I've been mulling over what to do with the base for the Dragon for a little while now. I've finally got an idea in my head that will help make the green pop without going overblown; something quite wintery and cold.
This, however, means snow effects which I've never really had a go at before. As an added advantage I've been thinking about some winter Stalingrad stuff for a while so if I can figure out a way to make it look good, this could be another technique that will pay off for me.
I had a browse around and found some nice tutorials, one including a mix which sounded like it would work. But then I saw GW had released this:
Now, I'm not going to lie; I'm lazy and my time is precious to me. This is why, even though I can more or less strip and rebuild a motorcycle engine, I will still take my bike to a garage. I'd rather spend the money and save the time than vice versa. So it is with this; in my younger days I would spend days making a piece of terrain - now I'll just buy it and leave more time for my kids or work or painting and gaming. So if GW had something which seemed to look very similar to the mix I'd found - apart from glitter which I'll come to in a moment - I'm quite happy to drop a fiver to try it out.
The Valhallan Blizzard (hereafter referred to as snow because I refuse to indulge GW's increasing eccentric naming conventions) is best applied I would say with a claw smoother. A stiff brush would also work, I think, but nothing soft or too hard.
As you can see, it has a pleasingly crystalline texture and a bit of white paint in the mix if I'm any judge. It gives a crisp white finish which lacks only the glitter of real snow. I applied a coat of gloss brish on varnish which seems to have helped with that but I'm tempted to possibly mix a bit of cheap glittery nail varnish in to the next lot I try.
Overall, a handy little addition to the box of tricks and - while not cheap at £4.50 a pop - is certainly good enough for a few bases. I reckon you could do a decent sized force - say 100 figures or so - from one pot if you were after a thawed look, probably 50 if you were going for deep winter.
I shall have a go at the Dragon base this week so we can see if I'm right.
With the immortal words of Hugo Dyson, fellow Inkling, upon hearing Tolkien read a section from the Lord of the Rings in our ears, let us look at my latest paint job.
Legolas Greenleaf is another of the early sculpts from GW and he is lovely. A fabulous likeness of Mr Bloom.
Colour wise I used a reference shot from the film:
Base colours were easy to mix using, oddly enough, a very WW2 palette; olive drab, feldgrey and khaki were the main shades.
Hair was mixed from yellow and bone, highlighting up to yellow. I felt that was more fitting than the almost white of the films at 28mm scale.
The final touch was stringing the bow. Not something I've ever done before but ridiculously easy after rigging the Napoleonic ships. This is certainly something I'll start doing with all archers from now on.
And finally just the base. I might add some leaves when I get some yellow rather than brown ones made.
I don't really feel the urge to paint the hobbits; so I might get around to Boromir and Gimli to complete my truncated Fellowship.
What I really want to do is a Nazgul on Fellbeast but I can't really justify the cost. If I see a cheap one, though...
Edited to cite the correct Inkling! In the first version I'd wrongly attributed it to Lewis.
Heresy Miniatures call him the Netherlord but let's not kid outselves: he's the Big Guy, the Great Adversary, Old Nick himself.
This was a long one. Bought, built and pinned just before the birth of my eldest, he was the first miniature I ever tried an airbrush on for the Base coat. He then got packed away with all the other stuff while life got taken over with work, a child, buying a family home and a Masters.
But I cracked him out a couple of months ago and I've been chipping away at details and layers on and off between other projects since the summer.
And now he's done.
The only question is, where do I store him? He's a massive piece of lead!
"We see our role as essentially defensive in nature. While our armies are advancing so fast and everyone's knocking themselves out to be heroes, we are holding ourselves in reserve in case the Krauts mount a counteroffensive which threatens Paris... or maybe even New York. Then we can move in and stop them. But for 1.6 million dollars, we could become heroes for three days."
Kelly's Heroes is one of the greatest war movies ever made. I mean, yes, it's not what you would call totally accurate in every little historical detail but my god, it's a fabulous picture.
One of the things that makes the biggest impact on you is, of course, Donald Sutherland's peerless performance as Sgt. Oddball. Converting a Sherman into Oddball's ride has long been on my 'to do' list but when I noticed that Warlord had made a kit... well, it was a no brainer.
Here's a warning ahead of time; I put a lot of effort into this so you're going to have to deal with a lot - and I mean a lot - of pictures.
The kit itself is resin with a few lead additions; pretty easy to slap together. Clean up and assembly took about an hour.
Crew wise, I decided to leave out the Driver and just do Oddball and Moriarty. I'll probably add The Turk later on.
Because it's a biggish piece of kit, I decided to crack out the airbrush. I decided early on to treat this as a model kit rather than a miniature so I used all the preshading techniques I've talked about before.
I airbrushed it Olive Drab and then mixed in some green ochre to spray a little highlight.
And then shot a final coat of Olive Drab over the whole thing to bring it back to the natural colour leaving the highlights inteacT
And then a little brown to start on the weathering of the tracks.
This gives us a final Sherman that looks like this which is damn near perfect for ww2.
The only problem is, Oddball's tank looks nothing like this. I don't know if it's because the tank belonged to the Yugoslav army or if the production team simply painted it wrong or what, but in the film Oddball's ride is green. Really, really green:
Now, Ok, some of that will be down to the processing of the film stock. It's been quite heavy on the bleach and the blues are strong - look at Sutherland's eyes - but still: you cannot deny that Oddball's tank is not Olive Drab; it is green.
So, do I keep it historically accurate or go screen accurate? I asked this question on the Bolt Action facebook group and the best answer I got was: "What would Oddball do?"
So I ate some cheese, dranks some wine, caught a few rays... and painted that bad boy green.
This was done with simply drybrushes of an intermediate green/green ochre mix with increasing amounts of green ochre. The base colour of Olive Drab is still there and the highlighting already being done meant this was more about just laying down some pigment over the top.
I picked out all the baggage - which required a lot of stop-starting of bits of the film and looking on the interweb for stills - and painted the posters on the side.
So here she is with Oddball and Moriarty on board awaiting decals and weathering.
And the quick daylight colour test:
A quick shot of Klear and then decals. You can't really see here but once the decals were on I then had a good scrape at them with a scalpel to wear them off a bit.
And then I hit it with some ground up pastels for dust and dirt and various weathering:
And finally I added some mud:
And here she is with Oddball and Moriarity in situ. I'll get some proper final shots next weekend when I have some light.
As a final thought I really enjoyed this. I really must consider doing some more World War 2 stuff, either in 15mm or 28mm. I have been looking at the new Bolt Action starter set with interest recently...
