Well it has been an eventful couple of months, I dont even Know were to start...well i guess with the biggest of news i am going to be a father, though my lovely other half has a son and i think of him as my own i am going to be a father for the first time. we went today to the Doctors everything is healthy and wonderful and sometime at the start of next Summer i will have a brand new Baby boy.

 This past month also marked another great moment, as the pictures above show myself and my little guy Skylar had our first Wargame. For the first time i looked across the battle field at an adversary that i hope to have for years to come. After months of him looking at my Lord of the Rings source books and day dreaming away i thought that it was time that Sky start to learn some of the basics. I think that it went well we played with two small forces of about 20 figures plus a hero per side, him as the Uruk kai and me as the Dwarves. He didnt really use his tape measure but he sure did love throwing hand fulls of dice (don't we all!!!). The game ended in a uneasy tie (mom said it was time for bed) but it started what i hope to be a love for the hobby. I can remember being the same age looking across a table at my fathers armies, falling in love with the hobby forever.

 I also began a new project, After months of looking at the Warlord Games website I finally dove in and bought two Bolt Action Armies.

I decided First to start with the American airborne, its strange i was shopping for my armies and realized that i had never played of painted an army from my native country so i figured i would give it a go.



Let me Tell you these figures i felt to be beautiful, they paint up wonderfully and i decided to take my time to really make them look good. The second army that i picked up was SS Panzer Grenadiers while ive gotten those primed i haven't gotten anything painted but a test figure, i dont like the SS Figures as much though but ill go into that when i get them all done.

 I have been trying some new stuff with taking pictures but for the most part have gotten mixed results. i really need to buy the lights and set up and actual photo booth in my office, i spent so many hours on these figures and by the time they reach my Blog the photos dont do much justice to them at all. Any tips would be much Appreciated.




So i started out with Warlords Sherman m-3 model, It was an easy model to assemble and painted up very nicely. i added some sand bags out of Green Stuff. I had a bunch of weathering powders lying around that i really had not been able to use before so it was nice to finally break those out on the tracks and under carriage to give a nice war torn look.

 I base painted the entire model in Army Painter Army Green and them gave it a nice wash with some watered down Burnt Umber oil paint, it took about a day to dry but man it took little to ne effort to achieve a really nice result, weathering powders and decals were about it form there

 So far i have painted all of my command Two Squads of Rifleman, i have all of the Support Weapons (2 light Machine Guns 2 mortars 2 observers) waiting to be based, one gripe i did have was on one of my support teams the light machine gun was just gone off the figure, it looked like it had broken of prior to packaging because it was nowhere in the box or blisters, this led me to make a 30 cal out of green stuff so that i didnt wast the figure, hopefully in my next post i will have pictures of the whole army and not just one squad.

All in all i am Glad that I was able to get a little bit of painting in this month, with School winding down this week i hope to get my Germans finished up over Winter Break. If i dont get another post in before hand i hope all have a Merry Christmas and a safe end to the year.

The last month or so

Man what a busy month so far, with school starting and work my painting chair has been empty lately.  I have managed to finish a few projects. I started with finishing up the generals for my new 15mm Union division and I am very happy with then. I really didn't have the time to start anything new so I picked some of the figures that my dad painted back in the 70s and did some restore work on them. This us the 79th highlanders, u had to do considerable work on these, I started by washing the whole figures original paint job and then going pack through and repainting all of the chipped areas, this took much less time than I was planning and was surprised with the out come, I made some flags for the unit and based them up. W8th how little time this took and with the outcome of the figures I decided to do the same with two British cavalry regiments, I painted the 1st life guards and house hold guards when I was about the 17 and the have sat in a bag ever since, following the same procedure I used with highlanders I got these done in about a week. I couldn't find any guidons for these guys but its really no big deal. I really forgot how much I liked these old Revell figures,  there are not a lot of awesome sets of figures in this scale but I feel that this is one of them. Around the time that I originally painted these I also painted some Prussian dragoons from Hat, I think bringing these figures back to life will be my next project.

French lancers

So I had posted these last year on my workbench and never posted them finished. This regiment was painted after I read an article in wargames illustrated about pink uniforms, overall I think that they painted up quite nicely, the sculpts are OK but they painted up very easy and quick. The figures are from HAT I had to do a little conversion work to make command figures but well worth it. Didn't get anything painted this weekend but wanted to post something.

1st brigade 2nd division 1st corp

These figures I have had for a long time, these are all from freikorp 15s, I'm really not a fan of these figures, I thought that they are a little to small and the facial detail wasn't good at all. I also had my worries about them being to small with the old glory figures that I already have, but it all looks OK as long as they are all in different units. This is the 80th NY, 121stPA, 142ndPA, and 151st PA. I have the third brigade of the division on my desk currently and they will make up the second Vermont division. i have my vacation coming up this next week so i should be able to knock them and all the command stands out. The flags I made all from home, printed out from a great website I found from Denmark.

All in all I think that once painted and based these figures came out great, I wouldn't use them for popular regiments like bucktails or zuaves but for rank and file troops there not half bad.i didn't spend a whole lot of time on these figures because of the lack of detail in the figures they got the most basic of paint jobs. oh and as i am about to start my Vermont troops can anyone tell me what Vermont Regiments carried a white regimental flag an what ones carried the blue, i cant find anything online at all about the three regiments that i am painting, they are the 13th,14th and 16th Vermont.

Anyone out there????

Wow i cant believe that it is been well over a year since my last post, man how time can fly by when work calls.

i have been painting quite a bit over the past year and have finished up some cool stuff from a new brigade of 15mm acw to two whole Lord of the Rings armies.

I painted up this nice John Reynolds stand for my 1st corp.

My wonderful better half also found me some great display cabinets for my man cave, they are wonderful

Ruins

This is my first attempt at making some home made terrain, I went down to my local DIY store picked up some blue foam and mdf board and got to building. I cut the individual bricks so that I could get a real ruin look, so I could build them unevenly. I think they came out pretty neat.

28 North Gloucestershire infantry

 These were some really great 1/72 figures to paint up, i finished the regiment last week and it was a pleasure

 For the most part the soft plastic figures can be somewhat of a headache to paint at times but the italiari figures seem to be a little more rigid and holt the paint very well

 as soon as i get the lancers form my last post finished up i should be starting on a string of 5 regiments or so to buff up the british lines (no pun intended)

 War flag helped with the flags and i think they came out quite satisfactory