Wednesday 4 November 2015

Bolt Action progress.

In an attempt to give the 'Bolt Action' side project a bit of a push I decided to paint the next six German Grenadiers. I had mentioned previously how difficult I had found the process of sticking these figures together, really not how I would choose to spend my hobby time, but once done they look OK. However, the US infantry were a nightmare to put together, unlike the German sprues these even have individual arms that require the separate weapons to be glued on, and getting everything to line up correctly really tested my patience! Not just small and fiddly, but getting the guns to sit in the hands correctly seems almost impossible to me. Even ammo pouches and belts etc need to be stuck on to the US troops, and you have to ensure it's the correct belt for the weapon, so for example if you give a guy a Browning Automatic Rifle then you also have to stick on the BAR ammo pouches etc. Of course individual weapons are identified in Bolt Action so you need to build balanced squads.

Having finally managed to get the first 10 US troops stuck together it left little enthusiasm to paint the damn things! However, I found a bottle of US Olive Drab surface primer so thought I would try a faster approach to painting this batch, more to follow on that.

My 28mm StuG is now also under construction, and what a fine model it is going to be, I'm holding off until I get my new airbrush later this month, and once I'm confident with it I'll paint both the StuG and the half track I have here. It will prove very useful for camo patterns.

Talking of camo, I invested in the correct shades for the splinter pattern (Splittermuster), and must say that it is far easier than trying to match these shades. I'll be using these on my planned platoon of 15mm Flames of War veteran panzergrenadiers, many of whom are wearing the camo Zeltbahn. These will be all Peter Pig figures and I again decided to try a different approach my undercoating in German Field Grey. This will be followed with a 'Magic wash' and then detail painted as normal.

15mm Peter Pig figures.

28mm Bolt Action figures.

These almost went in the bin on more than one occasion, but at least that's half of them put together finally! 

StuG III under construction, I intend to give this the full treatment including camo netting and foliage etc in due course. I can't get out of my mind the camp German officer character from 'Allo, Allo' and his "little tank" when I look at this.


BA order dice showing the six order options available.

Pinned markers, pinning plays a major role in BA.

Excellent set of paints by vallejo.

6 comments:

  1. All looking very nicely done. Keep it up.

    Am with you though - my Winter Soviets have sat unloved after I stuck together my 1st squad whereupon I found (Like your yanks) that almost all the weapons were separate to their arms! Fiddly models really crush one's hobbying spirit.

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    1. Cheers Dai,

      Those Soviet packs look fantastic in the pics on eBay, I know I'll do it someday. Just can't understand why they are making such hard work of these figures, it's putting a lot of people off I know that. I'll keep going, but it's a slog, I hope the game will reward me though :)

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  2. Hi Lee - what do you think about using 20mm plastics instead of 28mm? No assembly, just a thought!

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    1. Hi Ian, had I known just how much work the 28mm figures would involve I would have gone for 20mm! 'Bolt Action' like 'Flames of War' has been a huge international marketing and sales success for the company clearly, nothing wrong with that, but everything seems so expensive, the plastics cost around £1 per figure and I don't think they are anything special in terms of detail etc. I might yet still change scales.

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  3. Hang in there Lee. They are coming up champion.

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    1. I'm hanging on by the teeth,:) I'm not enjoying the process of putting them together OR painting them very much, but soon as I put the first finished models on the terrain yesterday it was ......YES, this is what I want to do, Bolt Action, just need to keep going, and it's good for me to have something on the go that demands my close attention :)

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