Germanic Test Painting

I've been trying to find a set of pre-mixed paints that I'm satisfied with for painting my 15mm WWII German foot-sloggers and artillerymen. They've almost always turned out too dark, sometimes too light.

This bloke, a Command Decision 15mm artilleryman with a binocular rangefinder, I base-coated in Vallejo ModelColor 759 German Tank Crew, and then dry-brushed (or moist-brushed really) fairly heavily with 886 Grey Green. I added an overall wash of Citadel Agrax Earthshade (my favourite), which darkened everything a tad, and then came back in with 886 again for the highlights.

This method gives me a field grey that I'm satisfied with. I know that German field grey is a vague and uncertain colour anyway, but I do want something that looks good to me.

I could have done the base coat in 830 German Field Grey, which is tonally similar to 759, but warmer. Once the wash has gone on, I doubt that it would make much difference.
 

Smooth, like a baby's bottom

 

Here are a pair of FDM-printed 15mm (1:100) Hummels. (They're the models I was sure I had already printed but could not find, and then I found them after I printed another one.)

• The one on the right has been primed, but otherwise it's just as it came off the printer.
• The one on the left has had its big side plates smoothed — I gave them a rough scrub down with a sanding stick so all the peaks of the ridges are at a consistent height, then painted on some UV resin to fill in the valleys, cured it and fine-sanded the surface.

Models like this, with very large flat areas, really suffer from the FDM layering process. Fortunately it is fixable, but though the process isn't enormously arduous, it's not something that I'd want to have to do all the time. It starts getting pretty fiddly on smaller panels or in more constricted areas, so I'd stick to the most obvious panels, the ones on which the layering ridges stand out most to the eye.

Unfortunately, a side effect of this smoothing process is the loss of any shallow surface detail — you can see that the smoothed one on the left has lost the vertical seam in the middle of the plate, and the canopy eyes along the top edge. The seam can be pretty easily re-engraved, but I don't think I'll bother with recreating the eyes. 

---

A bit later on...

I've begun the painting process, and I think the extra effort of smoothing those big side plates is well worth while.

Elsewhere, where there are lumps and bumps and details to distract the eye, it's not so necessary. 

---

And even later on...

All done, with a couple of crewmen added.

It ended up a bit filthier than I intended, but never mind. 

Baking Soda Air-Dry Clay Recipe

 

For later reference:

Baking Soda Air-Drying Modeling Clay

1. Pour 2 cups Baking Soda and 1 cup of Cornstarch into a saucepan.
2. Add 1¼ cups cold water and keep mixing.
3. Add food coloring if desired.
4. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly until mixture is the consistency of mashed potatoes (about 10-15 mins).

Also called "cold porcelain". Makes a soft white modeling clay that takes impressed detail well, very suitable for terrain rollers. The clay can be coloured when made, and takes acrylic paint well. It will take a day or two to harden.

Reading Glasses For Cheap

 

As I've become more geriatric and decrepit, my eyesight has become progressively crappier. Nothing unusual; just your standard Old Person Long-Sightedness.

For that reason, I now have to wear glasses to be able to read text on my computer or in a book, and also for doing art or engaging in my other hobbies such as model-making and woodwork.

Quite a few years ago I bought a headset magnifier, which allows for two levels of magnification. It works well, and the magnification levels are good, but it's not that comfortable to wear for long periods of time, and it gets in the way as it's relatively bulky.

Fortunately, the age of cheap mass-produced reading glasses is upon us, and I use those by preference. They're lighter and more comfortable, and cheap enough that they're practically disposable.

I need varying levels of magnification for different purposes, so I have multiple pairs of glasses. For sitting at my computer, and general day-to-day work, I use 1.75 diopters. For closer reading (books, e-reader or tablet) I use 2.25 diopter. For drawing and general modeling work I use 3.5 diopter, and for really close-in detail work I use 5.0 or 6.0 diopter glasses.

All of them bar the 5.0 and 6.0 glasses I can get from the Warehouse for about ten bucks, and the more powerful ones I got from China via AliExpress, also for about ten bucks each.

If I had to go to an optometrist and get a customized pair of bifocals, I'd be looking at a couple of hundred dollars per pair. Not that long ago, I wouldn't have had any other real option. So, thank goodness for el-cheapo mass-production.

The pairs in the photograph are the ones I keep on my modelling bench. They're on a stand that I designed in Blender and printed on my Ender 3, so they're always readily to hand, but are kept out of the dust and scratchy things that tend to clutter the desk top.

Challenger (in progress)

 

Next project is a 15mm (1:100) Challenger. Not the modern Challenger, the descendent of Chieftain, but the WWII Challenger, the 17 pounder variant of the Cromwell. Once again I made the gun barrel from a length of 2mm brass rod, tapered down and provided with locating pins on my cheap (and fairly pathetic) little mini-lathe. I would have liked to have been able to turn the muzzle-brake in place rather than having to glue on a separate piece, but my lathe isn't anywhere near that precise.

I have printed this model by the estimable Mr Bergman before, in FDM, but at that time my Ender 3 printer was in the process of crapping itself, and I got a bit of layer shifting. I've thrown this print away now.

As it turned out, while I was looking for the Cromwell (below) I discovered that I'd printed another FDM Challenger more successfully, and completely forgotten about it, so I've got a couple of Challengers available on the very small chance that I'll ever need more than one for any game I'll be playing.

I wanted to see how the Challenger looked alongside the Cromwell, in this case a 1:100 PSC plastic kit. It's certainly quite stretched out, and it's tall compared with the Cromwell, but it wouldn't be any taller than a Sherman Firefly, the Brits' other 17pdr gun tank option at the time.

I've primed the Challenger model with Vallejo British Bronze Green surface primer.

The Challenger was intended to work with Cromwell troops, and by being built on what was essentially a lengthened Cromwell chassis, to minimise the logistics impact of having two different types working in the same unit. Also, the Cromwell was a pretty speedy tank, and the Firefly would have had quite a job to keep up with them. Not to mention that a Firefly would stand out to enemy observation even more in a Cromwell troop than they did with other Shermans.

The next stage is to apply the top coat, ready for markings and weathering.

The colour I use for late-war British stuff is VMC Russian Uniform, and it's applied by airbrush one panel at a time. I'm not aiming at even, solid coating, but rather apply the paint in a sort of mottle pattern from the centre of each panel out to near the edge, building it up in thin layers until it looks okay.

The panel edges are then highlighted by dry-brushing with VMC Buff.

Decals and/or markings will go on before any further weathering, so that they don't look too bright at the end of the process.

The finished piece can be seen here.

Sherman's Bendy Barrel

 

An issue that arises all too often when printing models in resin is warping of components. Gun barrels are especially problematic in this way. I don't know if the issue is with the resin itself, or my printing settings, but resin prints don't seem to have the dimensional stability that FDM has. I assume it's probably the resin layers shrinking microscopically while curing.

I printed this M4A3E8 a few days ago, and I've just started painting it. I don't know if the warping of the gun barrel has actually got worse, or whether it's just preying on my mind, but in any case I've decided that it just can't be borne any longer.

I have some 2mm brass rod, and a little cheap mini-lathe that I got from AliExpress — it's basically just a Jacobs chuck attached to a little electric motor on an aluminium frame — so I've decided to have a go at replacing the gun barrel with a nice straight brass one. The 2mm rod is out of scale for the 76mm gun, but it's the same size as the barrel as designed, so at least I can be sure that the muzzle brake isn't going to suddenly look too hugeous.

The new turned barrel (a bit out of focus) is sitting in front of the model. Cutting off the muzzle brake and barrel should be straightforward enough with a razor saw; I'll just have to be a bit careful with the drilling for the brass tenons to slot into.

Something the lathe doesn't have is any kind of tool holder, so it all has to be done with hand-held tools. Not ideal, and it makes getting crisp, straight, square angles a bit tricky. Hey-ho, needs must as they say.

Later on...

Well, at least it's straight now

I see from the photos that there are a bunch of tiny supports in the running gear that I overlooked, so I guess there will be more disruption of the paintwork than I'd hoped. I'll start again from the beginning I guess.

A few days later...

This is about where I give up trying to paint it any more. I was trying for a tank that looked well used, but without all the chipping that tends to be splattered all over tank models these days (and of which I am as guilty as any).I've ended up with a bit of a mess, but it will do okay at tabletop distances I think.

The decals come from Skytrex, and they seem pretty good to me. They respond well to decal softener without becoming so fragile that they fall to bits, and the multi-colour ones I bought (German crosses) are printed in good registration, unlike any of the Battlefront decals I've had.

Figure Size and Model Scale

 This is a somewhat fraught subject, and there are people out there who take their own opinions very, very seriously. I suspect that they're very angry people at heart, and need to chill a bit, but anyway.

The main thing to remember is that the numbers used to describe miniature figure size and model scale are quite different, and bear only a passing relationship to each other. A purportedly 15mm figure might be anywhere from 12mm to 18mm or worse, but a 1/72 scale model will (or should) always be in a proportion of one real-world centimetre to 72 scale centimetres.

This image is from Andrew Loomis' famous work on figure drawing, Figure Drawing For All Its Worth.

It's a very influential work for illustrators, but its main purpose here is to give us some proportions to work with.

Loomis describes the normal male as being 7½ heads tall, which is a handy starting point as it's independent of any actual measurements. However, thanks to the magic of the internet, we can tie it to some real-world figures — it turns out that the global mean male height is 171cm (5'7⅓"). Therefore, the mean height of one head is 22.8cm, for what that's worth.

Miniature figure size is generally agreed to be measured from the soles of the feet to the eyes*, thus allowing us to ignore any tall fancy hats or the like. The eyes are half way up the head, which handily allows us to ignore the ½-head and declare that our mean male miniature figure's eye height will, in scale, be 159.6cm, which, for ease of calculation, we can safely round out to 160cm (5'3").

* Though remember those angry people who take themselves far too seriously. They may have other ideas.

Phew.

So anyway, now that we know all that we can work out which model scales and figure sizes should go together visually:

Model Scale	Scale Figure Eye-Height (mm)	Standard Miniature Size
1:300	5.3	6mm
1:285	5.6	6mm
1:200	8	8mm
1:144	11.1	12mm
1:100	16	15mm
1:76	21	20mm
1:72	22	20mm
1:64	25	25mm
1:56	28.6	28mm
1:48	33.3	32mm
1:35	45.7	45mm
1:32	50	54mm
1:24	66.7	70mm
1:12	133.3	130mm

These are not, of course, hard and fast rules. There are many people, for example, who use 1:48 scale vehicles with their 28mm miniatures, just because they think they look better. And 25mm figures are often used with 1:72 scale vehicles, mainly (I think) out of tradition. More power to them; they're their models, and they can do with them as they please and it will harm me not one whit.

A Note on Figure Sculpting

The proportions given by Loomis may not be entirely suitable for figures sculpted for gaming use, especially in the smaller scales. Often, elements like heads and hands will need to be sculpted slightly larger than would be strictly accurate, and limbs may need to be thicker just to stand up to the rigours of handling.

There is some natural variation in the size of real human beings, and there's nothing wrong with reflecting this within a unit of little army-men. Different sculptors may create their figures at slightly different sizes than other sculptors, and mixing figure ranges can create some pleasing height variation.

BUT items of equipment like rifles, webbing, ammo boxes and so forth do NOT vary in this way, and if two figure ranges have visually differently sized rifles, for example, then when mixed together they will just look wrong and wonky.

Mail-Order Junk

 

This static grass applicator arrived for me from China via Bangood today.

It is absolute shit. Not only does it not work very well, it doesn't seem to work at all. The power source is just a couple of AA batteries, and even if everything else was top-notch (it's not), they just don't generate enough current to do the job.

D-, Would not recommend.

Gun Barrels

 The most problematic part of any military model, whether it be 3d printed as here, or moulded and cast traditionally in white metal or resin, is almost always the gun barrel. The limitations of materials and processes mean that they're almost always over-scale, and also often quite fragile. White metal is soft and tends to bend at the slightest pressure, while resin or 3d printing plastics are easily warped or broken.

One way around the problem is to replace those gun barrels with new ones made of something a bit sturdier. In the case of the AEC armoured car shown here, the QF 75mm gun was turned down from a steel nail, while the Crusader's 6 pounder was turned from a length of 2mm brass rod. The brass is, of course, a lot easier to turn than the steel, and is generally quite strong enough for gaming purposes; the only reasons I did the 75mm in steel were

1. I wanted to see if it was practicable with the equipment I have to hand, and
2. I didn't have the brass rod yesterday.

What I use for this sort of work is a cheap little mini-lathe I bought from BangGood, an online mega-store. It cost me about thirty bucks, so not a lot.

It's really little more than a drill chuck mounted on a little electric motor on an extruded aluminium bed. It's the sort of thing that would be trivial to put together oneself, if one had any electrical engineering skills at all, which I do not. It's not nearly as precise as a proper micro-lathe, as would be used by watchmakers and the like, but it's adequate for this sort of task.

I just use needle files for the shaping. They work fine, and the brass 6 pounder barrel only took five or ten minutes from start to finish. The steel 75mm took a bit longer, because the material is so much harder than brass.

I don't think it would be up to the task of turning very small barrels, such as for 1/285 Tigers, or 1/100 20mm flak, but it's fine for most 15mm jobs, and it's a lot better than my old setup, which was just an electric drill strapped down to a piece of wood.

More Scale Comparison Dithering

Left to right:
Battlefront 1:100 (15mm) PzIII Flammpanzer
3d printed M.Bergman 1:200 PzIII L
Ancient GHQ 1:285 PzIII J

I've been fiddling around the edges of building some WWII desert forces, and now my procrastination and prevarication has come to a head: which scale should I commit to?

They each have their pros and cons.

I already have a few 1:100 (15mm) bits and pieces, mainly British and Italian. I don't have any Afrika Korps infantry, but that's fairly easily remediable, and I have access to digital models of pretty much all the vehicles I'd really need. The down-side is that they take a while to print and they do need quite a bit of painting to look good, and also they're large enough that my 900 x 1800 mm tabletop really doesn't look like wide open desert when I'm using 15mm stuff on it. It's fine for a game like Chain of Command, a bit cramped for something like WRG 1925-50, Fist Full of TOWs or Battlegroup.

1:150 (10mm) isn't really all that much smaller than 1:100, and needs pretty much as much attention to painting as 15mm models. The benefits of that scale, such as they are, don't outweigh the fact that I already have a decent head-start on the models I need in 15mm.

I'm completely new to 1:200, so I would be starting from scratch, needing not only the vehicle models, but also buildings and similar terrain — fortunately, buildings aren't a very prominent feature of a lot of WWII desert battlefields. I can print most of what I'd need, and a tank like the Panzer III shown here only takes about an hour and a half. Painting to an acceptable standard is pretty easy. I'd probably have to use 10mm infantry from somebody like Pendraken, and they'd look a bit big next to the 1:200 vehicles and guns; that is a concern. Also, since nobody I know locally has a 1:200 scale force of their own, I would have to provide the troops for the Commonwealth, Italy, and Germany to be sure of having sufficient forces for a battle. This scale is small enough that my gaming table starts looking acceptably large, and the models are small enough for big battles while still being large enough to distinguish easily.

1:300 - 1:285 is a scale that I already have quite a lot of, and it's a scale that works well on a fairly small table, or makes a moderate-sized table like mine look positively huge. The only issue with it, from my point of view, is that with age my eyesight has deteriorated somewhat, and the models and figures on the tabletop have become difficult to see properly unless I'm sitting right over them. I'm not so blind that they're unusable, but the fact remains that my eyes are not as good as they once were, and it's tiresome having to squint and peer to make out what I'm looking at.

LATER:     I've decided to stick with 15mm for the present moment. It's logistically more convenient in every way than starting on a whole new scale that nobody else in Christchurch has ever heard of, plus, I can build on the few bits and pieces I've already got in that scale.

Record Keeping

 I have never been good at keeping track of process notes. It was a requirement at art school, and I did it fairly well there, but then I got out of the habit again. It's something that I've seen recommended again and again, but for one reason or another (mainly laziness, if I'm being honest) I just haven't done it.

Now I'm making a conscious effort to be more organised in that respect, so that I don't have to reinvent the wheel every time I do something. My memory isn't terrible, but neither is it perfect, and having the specifics of a project written down is always handy if there's any chance at all that I might want to repeat it some time in the future.

I've used a wire-bound A5 sketchbook with decent heavyish cartridge paper pages that will take paint and glue without too much show-through. I really don't like wire-binding, but it does have the advantage that the book stays flat when it's open, and if I need to get rid of a page I can just tear it out without affecting the rest of the binding. The A5 size is convenient; the pages are large enough to fit a decent amount of information, but the book doesn't take up too much room when it's open for reference.

More Books For Me

This batch of books just arrived for me from the Book Depository, a late Xmas present to myself. Strictly speaking, just the four on the right — I've had the 1914–1938 book for a while now.

George Bradford's drawings are immensely useful as modeling resources, and though they're not usually sufficient on their own to catch every little detail, they provide an excellent basis to work from in addition to photographs of the original vehicles.

Hopefully they should enable me to fill in some of the gaps in my 15mm 3d modeling and printing.

Scaling

A note re: scaling —

• A six-foot (1800mm) man at 1/56 would be 32mm tall. At 1/48 scale, he should be 37.5mm tall.
• A 28mm 6-footer would be more like 1/64 scale.
• A 1/72 scale 6-foot gent should actually be 25mm tall, so at least there's _one_ of the popular scales that is what it says on the tin.
• A 20mm figure scales out to 1/90 scale.
• At 1/100 scale, 6-foot men should be 18mm tall.
• A genuine 15mm tall figure scales to 1/120 scale.

All this is all very well, though it's not going to make one jot of difference to the people who are heavily invested in their "20mm" 1/72 scale wargames forces.

The arguments about what a given millimetre-sizing means are perennial, but basically fall into one of two camps: either

• a figure is measured from the soles of its feet to its eyes (to remove the possibility of error through measuring headgear of different sizes) 

or

• a figure is measured from the sole of its feet to the top of its head, ignoring any headgear.

The effect is that different manufacturers create figures of quite different heights from those of other manufacturers, and market them under the same supposed millimetre size. It's all a complete shambles, and I think the idea of describing figures by some arbitrary and highly mobile mm-size is an absolutely terrible one.

Paint a Kangaroo on an Italian

I made this picture in response to somebody on the Facebook 6mm wargaming and terrain page who was enquiring about making decals for the kangaroos painted by the Australians on their captured Italian vehicles.

It's really not a difficult thing to paint freehand.

In the picture, I've separated the kangaroo out into its component blobs — start with the big circle for the body, and work outwards from there. Another blob for the chest/neck, another for the head, then join up the muzzle, ears, paws, legs and tail, and bingo, you're done.

The Dehydrator and MDF Flock

This is the first outing of my new (second-hand) dehydrator, courtesy of Pixi, and it does a sterling job of drying out paint-tinted MDF dust. So I'd call it a success.

It needs a two-step approach: an initial drying to get rid of most of the moisture, then a quick pass through my little electric coffee grinder to break up the clumps and back in the machine to get bone dry. I could use a mortar and pestle I suppose, but why bother having electric gizmos if you're not going to use them?

Altogether, it took about three hours of drying I guess. Or maybe less, but that's what I gave it.

This is generic "dirt" flock, and it's a very fine powder from my belt-sander. The "grass" flocks and the like go over the top.

You may well ask, why not just use dirt then, instead of going to all the trouble of tinting, drying and grinding MDF dust to do the same job? And real dirt can work well, but it needs to be dried and sterilized, and it can react unpredictably with glues and stuff. So, there's not actually much saving of effort in the end.

Flying Carpet

I needed a flying carpet for my up-coming AD&D scenario, so I made one. It's bigger in real life than it would be if it was truly to scale; it's supposed to seat six people comfortably at about 7' by 10' long, so I need to accommodate six figure bases. I very much doubt that the scale differential is ever going to matter at all.

The carpet is just a print of a photograph from the internet, stiffened with epoxy and some cotton gauze, and the flying stand is chopped from a soda bottle neck. The rocks are made from rocks.

The figure is an old Grenadier wizard, and the most appropriately Arabian Nights-ish one I own, but quite a bit smaller than the Reaper figures I mostly use these days.

Opel Blitz ambulance conversion (15mm)

I'm in the process of building some Zvezda 1:100 scale Opel Blitz trucks, and my easily-distracted mind turned to thoughts of other variants even before I'd finished the stock-standard kits. One conversion that would suit 3d printing would be a set of tracks to turn the truck into the half-tracked Maultier variant, but the one I've started working on immediately is an "office" body to turn the standard truck into an ambulance.

I haven't done any plastic card conversion work in decades, so I'm pretty rusty.

I'm building up the shell of the body around the existing kit's truck bed, because that gives me a square base of the right size, and more importantly, because it already has all the mounting points and what-not moulded in place. The plastic card I'm using for the walls is about 1mm thick, so  after the vertical slats have been sanded off and the card walls glued on, any increase in dimension is negligible.

The curved roof was a bit of a problem, because I couldn't find an easy way to evenly and precisely bend the card I have available.

In the end I laminated some light cardboard around a tin can of the right diameter, cut it to size, and then slathered it all in liquid cyanoacrylate to make it sandable — the superglue works a bit like resin in fibreglass.

The door and window frames stand proud on the original vehicle, so I cut them out of paper and glued them down with PVA. Looking at them now, I could have cut them a bit thinner, but it's a bit late now unless I strip them right back and start again.... which I'm becoming more and more tempted to do.

Now I've got the framing applied on the other side — I cut these ones to about half the thickness of the other side, and I think they do look better, though it makes the paper a little bit harder to handle. This sort of thing would be ideal for a laser cutter, or for photo-etching.

With all the surface detailing done, I gave the whole thing a squirt with white primer. This really brings out all the flaws. In general I'm not too displeased, but there are definitely some areas that need attention.

Did I say all the surface detailing? I just realised that I hadn't applied the door hinges. Bugger.

Now the module is mounted on a chassis, and it would be quite usable on the tabletop in this form (assuming I'd finished the painting, of course).

However, for completeness' sake, there are a couple more bits and pieces to be added.

There should be a stowage shelf just above the cab, which would be full of all sorts of clutter, and there should be a set of footsteps that fold up against the rear doors when in transit. They'll be next.

OK, here we have our front stowage shelf with some bits and pieces from PSC's German Stowage & Tank Commanders set.

There really should be some ropes and things holding everything in place, or else it would all go straight over the bonnet the first time they put on the brakes. I'm not quite sure how I'm going to go about that.

Blobby Stowage

I'm not usually much of one for adding all the clutter and crap to my models that actual real-life soldiers tend to accumulate on their actual real-life vehicles, but I thought I might give it a go on this PSC 15mm (1:100 scale) SdKfz 263.

The jerry cans were simple enough, and came from another kit. The helmet was carved off the head of an extraneous crewman.

The rucksack and tarpaulin were made from epoxy putty, and I am more impressed than ever by people who can use that stuff to make miniature things that actually look like the things they're supposed to represent. I'm not too unhappy with the rucksack, but the tarpaulin looks more like a rolled-up feather sleeping bag than anything made of canvas. Hopefully it will look a bit better when I get some paint on to it.

The Heartbreak of Wrong-Sponson Syndrome

Wrong! So wrong!

I bought a box of two British WW1 Mk.IV tanks by Battlefront some time ago, because they were marked down a lot and I wanted them. Only now have I got around to assembling them.

Woe! Alas! The horror! They included four port-side male sponsons, instead of two each of port and starboard. I failed to notice until I'd already magnetized them all and tried them on for size.

I've emailed Battlefront about the issue, and hopefully they'll be sending me some replacements, but until then they'll have to be used as either female or hermaphrodite tanks, since I appear to have a full complement of female sponsons.

I feel so hurt, so betrayed.

Airfix 1/48th Hurricane

I bought this kit a couple of years ago, but never got around to building it. After doing the 1:72 Bolton-Paul Defiant, I got all enthused and dug it out.

Alas, the experience was not nearly as pleasant as with the smaller-scale kit. The 1:48 Hurricane is not a bad kit by any means, but the Defiant's tooling is so good that it made me forget what normal plastic kits are like. This one has some strange peculiarities, not least in the undercarriage, which a more anal-retentive modeller than I would almost certainly rebuild from scratch. The decals are also nowhere near as good as those on the Defiant; they cracked and silvered all over the place.

Anyway, it's done now, and all I have to do is find somewhere for it to sit where it won't get busted.

Oh, and I see that I've forgotten to paint the red gun-muzzle patches. Maybe later.