His Majesty's lead pile

The only truly tangible project I have on the go at the moment is in Flames of War, the miniatures game set in the Second World War.  Being a romantic chap and a sucker for the land of hope and glory I'm rolling with a late war British Rifle Company for the Italian Theatre, for use with the Fortress Europe and Cassino source books.

I may very well use these miniatures as New Zealanders which is perfectly acceptable given the identical colour schemes, though there are some very nice Commonwealth Infantry produced by Battlefront.  In terms of ease of painting I should perhaps have chosen the mid-war desert theatre or late war France for British Infantry, as those theatres would require a more limited palette and therefore require less of my very scarce painting time!

I picked up 1x Mortar Platoon and 1x HMG Platoon of late war Italian theatre British quite cheap on trademe.co.nz about 5 years back, so I've made a start on the Mortar Platoon as you can see below.

As you can see I need to practice photographing miniatures, and they could do with some matt varnish over the top of the gloss!  I'm pretty much block painting on bare colours and relying on the Army Painter Quick Shade "strong tone" to pick out the detail and provide shading (it also varnishes which is handy).  While I think that I could fairly be the target of criticism for my use of Quick Shade as a "cop out", at this early stage of my painting career I don't think I have the skill or the patience to shade/highlight manually, and I also have very little inclination to do so on 15mm miniatures!  I'll explain my reasons for this in a future blog post.

I'm actually pretty happy with the results and I think that the Quick Shade has worked quite well with the Italian theatre palette.  I'm hoping to pick up the pace with my painting a bit by batch painting larger groups at a time.  Fairly shortly I hope to have accumulated enough bottle caps to be able to "working base" a whole platoon at a time.  By utilising a wet palette successfully (I've found it to be a useful technique so far) I ought to always have something ready to paint without having to wait on an earlier coat or an adjacent colour to dry.

Reinforcements

With the pace I've been setting so far, the prospect of what I have left to paint for my British is quite daunting.  I have something in the order of 140x little men, 4x 25 pounders, 3x Churchills and 1-2 as yet unselected and unpurchased support options to go before I can field 1500 points in flames of war.  Italy may have to wait a season or two for liberation, I think...

His Majesty's obvious intention was for stiff upper lips when faced with a lead pile