WW2 models:
Dagorlad´s cool Russian Ice Racing vehicles
Massive Vodoo:
Outstanding Assassin Show Reel with great building details.
Gaming Event in Berlin:
Frank Becker shows great gaming images. And so does The Lieutnant.
Impetus miniatures:
Rusus shows his wonderful medieval Peasant´s base.
Painting Impetus Japanese
Saxondog shows two beautiful Japanese Infantry bases
Painting stone walls:
Elladan describes how he paints Chathedral ruins in a beautiful way.
Fighting Uruk-hai:
Frank Becker his marveless Uruk-hai in green.
Magnetic Basing for Impetus:
Fin made pictures of his bases he made with my tipps for Impetus basing.
My second Impetus element for our club’s presentation for the next Tactica wargaming show is an element showing Johann, Herrmann, Henne and Siegfried von Holzhausen, all members of an mighty patrician family with their mercenaries. The family crest shows three roses on black. I designed the banners in order to look similar than the on the crest showed in the Dome of Frankfurt.
My plan was to show the patricians on their way to the battlefield. Therefore I depicted a country road and showed the group in loose marching order. In my imagination the only good fighter in the group is the infantrist with the huge falchion walking behind the rich citicens of Frankfurt. His job is to secure that falling off the horses will not end in instant death. As far as I can imagine a patrician was not as experiencend in fighting than their opponents, the knights of Kronberg.
Good to know that the family pevailed some more centuries and wasn´t extiguished during that battle. Adding some local spice to hobby project was again much fun and I will definetly go for more crests out of the region. However I am sure that the base can be used in any other conflict in that epoche like the 100 years war.
By chance my wife went on the castle hill in Budapest on the Honvéd nap, which can be translated as the day of the hungarian Defence Force. The event took place on the 21st of April. It was a short event with some military music, a small parade of the cavalry and infantry and some shots out of a replica cannon which is located in the narby Military Museum.
Stupid me – I did not join my wife to visit the castle hill and missed the event. But she did very well to take a lot of pictures with the camera of her sister. As an miniature painter it is very interesting to see real pictures of military of former times since we have developed a phantasy way of imagining soldiers which sometimes interferes with reality.
Especially horse eyes are an example. I often see painted horses which remind me of „My Little Pony“ Illustrations. I think it is very interesting to look at real animals and persons in order to paint more lifelike.
In our Club we are going to start an Mid War FoW Campaign very soon. In order to have some valid thread to russian Tanks I painted one Platoon of Hungarian Assault Pioneers, called Utász in hungarian. I was a little bit unlucky with the decision of converting some models, since Battlefront did a platoon with modeled pioneers, too.
However now I have my very own version, which is pretty much similar to the version of Battlefront. I decided to show the Pioneers by adding german mines, barbed wire and some craters. I modeled the mines with grey stuff and made a tiny mold of it. There are two versions of the mines, a bare mine and one in a wooden carriage box. I used the box to convert the pioneer truck.
Painting was this time a little bit quicker but more precise than I did with the first infantry platoon. Currently I think the amount of work should be chosen carefully. There are a lot of 15mm based miniature painters, who are very specialised and paint an incredible quality. Chevalier de la Terre had an excellent Blogpost on inspiring FoW painters: http://cracdeschevaliers.blogspot.com/2011/04/sources-of-inspiration.html, but I must admit, that personally I paint FoW miniatures less intensive, since there are too many other miniatures to have a detailed painter eye on it e.g. 28mm.
The birch ent is my next base for my Impetus Phantasticus Rohan army. I used the plastic set by Games Workshop, which is quite nice. However the paintjobs I have seen so far on this model looked very simple an I did not like the plastic leaves. Therefore I decided to paint a special tree, which I like very much – a birch.
As a tiny detail I used a squirrel from the „Kleintierset“ by Busch, on which Massive Voodoo wrote a very nice article. The model is very tiny, the effort the pro painter Roman aka jar put in is incredible.
Moreover I used MiniNatur Birch foliage, which is the best material for tree foliage I know. The ivy is by MiniNatur, too, but I bought it in a small set distributed by Army Painter.
The tree stump was modelled by me, I made a silicone casting mold and casted it in resin. Initially the model was made for our „Kaiserschlacht“ WW1 Club project.
The axe was taken from the Gripping Beast Hirdmen Plastic Sprue, images of the sprue can be found here. I bought this box in order to have variations for both Dunlendings and Rohirrim and to have options for battlefield debris and a camp model.
The rocks are casted plaster rocks made by Rusus. These are perfect for basing models since they are flat at the bottom. I bought a whole bunch of that rocks, since it makes cool looking bases in a very fast and light way.
I primed the model white, since it is very difficult to have a smoth white color when you prime in a different way. The stone painting was done in a simplified way of Elladans way to paint stone. He uses several steps with thinned airbrush colors like brown, black, green on light primed stone models. I started with white.
During the next game I will give the modified ent profile a chance. I am curious how monsters will work in Impetus, personally I do not like the way they are integrated in War of the Ring and Lord of the Ring Strategy Battle Game.
Currently we play Fow with Thomas, Jonas, Martin and me in the club. Finnish and Fallschirmjäger vs. TwoTankovy Companies.
We are just beginning to have a game in the club. Thomas is fighting my Hungarians. We agreed to play with our light tanks only. Thomas did attack with his heavily armed Recce on his right flank and payed a lot of blood on his tank assault on my tanks which took defensive positions behind concealing terrain.
When Thomas concentrated his fire on my Nimrod, the poor guys, who were in charge of tank defence rather than aircraft defence, he were lucky and knocked out one of two. This was quite important sice the remaining Nimrod dominated the centre.
I decided to both let the infantry and the artillery enter the game risking, that 5 tanks will not reinforce the game. Thomas was lucky when rolling for reinforcement. I did not manage to get my last platoon on the table. Thomas won using the sheer amount of russian tanks and infantry wisely whereas I could not stand the flood. I knocked out approximately 20 tanks, more than I had on the table. Eastern front is really a complete different feeling to the Africa and Italian theatre I played before.
In our club we started recently to play Impetus, which has the very nice effect, that you can design diorama bases with your miniatures. I really love to collect that kind of army, interesting to know is, that there are guys out there, who play DBA with that kind of bases as well.
However I do like the Impetus gameplay so far, since I do enjoy games, if they are surprising at some point. If I am a little bit more experienced in Impetus, I will talk more on that. I always wanted to have a medieval army, and I urgently needed to have an excuse to paint the Perry´s Agincourt to Orleans Range.
The conflict we want to depict is the „Kronberger Fehde“ a local conflict between the City of Frankfurt and the knights of Kronberg, which had quite an impact to the decline of might of the free german cities. If you follow that article you will find a painting of the battle which took place in spring 1389.
The miniatures I used wear gambesons, chainmail and partly plate armour, since the germans still used a lot chainmail during that time. Lemming told me, that the german chainmail was of such a quality that it was still used in contrast to the french and english armies of that time.
I definetly was inspired by Antipaters excellent Impetus Bases, which also are shown in the Extra Impetus book, he made me look at that system. He supported me with detailed information on the armour and clothing of that time and his literature list was an excellent starting point. Thanks again for that, Antipater!
I modified some of the miniatures, since the Perrys depicted some of them as suffering from dysentery and therefore leaving their trousers down the heel, always prepared to shit. That was not exactly my expectation for the force of Frankfurt, although they failed in the battle due to loss of morale, as far as I know. El Comandante therefore will show some of them with their trowsers down.
The rock was made by Rusus, it´s made from Ceramofix and is an phantastic material, since it looks like real stone, but is absolutely flat on the bottom. I used a very similar painting technic as told by Elladan using airbrush paints to ink down a white rock.
The banner was inspired by the medieval painting depicting the battle of Kronberg. It shows the Eagle of the Holy Roman Empire on red. I used an illustration from Wikipedia to create the banner. The printed paper was glued and afterwards I painted and highlighted the red. Since I want to use a lot of banners, I prefered to use the printed banner technic. For sure I will paint some Knights banners by hand, but that motive is very detailed.
Cloth based terrain boards:
Our gaming friends from Ulm made an excellent Gaming table based on cloth. They used technics which I already liked in this post.
Impetus in Middle Earth:
Finarfin liked our idea with playing LotR with impetus rules and started to paint this incredible nice army.
Impetus Army:
Hetairoi published pictures of his excellent Samurai cavalry.
Pirate scenery:
Dagorlad did some beautiful dangerous scenery for a pirate setting.
