them if needed (its built so you don't have to glue the hull and chassis!)

The trickiest part was painting the camo on the barrel. Panzer crews quickly raised how deadly the 17 pdr was and would target the firefly in each tank troop first, so the crew camo'd the end of the barrel with a disruption pattern to make it look like the 75mm.

I'm looking forward to trying this bad boy out, i'm sure it'll suffer from the newly painted curse and explode in the first couple of turns.

Lockdown Post 20 - Random 40k Ork

Ever feel the urge to just paint something different? I've been cracking on with my Early Imperial Romans' and just felt the need for a change so grabbed the first thing that looked different from the pile! And what's more different from historical Romans' than a fantastical space ork. 

I'm not sure why I even have this model, its the only one in my collection. It did however give me the opportunity to test my green shading and check patterns. 

And I thoroughly enjoyed painting it,  it made a fun diversion and sometimes that's all you need to feel refreshed.

Right, back to historical I guess!

Lockdown Post 19 - Cruel Seas Scratch Build Merchant Ship

Its really hard to sink a ship with torpedoes in Cruel Seas when almost all the boats we play with are unaffected by torpedoes.  This is one of the very quick realisations you come to when playing the game,  in fact it's quite terrifying if you just happen to be playing the side that has a single large ship! 

Also the game gets a little tiresome if you don't play some different scenarios every now and then,  so to keep things interesting I thought I'd have a crack at scratch building myself a freighter! So, where to start? Well what better place than the hull, and in the interests of not making something that looks like utter crap I copied the hull from the Kreigsmarine Flakboot. To start with I cut a base from foam board by simply drawing round the flakboot as a template and cutting at a slight angle with a sharp craft knife. Then I placed some plain paper over the hull of the Flakboot and with a pencil did a rubbing to get the right outline.  You see I'm a major cheap skate and was planning to build the entire thing from scrap materials,  the hull would be card!

Once done I then went and laid the rubbing outline onto a piece of card and drew round it heavily with a hard pencil to press the shape into the card,  then using a sharp craft knife I cut out the hull and compared to the flakboot floor accuracy.  As it looked fine I flipped it,  as a template for the other side of the hull and hey presto,  I had the makings of a ship!

The superstructure I simply constructed out of foamboard rectangles stacked on each other  there was very little planning, I simply messed with random bits until I got something that looked right.

The canvas cargo cover is a plastic Warlord Games Hanomag crew cover,  there's an mg at the bow from an old 1/72 kit I had lying around the windows are simply cut out card. I should really try and build another one so we can have some convoy battles!

Lockdown Post 18 - Cruel Seas Kreigsmarine

S- boats,  Minesweeper and Flakboot, that's the German fleet,  although it also comes with a Stuka which is quite nice but not really required in the game as aircraft attacks could easily be represented with a counter.

I've gone for a few different camo schemes,  simply because I seem too have loads of e-boats to play with. These stress the s-100 with armored wheelhouse.

I think this is my favorite one,  a lot of sponging and stippling to get this effect. 

These are the s-38 type which I prefer to the s-100, they just look nicer!

A flakboot, and yes that's an 88mm on the front, pretty scary really although terribly slow in the game and vulnerable to torpedoes.

I foolishly asked my son what camo scheme I should paint the minesweeper and his reply was "Bismarck", so I valiantly tried to paint straight lines on the damn thing which was no easy task

Turned out ok I reckon. 

The combined Kreigsmarine fleet.  A much scarier proposition than my Royal Navy, at least until I finish my Fairmiles

In the Cruel Seas starter set you also got a half submerged sub, not tried to user it yet I just enjoyed painting it. 

Lockdown Post 17 - Cruel Seas Royal Navy Fleet

My youngest is a big fan of ships so when i described Cruel Seas to him he was all in straight away, that means I've had a built in gaming buddy for lockdown and it's given us both the opportunity to learn the rules properly. I'm not going to give a run through of the rules as that's been done better elsewhere but I thought I'd share my Royal Navy fleet as I'm quite pleased with how they came out. 

These have been painted over the last year or so,  I still have 2 Fairmile D's to paint so this isn't my full fleet! 

Vosper type 1 MTB's. I quite like the aesthetics  of these, although the masts are way too chunky

An armed trawler,  it's pretty pathetic when facing up against some of the Kreigsmarine ships but when you factor in the gazillion torpedoes from the cheap and cheerful Vospers then it manages to survive quite a while. 

Vosper type 2's. Same problem as the type 1's with the oversize mast. I should really have replaced then with something more appropriate to the scale. 

All the gang together.  It'll look better when I add the Fairmiles.

Lockdown Post 16 – Its the little things!

In these trying times you appreciate the little things, those small things that you normally wouldn’t really appreciate enough. Like many of you I’m exhausting my supply of hobby materials, I’m painting more than normal and Covid-19 timed it just right to turn up just as I’m starting to run out of stuff. I’d normally call in at a bricks and mortar store but that’s not possible here in NZ with our lockdown so I had to make use of online ordering from local hobby store Kapiti Hobbies (a hobby shop that’s also a pharmacy, or is it the other way round?).

I ordered yesterday and boom, my stuff arrived today! Pretty good turnaround from both the store and the courier company!

Good service, good products. I know it’s not much but it brightened my day

Lockdown post 15 - Roman Legionaries

I've been working on some more Warlord Games Roman's too go with my earlier efforts.

Had a minor disaster with the army painter spray varnish which went cloudy but a quick application of some olive oil managed to fix it.

 Next up are some barbarians for them to fight against or ally with! I've had a bunch of Warlord Games plastics floating around for a while so lockdown has provided the perfect impetus to get some of them out of the cupboard!

I should have enough for some games of SPQR now,  hopefully when lockdown finishes and we all emerge from our bunkers there'll still be some people to play against!

Lockdown post 14 - Islands

In one of my recent posts I talked about gaming with my boys,  the game in question was Warlord Games Cruel Seas. Well as we all know every game is improved with some nice looking scenery and that's what I did the day before that game so I thought I should post about making islands. 

Each island is just a chunk of polystyrene stuck on some old board and shaped accordingly. 

Painted and textured with old art acrylics, although I have used some Vallejo sand paste which is something new for me.

Looks all right. I'll post with my Cruel Seas fleets at some point!