Re-done Brits

I decided to flock my Brits to the Italian standard and am pleased with the results. Also changed here: the carrier unit is based, as per infantry and guns, on the 25mmx17mm "low visibility" base.

8th Hussars. Yes, I know that's a Daimler and not a Humber

That will be fixed with my next order from PicoArmor.

1st and 5th RTR, plus 7th Brigade HQ

2nd Scotts Guards and 7th Brigade HQ

The entire 7th Brigade, 7th Armored Division, ready for battle!

Mighty Eyeties: 132nd Ariete Armored Division, 1941-42

I've finally finished the Ariete for Blitzkrieg Commander. A few changes were made from my plans as detailed in an earlier post. First of all, I've not yet provided Ariete with its engineer or anti-aircraft contingent (a detachment of German 88s are with the division in the meantime). We'll also have to wait until O8 produces some Italian 100mm artillery pieces and gets them off to Picoarmor before I can finish the artillery regiment.

132nd Italian Armored Division, 1941. Each stand represents a company.

Basically, everything's worked out fine. Ariete, as modled here, has two infantry battalions, three M13/40 battalions, an artillery regiment and supporting arms. I should point out that each unit represents roughly a company of 100-200 soldiers, 10-15 tanks, or 8-12 guns. Often, however, there isn't a precise map-over between units. The artillery regiment, for example, had 6 batteries of 4 75mm canons, here represented by 3 game pieces and a Forward Artillery observer. Also, my goal isn't to create a precise copy of the Ariete at any point in time, but a general overview of its capacities - sort of a "universe right next door" version of the Ariete. The division as pictured above thus has a battalion of L3 tankettes, even though these never shared the battlefield with the M13/40s, as far as I know.

The L3s are another issue. Since beginning this project, BKCII has arrived and I've done some further thinking about basing and decided that I will use 25mm x 17mm stands for all low visibility units (basically infantry, guns and support weapons) and 25mm x 25mm stands for everything else. Strictly speaking, then, the L3s should be mounted on the smaller stands and one could argue that the 88mm AAA canons should be mounted on larger stands.

I decided to keep them as-is, however. In the first place, the Italians used - or tried to use - L3 tankettes as if they were by-God tanks. Making them low visibility, in my opinion, would encourage an anti-historic use of them as weak ambushing units. As for the 88mm cannons, big they may well be, but the history of the Desert War is full of examples of British armor getting severely pwned by 88s operating under cover.

Here are some pictures of the painting process. Again, I followed the same recipe as before: base coat of sand, sepia wash, successive dry brushes of lighter sand colors and a final fake drybrushing of Valejo Light Sand, followed by detailing. Also, color flashes are again exageratedly big to help the miniatures stand out:

Flocking the bases for this one was difficult. As readers of this blog know, I flock bases in a different color from the figure's paint job because otherwise 3mm figures blend in too handily with the base. So far, I've been using dark bases set against light paint jobs. This has caused difficulties, however, when it comes to blending into my terrain backdrop: the bases are simply too dark.

This time I tried another tactic. I glued dark flocking near the figures and then added another coat of light yellow flocking around the base's edges. Here and there I laid down some dark green patches, then glued coarse light green flock over those. I'm pretty pleased with the result: the figures still stand out, but the base blends better into the terrain sheet.

Here are some pictures of the final units:

Infantry battalion of the 8th Bersaglieri Regiment

Headquarters of 8th Bersaglieri Regiment and supporting units

Headquarters of 8th Bersaglieri Regiment

Armored Regiment

VIIIth and XIth Armored Battalions

VIIIth Armored Battalion and Armored Regiment HQ

Ariete, Awreety, Awrighty! The Italian 132nd Armored Division in 1/600

Go Rams!

Figuring out how to portray the 132nd Ariete Armored Divisions takes some thought. Though the unit was one of the major combat units in the Axis forces in Africa, it's relatively difficult to find clear order of battle information for it.

It's universally agreed that the Division's two major front-line combat units were the 32nd Tank Regiment and the 8th Bersaglieri Regiment, but it's somewhat harder to discover what was the exact composition of these units at any given time. Did the 32nd have three battalions or four? As for the 8th Bersaglieri, it seems to have started the campaign with two motorized and one motorcycle battalions and then moved to two motorized and one weapons battalion. Some sources have the regiment at 3 motorized infantry battalions, however.

For our purposes, the Ariete will have the following company-sized units:

2 HQ

1 FOA

9 M13/40 companies

3 L3/38 companies

2 AB41 recon troops

1 Motorcycle recon company

6 Infantry companies

2 Machinegun companies

1 Mortar company

4 47mm Anti-Tank Gun batteries

3 75mm Artillery batteries

2 Engineer companies

It will also have 2 German 88mm ATG/AAA batteries attached. I wish O8 would release the Italian 90mm AAA guns, but for now, these will do.

Basing is underway as I right this.

5th Panzer Regiment, DAK

Planning this unit was fairly simple as there are excellent and acessable OoB sources for the 5th Panzer Regiment on-line. Again, I'm following my "universe slightlty to the left of us" philosophy and building an historic-ish 5th PzRgt rather than a perfect snapshot of the unit. The original mix of tanks is set for the Crusader-Gazala Battles period and includes 2 companies of Pz Mk II, 4 companies of Pz Mk III short 50s, 2 companies of PZ Mk IV short 75s, a Headquarters unit (on the circular base) and a composite recon company (on the house-shaped base).

O8 Pz IV shorts come with two different command tanks (both have the commander un-buttoned, one sitting and one standing in his turret) and they make nifty 1939-1942 command tanks. I added a MkII on the HQ's base as well. The recon unit gets one Pz Mk II and two motorcycle-sidecar combos.

The process for building this unit was much the same as that used for the British. First off, bases were spackled with Vallejo Sandy Paste, then the tanks were glued down and a base coat of Orange Ochre acrylic paint was applied. Once this was dry, Skin wash was applied over everything, followed by Sienna wash near the tanks. At this point, I was going for a light-colored tank on a dark-colored base.

The tanks and bases were then drybrushed with Sand, Highlight Afrika Korps and finally Dark Flesh. Note the needle in the picture: it's there to pluck out bruch hairs which detach during drybrushing. At this scale, they are very noticeable.

Finally, I pin-pointed highlights with Higlight Afrika Korps. The purpose of this is to smooth out the drybrushing and make the figure look less scratchy. You can see the effect in the above photo as the recon and command stands there have already been through the process while the combat companies haven't. Here's a picture of the whole regiment after the treatment was completed:

Now on to detailing. As was the case with the Brits, I'll paint black under gun barrels and sienna wash any bare or light spots on the treads. Tank commanders are painted black, highlighted grey and given a Dark Flech face. I then add in some red and white highlights here and there. Again, this scale is too small to see numbers and national markings. The bits of red and white, however, really make the models jump out and so are worth adding, even if they are too big for history. After detailing, I varnished the models with flat varnish.

Base flocking turned out to be difficult for this unit. As I've mentioned before, my philosophy is to base darker or lighter than the model, in order to make the miniature stand out. As you can see, above, this didn't work well in this case.

What I finally decided to do was a three part flocking method.

About 70% of the base gets covered in fine yellow flock, with 20-25% (generally the areas closest to the tanks) covered in fine dark brown flock. Another 5-10% of the base is left unflocked. Finally, bits of green flock are added here and there. The result is as follows:

Photo of two regiments in the palm of my hand

A regiment from the 4th Armored Brigade and one fromthe 22nd Armored Brigade in the palm of my hand.

This should give readers some notion of the... er... compact nature of 1/600 scale figures.

Note that the 22nd Brigade stands still need to be flocked.

Painting the British 4th Brigade (three of three)

Final touches
As I mentioned in the last post, I decided to put sangars around the artillery and machineguns. These are built up with Vallejo Pumice and allowed to dry. They are then painted with Burnt Umber and dry brushed with Mahogany.

Some of the painting is also touched up - particularly a few of the flashes and some treads. More Seinna wash is applied under the tanks to give the effect of shadows at high noon. The Armored Car company's base edge is painted in Sand. The other bases, being commerically bought transparent acrylic, don't need this final touch. In fact, they look better with out it.

Flocking
Woodland Scenics Fine Earth flocking is laid down in patches to cover up any obvious base lines or hairs that inadvertently got painted into the base. After the glue dries, small splotches of Green Blended turf are stuck on here and there - about three or so per base. Again, this is mostly done to highten the contrast between the tanks and their bases.

Finally, the miniatures are carefully brushed off to remove any lint or hairs and two more coats of spray varnish are applied.

Here are the final results (again, apologizing for the poor lighting):

The entire 4th Brigade, 7th Armored Division, finished. Three armored regiments and an armored car squadron lead the way, followed by a motor rifle battalion and an artillery battalion.

A tank regiment, Honeys in front, Grants in back. Looks like I missed a hair on that lefthand Honey base. More flock!

Motor rifle battalion. Infantry and machineguns in front, 2lb portee ATG and carrier company in back.

The 25 lbr artillery battalion.

Total elapsed time on this brigade was probably about two hours. Now onto the next brigade, which I have decided will be the 22nd Armored and not the 2nd, after all.

Painting the British 4th Brigade (two of three)

Detailing

Now that everything's basically painted, I grab my smallest brush and go for the details.

Again, one must recall what scale you are working in. Details should only be those things that can clearly be seen at arms length. This means, basically...

1) Painting treads and wheels black and (depending on the model) lightly drybrushing them grey.

2) Painting under the barrels of guns. In order to support gunbarrels, O8 leaves in a bit of flash. This can't be removed without breaking the gun barrel. There are three ways to deal with this:
    A) Cut off the barrel and the flash, drill a hole in the model and mount your own barrel. I can't be bothered with this as O8's alloy is just too strong. It's too much work for too little effect, IMHO.
    B) Leave the flash the color of the model in general.
    C) Paint the flash black. This is what I do, as I feel it looks better. YMMV.
In any case, the detailing step is where any painting of the flash is going to be done, if it is done.

3) Paint windscreens black or dark blue. If you're a real nutter, highlights can be added, too.

4) Other details as come to mind. In my case, this means painting the Honeys' back storage bins varying shades of green, painting their auxilliary gas tanks light grey and painting any jerry cans green or grey-blue.

5) For the infantry, asms and legs are painted Dark Flesh, rifles and shoes get a coat of Brown and machinguns and other heavy weapons are painted Black. I occaisionally outline prone infantry figures with a Sepia ink wash in order to give a better contrast with the base. This being the Western Desert, I paint weapons crews' torsos in dark flesh, too.

6) Finally, little colored bits are added. It would be reasonable to assume, at this scale, that one wouldn't see national markings, unit badges and the like. But you want at least some color to further break up the camouflage effect discussed in the last post. In this case, I make little red and white scribblings on the tanks' front bumpers. Honeys get a white-red-white armor flash on their left turret side and Grants get the same on the left sand skirt. Finally, the infantry brigade's vehicles get a green motorized infantry flash.

Here are the pictures and I apologize for their quality (I REALLY need to build myself a light tent, but with the xmas bills coming in, that may take a few more months)...

Figure 1: The entire brigade in battle order.

Figure 2: The motorized infantry battalion.

Figure 3: Tank regiment, seen from above.

Figure 4: Tank regiment seen from the side.

At this point, it's a good time to pause and do two things: check for problems and apply a coat of matte spray varnish.

In the photos above, I can see two main problems that I'll want to fix in the next stage.

First of all, I live with two cats, so there's always fur and lint in the air. As you can see in Figure 3, the smallness of 1/600 scale means this stuff shows up even more than usual, especially on the naked bases. No matter how much I clean, some always gets in and this means that I'll have to flock these areas over.

Secondly, the bases of some of the figures - particularly the artillery - didn't get as covered as I would wish during the basing stage. I plan to solve this by judicious use of flock and by building sangars around the artillery pieces. This will be what I do next, using Vallejo White Pumice paste to build up the sangars. For better differentiation, I'm also going to add sangars to the machinegun unit's base as well. Mortars will be sangar-less..

Regarding varnish and 1/600 scale figures

DON'T brush on varnish: DO use a spray varnish.

While it is possible to brush on varnish in an emergency, you need to water it down and pay careful attention while its drying so that it doesn't pool. Tiny pools of varnish which could be overlooked even on 6mm figures are disasterous at 2-3mm.

For this reason, you should use spray varnish, wherever possible. Even then, you need to be careful to not over do it. Multiple light coats is the way to go here.

At this point, I prefer to put down one or two light coats to protect the figures' paint jobs from my fingers during the flocking and final basing stage. After that's done, I'll touch up any (hopefully few) raw bits and apply more varnish, after carefully brushing away excess flock and cat hairs with a dry brush.