Hussar Part 3 [Now with Words!]

This is the painting hussars part three and its just to bring you up to date with the finished models. When we left them the model was completely base coated, and block coated and I had mounted the figure on his horse, which I had previously painted.

We will go over painting horses at some future date, as it is still a mystery to me though I am improving.

So we have a nicely finished block painted Hussar ready to go on his horse and the first thing we need to do is use some quickshade on him. I used the dark tone, which is the black quick shade, and I don’t dip the figure as the instructions say instead I paint it. Painting the dip over the figure allows me a certain amount of control, and it means that you make sure that everything get covered nicely and don’t end up flicking quickshade down my garden, as the instructions suggest. It does make me feel in control; like I am painting it rather than just dipping it in a tin and forgetting it.

Once the figure has been painted with dip and let to dry I check it. Though I do look to check the quickshade is going in the right place, the one thing is that you don’t really know until its dry, where it will go. So you have to let it settle and go in all the creases.

Once they were dry (I let the it dry at least overnight and there is an argument to let it dry longer), and then it is time to matt the figure down. The initial appearance after quickshade is “oh no I have ruined my model”, you haven’t! Carry on with the process and the next stage of the process is to use the army painter matt spray to matt the figure again. Matt varnish can be very temperamental so do make sure to shake it very very well; a good five minutes or so. I have never had a problem over shaking, but I have ruined by under shaking, and then do a quick test spray on a piece of card. This is because if you are like me and have a number of spray cans on your shelf then its so easy to pick up the wrong can, and I have heard of so many people who have sprayed their beautiful models silver…

I spray from around 20cm away in pulses, not a blast, I’d rather go back and respray rather than have it fog and mist.

 

The one other thing I will do is take the matt white and go back over any white that had been too dirtied down such as the fur on pelise and tuft on front of the bearskins. Also on the sword paint the edges in a nice bright silver, which gives the sword a nice shiny edge.

 

He is then mounted on his horse, and based.

 

The basing technique I use is to first of all paint base in chocolate brown or Vallejo black brown, then cover in PVA and use Arcane Scenery Forest Scatter. This gives you earth colour to start with. Then I use Army Painter tufts, and I have a thing for the meadow tufts, and on some of the bases I have used some Highland ones too. And finally some static grass, and for this I used Expo

flowered field which is a nice bright green. The basing doesn’t take too long and gives a nice effect.

 

On a couple of the figures I decided to go back and paint the eyes. One of the beauties of quickshade is that it can bring our the features of the faces, unfortunately sometimes this makes them look rather zombie like, so I went back and painted the eyes. Which even at this scale is an art in itself, and you may notice on if my men has rather staring eyes…

 

They were taken to the table last week in Sharp practice, where they managed to flank very nicely. Unfortunately a French counter charge left them under the charge of the cannon that they were attempting to charge. So not the most glorious start to their career but I hope it will improve!

Good Friday Egg Up

What are you doing here? Those chocolate eggs aren’t going to eat themselves you know.

Any orders placed over the weekend will be sorted out as soon as everyone gets back into the office. Which should be Tuesday, baring any Easter egg overdoses. However, the postal services of both the UK and the bits of the world that celebrate Easter are not always up straight, so do keep this in mind when awaiting your goodies.

So back to the food people. And in the mean time here’s some hot cross guns

 

And for some awesome future history reading over your weekend may I recommend this from io9. Go forth eat chocolate, ruin the diet and come back next week soldier ready to work that army. Dismissed!

 

Friday Round Up

Hello hello hello

First this week we have Tamiya range extensions. Which is many many items, tanks galore and many of them post WWII, which is good news for those of you who like a bit of modern warfare…here are some of the new delights, but to get a better idea of how much the range has extended pop over to the Tamiya section on our eBay site.

For WW2 fans we have the new Operation Squad Reinforcements rules set in. This covers artillery, mortars and new squads. Steve has already tried a brief skirmish with the rules and really enjoyed them. He also thinks they’d work really nicely for 1/35 and 1/48 as well if you fancy something a little grander.

We have restocks on Airfix Liberators and Sabres, which have been reboxed and reissued. The Sabre saw action in North Korea, whilst the Liberator is a B24 bomber from the second world war. The sabre comes with the rather cute little dragon decal shown on the front. Yes yes I know he’s meant to be a scary Korean terrifying Dragon, but he’s sweet  and called ‘The Huff’, which makes him one step away from Puff the Magic Dragon. Only hopefully less stoned.

From Revell we have ummm well its another Leopard tank. They like their Leopards it has to be said.

From Warlord we have some Greeks, some Romans, some casualty markers, and a pike sturgeon…sorry I mean a pike and shot surgeon.

From Wargames Factory, yes those with the ummm boxes, we have some Germans. Really really nice Germans. Some very impressive and well made kits which have good mouldings. Just ignore the box art.

And finally the new issue of Wargames Illustrated is out, and it includes an article by one of Arcane’s friends the innovative Andy Callan and his microships for refighting Trafalgar, which we thoroughly recommend.

Till next week chaps. TTFN

 

The king is helpless

You chaps should know about this, and so I thoroughly expect some corrections. I will be disappointed if not.

War is an expensive business. All those guns, bombs and people don’t come cheap. Well unless you happen to have coerced and stolen, and even then you have a whole new bunch of people to kidnap and people don’t leave AK47s lying around everyday. Ideally you want to plan what you are doing in advance.
You might want to pop a few notes down :
“Monday-march a bit,
Tuesday-circle encampment,
Wednesday-storm encampment,
Thursday-shoot a bit more, probably bury Smith, always was slow,
Friday-win!
Saturday-celebrate,  get Smith to order beer and girls before death”

Of course this all relies on you knowing how to wage a war, and your enemy. If you’ve never gone to war before how do you know what to do? [This is where you chaps answer]

Luckily since ancient times there have been ways of training your officers that don’t require leaving the comfort of the mess hall.

Chess, Draughts… Go

Though the history of all three of these games has been disputed and confused over the years, they certainly have played some role in the strategy training even if unofficially. Chess and Weiqi (Go) both focus on defence and offence tactics, to protect your pieces and diminish the opposition.

When they weren’t off persuading Muslims into Christianity the Knights templar were stealing their games.

The Indian part of Chess’ history (for it has two parents) names it chaturanga, which in one translation means the four parts of the military. The four parts being cavalry, infantry, chariots and elephantry. The elephants disappointingly got replaced by castles in the modern version. The Persian parent side shatranj was used by the military to train noblemen before they took on command roles.

How your chess game might pan out today (photo by Alan Light)

German soldiers watch a game of chess (photo by Bundesarchiv)

 

Roman Sand Pits to German War Games

Something more familiar to many of you is the Roman approach to strategy and tactic with a sand box, and stones to represent your soldiers. Used to play out the possibilities that might face your legions as they advance on the yet to be Caesar-ed towns. Still used by some cadet training programmes in America (apparently) to introduce new recruits to the tactics they might need. You should be grateful to the Romans chaps, not only for their amazing roads, but they essentially are to thank for that thing that you dedicate so much to. The Germans in the 19th century of course expanded on these and chess to create military training games that mixed the two forms and are far closer to the sort of games you probably play. Though HG Wells characterised the German games that he based his rules on as dull, they were not designed to be a fun game, but a very definite training tool.

Helmuth Karl Bernhard von Moltke the man behind Kreigspiel

 

Graph Paper and Simulations

We’re going to skim over the 1950s games which were used by both the military and sold commercially. Not least because a good portion of you probably own one of these games. At a similar time a less game based strategic technique was also emerging. The start of the twentieth century was a great time for science, technology was moving on sufficiently to start making discoveries in the chemical, biological and physical science. And not to be left behind the maths dudes were finding proofs all over the place. The potential of  equations to plan war was not lost on the military, and they began developing wargames that resembled more a log table than a game table. This use of mathematics has largely led to the way that the military now trains soldiers, and how many of you might occupy yourself when not near the game table. Computers. Starting as an almost direct translation of the board games, computer simulations have become increasingly more sophisticated making use of AI and modelling.  No not that kind of modelling, I mean more like   m frac{d^2}{dt^2} x(t) = - nabla V x(t)   or P(t) = frac{1}{1 + e^{-t}}   kind of modelling.

The military’s interest in computers has naturally distilled down to increases in consumer technology, it is after all the military we can at least partly thank for the internet. However, more surprisingly it works in reverse too. Reputedly the US Navy make use of Flight Simulator.

This kind of war room drove the second world war (photo by Kaihsu Tai)

This kind the Cold war…(photo by Niels Elgaard Larsen)

And if we have a space war (lets hope not) this will presumably be the kind of planning room. Though I imagine the astronauts will look less jolly. 

 

The question is would you trust yourself to run a military operation? Or if you’ve done both does the game reflect real life?

If you’d like to read more on this here and here are quite useful sources.

 

 

Friday Round Up

Okay. Confession times folks. You may have noticed no post on Monday for which we apologise profusely. Bluntly technology has not been our friend this week. But we’re fighting it and hopefully winning.

Confession two. No new release. None. Nada. Lots of restocks. Lots and lots. but nothing new. So today we thought we would spotlight on a few of our favourite manufacturers.

Wargames Factory

Their box art can be a bit ummm unusual, but the quality of their products and the expanse of their range cannot be disputed. You want ancient Japan…they’ve got them, you want Amazons…they’ve got them. Modern wars, ancient wars and all kinds of relatively under-done areas. AND if you have a really specific army that you are looking for, that nobody makes, you can even vote for them to make them here. They American and Chinese in origin with a rather colourful history, but we really like their models.

 

Hobby Boss

Also from China come HobbyBoss. Unless you read Han their website can be a bit perplexing. Even in English. What isn’t perplexing is how much of a bargain they are. Really. Seriously. They are as cheap as the proverbial chips, but they are, and I risk sounding like Del Boy here, top quality. They really are beautiful things. Lovely moulding, lots of detail. We love them.

 

Zvedza

From the other East this time comes Zvedza. The moral of today’s post seems to be communism and post communism leads to great model making. They’ve been around since 1989 and make both model kits and board games. They make the moulds, cast and essentially follow the whole production process through from scratch to ensure that they can control the whole process through from the beginning to the end. For fans of Russian tanks Zvedza, or star as their buddies like to call them, are absolutely fabulous with their precision and detail. They also do some beautiful little scenery pieces for World War II scenes.

Hopefully next week we will have some new items to tell you about, but until then have a good weekend.

Hussar…part 2

Welcome back to part two of painting my Perry hussars. As you will recall we are painting six perry hussars and have so far applied the first three colours.


The next colour I used was Dark Prussian Blue (899) to paint the pelise and the dolman. The pelise is the short jacket worn over the Hussars’ shoulders, and the dolman is the tight fitting jacket that they wore underneath with all the equipment strapped around them.
When it comes to the blue you are going to paint over lace and I don’t think that’s a problem, because when you come to paint the white lace you’ll need the blue there to show through.
The next colour I came to paint is Iraqi Sand (819), which I have used on their haversacks, which are shown in the reference pictures as an off white colour.
Having painted the haversacks, the next job was to paint the water bottles, which are a light blue. I mixed this colour myself, as I didn’t have anything suitable on my workbench.

The next issue was the colour of the lining on the pelise, which according to the Perry’s instruction sheet should be red, but in my other sources… Mont Saint Jean shows no colour; Osprey  show the pelise lining in light blue; and in CE Franklins’s British Napoleonic Uniforms, there are some very clear pictures and a table both of which are contradictory!  The table  in the book says light blue on the officers pelisse and on the troopers, white. There is a picture of an officer and the pelisse lining is light blue, but the picture of the trooper shows it as light blue too…and then I looked in the general introduction section of the book and there’s a picture of the pelise with light blue lining…so I am confused! I decided that the light blue lining looked better than Red and so went with this. The point of all this is to illustrate the discrepancies that you find when researching uniforms. I suspect that all of the lining colours are correct and it depended on the  squadron but who really knows… I took prussian blue and mixed with white, to get a nice shade of light blue and got on with the painting!

Next up was to paint the overalls a dark grey (994), the leather water bottle belt (871), steel(864) for the sword holder(?) and stirrups and red line on the overalls(947).  And so onto the most complex job – the white fur & lace!

I’ve put the white lace on as you can see in the picture above, the minute you put the white paint on the figure starts to come alive. As I am painting this colour I will often touch up the other colours, and I decided when I got to this stage I would carry on and finish the figure. So I have also done the brass on the sword hilt, the various buckles and on the sword holder- I must find out what that’s called [ed: scabbard?], and  the chinstrap. I have also painted his mustache, all my troopers will have chocolate brown mustaches…
As you can see the addition of the white has brought him together, but there are two colours missing; the yellow (953) for the cord on the hat, and the blue bag on the hat needs to be a strong bright blue (844), and I wanted it to be a different blue to the lining of the pelise.
I’ve used steel on the sword and I will paint over that with silver, and I will just brush up other colours before we use the quick shade.

So we’re nearly finished. In part three I’ll show you the finished models and discuss how I use the quickshade and how I finished basing the models.

Hussar! (Part 1)

Long term readers of our blog will know that I am gradually building a Napoleonic army, and with the release of the Perry’s  British Napoleonic Hussars set, I have the opportunity to add some cavalry to my army, and of course a chance to extend my painting experience. The following article is a step by step guide to how I paint these figures.


I have already assembled the Hussars, apart from the officer and trumpeter, which I will leave  for the time being. I just wanted to get on and get the 12 troopers done, which will allow me to field them in our club Sharp practice games. 

As with all  Perry figures, they are beautifully moulded, although there were a couple of challenges: the horses did not quite go together as neatly as I would have liked and also on the hussars themselves,  the fur caps had a bit of a sink hole from the moulding process,  which I had to fill.

This gives me the opportunity to talk about the fillers that we carry at Arcane Scenery. Now, most people reach for the green stuff  to fill blemishes,  but for filling plastic models, a much better solution is to use  Squadron White Putty. The beauty of this product is that its based on a plastic solvent, so it bonds very well to the plastic and it dries really quickly and smoothly, so you can get on with your model without having to wait for green stuff to set.
Now other than that, the moulding is very, very good and the actual cast lines in the figures are very light,  they need the merest of scrapes with a file or a scalpel. So  just another quick plug… we’ve recently started stocking Albion Alloys’ Flexible Files, which I suppose you could say look like glorified nail files, but they do the job brilliantly. By all means carry on using the wife’s or girl friends nail files, if you can get away with it, but I have found the flexible file to be much better.

With prep done, I continued by assembling the horses , undercoating and painting them, and then setting them aside whlst I built the Hussar riders. I’m not going to cover painting the horses in this article – painting horses will get it’s very own section!

So this means that I’ve chosen to paint the horses and riders separately, and thats not to everybody’s taste – some modellers say that the best way to deal with them is to glue the rider onto the horse and paint them as one, but I thought  that given the Hussars are quite complicated it would be better to paint them separately.

Now on with the painting…I’ve undercoated them with Army Painter grey spray paint. The hussars are difficult to handle, as they have no bases. To make this easier I have some plastic straws, that were holders for balloons  and the riders are blu-tacked to the straw  at the groin (and that doesn’t really matter because we want that clear to attach to the horse). So just to show you how that looks on my workbench we have them all lined up…

[Steve likes to live life at an angle…]

 

First 3 lots of paint on the figure as you can see from the photograph (apologies for quality I am using a phone camera)

I always start my figures with flesh, I think if you start painting the face and hands, it gives the figure some personality and its pretty clear where the colour goes (955 Vallejo). The next is Vallejo 950 black, for the boots and satchel and cartridge case, and again its a nice easy paint to use, and as you start to work on your figure you get an idea of whats to come and the sequence in which you will paint the figure. The next colour is for the hat, which is 822 German Camouflage Black Brown. The interesting thing is I am using several references,  Mont Saint Jean which is a superb website, and gives the colours for all of the troops uniforms at Waterloo . I have also got the Perry’s colour painting sheet, which is supplied with the set (and I applaud the Perry’s for doing so- it’s a rarity in the business), it shows all of the Hussar regiments in great detail;  and the final reference is from an Osprey book, Wellingtons Light Cavalry, which shows the regiment I have selected, the 18th Hussars in the 1815 period. All the pictures show the hat in a very different colour. The Osprey book: black, Mont saint Jean: a light brown (which may be due to the screen limits) and the Perry’s: a dark brown. Since two out of three are brown I am using Vallejo Camouflage Black Brown(822) which gives me the opportunity  to bring out the texture on the fur by dry brushing with a lighter brown later on.

So three colours on and its taken me about an hour, and as usual I paint six figures at a time, which means I change colours every twenty minutes or so.

The next part of the figure to paint was the Pelisse, (the slung jacket) and the dolman, (the tight fitting under jacket) and I’ve used Vallejo 899 Dark Prussian Blue.  But for now it’s time for a break…….

[Join Steve after his coffee for more painting]

Napoleonic Farmstead by Pete Harris

We’re always pleased to hear of other modellers projects, this post comes from modeller Pete Harris…

If like me, you are interested in the Napoleonic period, and specifically Waterloo, you will know the significance of La Haye Sainte and Hugomont. These buildings were pivotal during the battle and I was keen to have something similar for my war gaming table. Obviously, it’s possible to buy the exact replicas, but there are two drawbacks :

  • They are relatively expensive.
  • They take up a lot of space.

So I decided to produce something that had a similar look to La Haye Sainte, but with a smaller footprint. I started with the main farmhouse building and for this I purchased the Hugomont Farmhouse from Hovels, together with their 20mm wall sections and pillars. I chose 20mm sections instead of 25/28mm because the height is just right for a firing line to stand behind without a need for a firing step.

The rest of the farmstead is scratch built using an old Hornby station building, plasticard, Wills tiled roof sheets and Milliput. The base is two pieces of thin hardboard,  laminated together and then covered with PVA  and sprinkled with sand. All the structures were base coated in coffee coloured acrylic paint and then dry brushed in various shades to achieve the finished effect.

During construction I noticed the Hovel’s building, although stated as 25/28mm scale, had small doorways. So I cut out the stone framework to enlarge them and then used  Milliput around the new openings to replace the stonework. The doors and gateway were made from strips of balsa, and green scatter was added around the base of the walls and buildings. Finally, I added some Renedra barrels and sacks made from Milliput under the lean to shed.

If you’d like to share your work with us, then leave us a comment or drop an email to arcanescenery@gmail.com. 

Tomb Stalker

Too much of a good thing can get to you and after weeks and weeks of Napoleonics, Steve decided he needed a break. Having for many years been a devoted necron fan, he still had plenty of necron stuff around the house, so decided to break out and complete the Tomb Stalker…

I started with the base and had decided I wanted the stalker clambering over a tank and so went to my bits box, and found an old Leman Russ model that I bought from eBay sometime ago. To make it fit to the base I chopped it in half very roughly, using a junior hacksaw and sprue cutters, and then attached it to the base with polystyrene glue. To hide the joins and to provide some groundwork I used standard milliput to cover the base, and blend in the tank hull. At this point I also added a few skulls and bones from the bits box to represent the remains of the crew.

I then coated the base in PVA and covered it in sand, and set it aside to dry. The next stage was to assemble the tomb stalker. The instructions supplied are a bit sparse, so it is important to take your time and make sure you know the difference between the various legs, antennae and other appendages. As the model is in resin a certain amount of cleaning up was necessary, but there was nothing too demanding as the moulding was very good.

I first assembled the model using bluetac so that I could pose it over the tank, and then piece by piece superglued it together, checking the positioning as I went. When I had completed the Tomb stalker I added some more damage to the tank to simulate where the Stalker’s claws had damaged the tank’s armour, this was done by heating a scalpel blade and chopping into the plastic. Once everything was assembled it was onto painting. The groundwork on the base was simple enough, in brown, and then highlighted with Iraq Sand from Vallejo.

The tank was painted in Desert Yellow, and then dirtied down with washes of Devlan Mud and then dry brushed with Desert Yellow/White mix. I also used the stipple brush technique to add scratches using boltgun metal and black. There’s no scientific method to this just keep going until you are happy with the result. I then picked out a few details on the tank, the tracks being in gun metal and the gun on sponson in red. A final light wash of Devlan Mud tied everything together.

The Tomb Stalker was sprayed with gun metal and then silver. I then gave it a wash of black ink, followed by a dry brush with Mithril Silver. Again it is sometimes necessary to repeat this process until you are happy with the effect. I then picked out the eyes, and the detail on the guns with a bright green. The antennae were picked out in gold.

 

The final stage was to glue the green rods into the guns.

Et voila a Tomb Stalker.

Friday Round Up

Well howdy there boys and girls…this week’s round up is very make and do focussed, but we have some models and rules first of all…

We have in stock now the Crusader Rules which cover 1740-1900, Napoleonic period and the American Civil war, with a supplement available for the American period.

New from Airfix the 1:72 Aichi D3a1 aeroplane, which is probably most well known for Pearl Harbour, and is a rather stumpy nosed looking little aeroplane…I have to say (sorry beloved American readers) it is a kind of cute little thing…also we have a lovely T34/85 because we can never have too many Russian tanks.

From our favourite Italians, Italeri we have a 1:72 scale station, which is perfect for World War 2 European skirmishes…your table will be massively improved by the inclusion of the greatest piece of technology ever, the train…more on that in a paragraph or two…

In Steve’s ever growing desire to stock every kind of glue ever we now have a growing range of Deluxe products which include some incredibly specialist items such as the rust kit…

On our webshop you can now find our range of resin bases in all kinds from cracked ground and gravestones, to a pile of skulls…should you wish to stand on a pile of skulls.

More prosaically from Expo we can now offer the poly cutter with its battery…which is for cutting polystyrene not parrots. We do also sell the battery and replacement wires if you already have the cutter.

Also, we have catalogues…you can buy the Pocketbond catalogue from the store now (ignore that it’s the old picture, we will beat Rob soundly for not updating it)…but we also have the Expo catalogue…which you can have for free…if you email the bossman at steve@arcanesceneryandmodels.co.uk and title your email “I would really like a free Expo catalogue pretty please”…and if y’all want to mention how the webfairy needs supplying with more (lactose free) chocolate I shan’t object.

I mentioned the glory of trains…and glorious all train things are and our final new item this week celebrates one of the things that railway modellers do with finesse. Scenery. Now here in the office, we have something of a divide. Rob, master of straight talking, doesn’t see what the point of the time railway modellers spend on scenery because “THEY DON’T LET YOU TOUCH IT!” (and yes he really does yell)…I, unsurprisingly as a woman who would rather like a train set in every room of her house, am a big fan of a fine model railway…and the master of all things Arcane sits somewhere between the two. What we now have, so you can see where you fall on the spectrum, is  a book Creating Realistic Landscapes …it shows how railway folk make spectacularly realistic landscapes, and whilst you may feel that some of it will be a lot of work that is going to get mussed up when playing, there are, we’re sure, tips and tricks you might want to incorporate. Plus if at anytime you wanted to make a diorama or something for display rather than play there’s plenty of information in here for you.

Till next week folks.

Another putty history post

Yes folks it is indeed another history post that isn’t about a specific thing. We mentioned last week that history lurks all around us, so we thought we’d mention a few things that we are hoping to cover…

In Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire…POWs, Civil War (the most inappropriate description of war ever “civil”), bunkers, shot towers, aeroplanes…

Further afield locally…battlefields

From our own histories…a lot of sinking ships (it is probably wise never to get on a boat with any of us just in case luck is hereditary)

(PS-apologies folks for the delay in the post, web fairy had exams)

Friday Update…..or not

It’s that dreaded time of the year. Just about got over the numerous bank holidays, the feasting and drinking are a distant memory, (although everytime I try to do up my belt I’m reminded as to how many minced pies I ate), and it’s back to work with the end of the month and next pay day looking a very long way a way….

Nevermind though! There’s plenty of models kits and soldiers to make and paint and if the weather’s a bit miserable it’s all the more reason to stay indoors with a nice cup of tea and get painting! If moneys a bit tight, now’s the time to dig out those models you’ve been meaning to make and get busy. As for New Years resolutions, well dont worry about what you need to give up – how about planning your next army or kit to make. If you are looking for inspiration, fear not, whilst the new releases are thin on the ground this week I can promise you that there is a whole host of new goodies on the way. 

Watch out for some great new kits from HobbyBoss, Italeri and Tamiya as well as releases from Warlord (do they ever sleep?) and yet more goodies from Northstar. And we will keep adding to our ranges to give you ever more choice.

If you haven’t already seen them, check out the new range of abrasives & glue dispensers that we now have from Albion. I particularly recommend the sanding sticks if you are building plastic models.

So get busy with the paint & glue and get modelling while you can. It will be Summer before you know it and you’ll be getting dragged off to mow the lawn and cremate meat on the barbeque…….

In case you’re wondering, Lotte is away on holiday, sitting her exams….which means she will have a degree soon and it will be official that she is the brightest spark in the office.