Next step

Allies

   Next "project" would be completing British armoured platoon, if possible, with Irish Guards markings. They are assembled, and finally I gave them their stowage, which was fun to do. Three more need basic colour painting. After that, detailing, washing and weathering.

   

Note two things: the still unpainted black Sherman with a lot of spare tracks and SiC tank with semi transparent unpainted antenna. Antenna is made from jeans mark plastic holder, as well as the antenna on the unpainted one.

 
   Inspiration for (unpainted) command tank came from here: 

Good article on: http://bloodofkittens.com/wargaminghub/2013/01/14/flames-of-war-tank-stowage/

A bit customised Firefly

   Once stowage is pre-painted with black and remaining three Shermans are coated in main colour, true painting will begin. Also, tank commanders are ready to be painted!

Which colour to make his moustache, hmmm...

   When armoured platoon is finished, next will be Americans. With them I'll complete allied part of Open Fire, and that's more than a half of it finished. Also, American infantry platoon is small and thus it will be less time consuming than painting 2 German Grenadier platoons with support.

Let's make some woods!

part 2

   Well, the trees are dry, it is time for gluing them! Finally!

Top o' the mornin' to ya!

 

  Bases are ready and looking great under the sunlight!

Better and cheaper than "Battlefield in a box"! :D

Ready for... treeing?

    I spread out the trees and bases in order to make some plan as to where each tree would fit the best in order to make good and game friendly scenery. Each tree will be glued to where it points :)

  

 I used one team to measure distances between the trees in order to make the final woods usable for gaming purposes:

First tree is in position!

    After repeating this for 20+ times, my home hand made wood terrain for Flames of War is ready! Finally! I feel good about this and I'm satisfied with the result especially if you consider time and money invested in it :) And I think that the good forest terrain will bring more enjoyment to a game.

   Although the threes are painted, in sunlight it is hardly seen, so I'll have to give them a touch or two by hand with some lighter colour to distinguish some highlight, though they look better in real life than here in the photos.
 
 

I think that tank passed through here...

   All in all, this was very satisfying "project" to do. It wasn't that time consuming as one would think, and it is easy, really. The hardest part is repetitive nature of making three tops from sponge, other than that everything else is pure creative joy.


 I hope you found this interesting! :)

Every good game needs terrain...

...so let's make some woods!

   It is very important to me to have decent terrain for playing the game. Maybe even more important than perfectly painted miniatures themselves. Not that I don't care about nicely painted minis, but I'd rather play game in the meantime while painting the army, and in Open Fire set, there's a lot to paint! So, I have decided to do some terrain too! And what better than woods!

   First, I used Open Fire cardboard 2D woods as a pattern for my woods. On hard cardboard I drew those shapes and I cut them. After applying glue and sanding, it was time to paint them. I sprayed them with black acrylic spray and then I used relatively cheap water colours ("tempere") and this is the first result:

Yeah, I used some stones too

Looking great ;)

   This was quite a fast job actually, as I thought it would be way more time consuming. After that, there should be some grass, right?

   For grass flocking I mixed extremely cheap green static grass and not so cheap scorched grass blend, to make it more interesting to look at. 

   And you can relax and enjoy playing with all the small details you can come up with:

   However, the most time consuming part here are, of course, trees. I don't want to make another tree anytime soon. I suppose I'll be saying that for painting infantry once I manage to do that. I started making trees before making these wood stands and continued to make them while making wood stands. I used green car wash sponge and later when I made trees I dipped them in diluted dark green water colours. This turned out to be more or less effective, so I will have to ad some finishing touches on them next time I have the opportunity.

This isn't all, I had to make more of them (13 more!)

Trees are drying

   Finally, stands were finished. In the mourning, when the trees are dry, Ill be assembling woods!

   See you!

                                            FoW begginings

It was good day to start FoW :)

   For everything there's the first time. In this case, those were Stugs from Open Fire set. Also first assembled were Pak40s :)

   Then, there was some trials and errors, experimenting as one could say:

   I had great idea of spraying them (after black overcoat ofcourse) with acrylic spray in this beige colours, and then adding camo pattern with green and brown, however, I didn't know that the spray was glossy and not even wash could fix it. so I had to start all over again and this time with brush. esult is on second photo. Kind of "middlestone", though I made it with GW colours myself.

   After that, there was time to learn painting camo:

   I was very pleased with the pattern while painting, only to find out that I got lost somevhere at the half of it and that it's not very historical. At all. And I didn't stop with experimenting, all of my three Stugs are different. Hey, it's late war, anything goes!

So this is the first one :)

And with the rest:

Battle scared

Command vehicle with air recognition flag

   Next project, Pak40s!

   

   See you!

Flames of War

In the meantime...

While this blog of mine seems deserted, things are cooking in the real life. Since 2013, i got myself into FoW. Something I wanted to do for a longer period of time. I bought Open Fire starter set, as it is great for beginning, and you can expand those two forces nicely for friendly games during cold winter months. Set is assembled and half painted. Why half painted? Because I wanted to play the game as soon as possible. And for that, more important thing for me than painted minis, are decent terrain pieces. So, yes, I'm multitasking. Painting minis and making terrain from scratch. I'll be posting progress here, so this blog should get alive again.

Finished Pak40 command