The Warlord Games U.S. infantry set has an excellent weapons frame, with Garand and Springfield rifles, BAR, Thompson, M3, and Bazooka. If they'd found space for a .30 Browning, it would have been perfect!
I assembled a bazooka team using one of the more youthful heads (they're all great) for the chap hefting the rocket-tube, and a more grizzled 'veteran' looking head for the number two. I armed him with an M3 'grease gun', commonly issued to heavy-weapon crews and other specialists, mostly because it was the only weapon on the sprue I hadn't used yet.
Usual variations in colour of kit and uniform (see my other post on U.S. infantry), and I wish I'd 'blacked out' the end of the rocket tube. It looks odd being green, makes the bazooka look solid. The base treatment includes some shredded 'clump' foliage from Heki. Great stuff, and comes in a massive bag for making bushes, shrubbery, undergrowth, tree foliage etc..
Even more Perry Long Range Desert Group / Special Air Service from WW2;
The grenade-lobbing chap uses a Perry head, the other three are modified with beards and head-dress added.
Mostly rifle-armed this time (I usually have more of a mix), which work well with my home-grown WW2 skirmish rules (range is three times that of a sub machine gun). If there's any interest, I will publish the rules in a future blog. Only about three sides of A4 (including tables), with a card-based turn sequence and some other neat elements I've not seen in commercial rules.
Large beards on these chaps. Maybe they're hoping for an extra cover-save.
Mortar team, mounted on my favoured 3mm foamboard.
Rear view of the mortar team, showing the 'green stuff' head-dress.
Some more Perry WOTR figures, this time assembled and painted as billmen;
I really enjoyed this kit, which eventually became two units of archers, part of a pike unit, and this unit of billmen.
I went for a quite stark colour scheme, of red / black / grey / white, without any badges or other insignia.
I mostly chose armoured bodies, and sallets, for this unit. My research led to me to paint over the studs on the brigandine (as most would apparently be covered with fabric), but on reflection I think I'll go back to painting them exposed again. Looks a bit dull in this picture.
Love the head on the leftmost chap, probably my favourite of the helmets in the kit.
The only problem I enountered with these chaps was getting some of the more dramatic poses to rank-up properly. I'm mostly a skirmish gamer, and I have a compulsion to assemble multipart miniatures in exciting poses - stabbing, running, lobbing things - and this makes lining them up on 20mm square bases problematic. No criticism of the kit at all, entirely down to me!
Eventually I settled on mostly 45 degree vertical, 45 degree horizontal for the bills (and spears, in the case of the fellow on the left) to get them to all nestle neatly with no gaps. So much easier with 25mm round bases!
Many of the troops serving in the Western Desert on the allied side in WW2 were commonwealth troops, including South Africans, New Zealanders, Australians, Gurkhas and Indians. I fancied converting some Perry Desert Rats to Indian Division troops, but didn't want to wait while the dedicated metal replacement heads were delivered, so I went ahead and employed green stuff;
The completed unit, possibly much more ethnically-mixed than any real section would be, but I like the variety.
The first two models I converted were a Lewis gun team. The Lewis should really have its cooling tube off, but I prefer the look of it on. The Lewis itself uses a rifle butt, plastic rod, and a carved piece of thick sprue as a magazine. I placed the gun on a section of ruined wall, to allow me to use kneeling position bodies.
The lefthand chap was very lightly converted, just greenstuff military moustache and sub-continental skin tone really. The chap on the right has a turban from greenstuff, modelled onto a spare LRDG / SAS bearded head. I chose a variety of skin tones for the Indian troops, some paler some darker.
Similar combination to the previous pairing. If you look at a wide range of Indian skintones, you will find great variety in shade and tone, with deeper colours and redder tones, pale olives, and more chocolate shades. With this in mind, I used 3 different colours and two different shadings. Of course, individual sections may well not have showed this much variation in reality.
I prefer the Perry Sikh heads to my turbaned varieties, but as I say I didn't want to wait for delivery. I love the big military moustaches though.
I have mostly used the Templar foot sergeants set to produce Hospitallers, but I did some Templars too;
I wanted to make them as different to the Hospitallers as possible, so the shields are not divided vertically into black and white, but have plain white fields with red charges on them.
I chose lighter colours than those used on the Hospitallers - so the hose / sleeves / hoods are white, or sand, or beige. In the case of the chap on the right, his hose have gone altogether.
I did a few different designs of Templar cross, using my usual method of printer / sticker paper. Be careful when cutting the stickers out and placing them, the one on the right didn't quite reach the bottom of the shield.
The red crosses on the tunics were freehand (you can just see them peeking out on these two miniatures). This is easily done, especially on the Templar Sergeant bodies (right), as there is a nice large flat area to work with.
Even though the left figure uses Templar body / arms / head, and the right figure uses 'normal' sergeant components, I think the common painting style / shields tie them together nicely.
I usually 'edge' my bases in black, to make miniatures easy to spot on the table, and it also looks quite neat. For my own collection, for skirmish games / Warhammer, I often paint the character's name onto the base too, which heightens emotions when dealing with casualties, as you remove a named individual (Watkin of Norwich), rather than just 'that spearman on the left'. This unit had their bases edged with a big felt tip, which unfortunately faded very quickly to a grainy, thin finish. I went back to using paint.
I bought the Americans on a whim, just to see how they went together. The fit of parts is great, and the weapon sprue and head selection are both excellent. The body proportions look a little odd to me, from some angles (small legs, bulky torsos), but not enough to spoil the overall look;
Inspired by Saving Private Ryan / Band of Brothers, I tried a variety of shades / tones for the uniform and equipment elements. I read somewhere that this happened due to the large number of suppliers involved, with their differing manufacturing standards and techniques. New out of the box, the kit would all look the same, but in the field, it would fade / weather at quite different rates, and in different ways.
Captain Hanks and PFC Pepper (the sniper). The tube containing the sniper's delicate optics was just a chunk of plastic rod, stuck the side of his pack.
Goldberg and Diesel. This pair of best buddies show the variety of shade and tone in the equipment to good effect.
The BAR gunner is a heroic New-Yorker, inspired by Ed Burns character from Saving Private Ryan. The other chap didn't get a speaking role. I love the heads in this set - really characterful, as with all the WG Bolt Action heads I've seen so far.
The tough sergeant with his half-chewed stogie is Sgt Sizemore, using the carbine rather than full size rifle These two use the same body, and very similar arms / equipment, but look quite different.
More of my LRDG / SAS output, I think I may have produced more 28mm LRDG / SAS than actually served for real;
If you've read my earlier posts, you'll know I sort of 'standardised' on four-man teams, usually with a mix of weapons; in this case Bren, Thompson, and Lee Enfields.
With the Bren gunner, I've tried to indicate the heft of the weapon, by positioning him shifting his weight onto the opposite foot and stretching his other arm as a counterbalance. The excellent proportions and realistic sculpting of the components allow this sort of natural posing.
Normally, the four-man teams are composed of two chaps in cap comforters, and two in arabic head-dress. In an earlier modelling exercise, I'd used some of the cap comforter heads to make Sikh soldiers (see later post), so I had 'arabic' style ones left over. So this set got three of them.
This team is more of a departure, including a radioman (who I envisaged being attached from a signals battalion, hence his lack of beard, and attachment to his tin hat). If I modelled another team like this, I'd probably replace the helmet with a cap comforter, for aesthetic reasons.
Spot the mistake with the chap on the left - yes, two pairs of sand goggles. D'oh!
The other two chaps in the team are similar to others I've modelled. The observant among you will have spotted that even when armed with Tommy-gun or Bren, the doughty troops still carry their bayonets. This is based on evidence from photographic sources, perhaps because the bayonet was useful for more than just poking holes in the enemy.
In earlier posts, I've looked at LRDG / SAS troops assembled and painted from the Perry Miniatures Desert Rats set. In this post, I wanted to show some of the miniatures I'd assembled as 'normal' 8th army;
This is one of the 2 inch mortar teams. I found the helmets on these miniatures sat a little high, perched on the head. Might be just me, but I wanted them to sit a little lower, so I scalped the heads first (about 1.5mm off), before cementing the helmet in place.
Studying my photographic references, I noted a huge variety among the troops in the Western Desert, which you can't easily replicate with a set which has everyone in matching shorts and shirts. With future sets, I think I'll sculpt long trousers on a few, and maybe some pullovers too (the officer comes with one anyway) to add more variety. For these, I used helmet angle to mark out those who did it 'by the numbers', and those of a more casual or jaunty persuasion. In the case of these two, the gunner is a serious character with very correct helmet placement, but the loader is a little more of an individual, with his helmet canted over to one side.
Mortar team number two, positioned slightly differently and with a small cork rock to break up the flat sand. Not much different, but enough that I could tell them apart when they went on eBay.
Another angle of mortar team number two. On the subject of basing, most of my WW2 Western Desert (and medieval crusades) miniatures are based with mostly plain sand. This is not wholly accurate, of course - there should be patches of scrub, rocks, and more variety of colour (from almost bleached white through to almost black/brown). The reason for the plain sand is twofold - it's easy, and it can be easily amended. Because these figures are primarily for sale, and not commissioned especially, I need the base to be simple so that the purchaser can either use them as they are, or add rocks / shrubs / etc. to taste. Of course, with commissioned figures, I base according to customer-specific needs.
Jobs for the Boyes. As a kid, I used to laugh at the notion of anti-tank rifles. It wasn't until I saw a real one in a museum that I appreciated they might actually work. The round they fire is big and heavy, and I can well imagine that thinner armour (rear, sides) could be penetrated and still leave enough velocity to really upset whoever was inside. The kit allows you to build several Boyes gunners, and I chose to model these with kneeling poses, the rifle itself balanced on a handy rock to offset its weight. The chap on the right is clearly posing for the camera.
Bren gunners. You just can't have WW2 British without Bren guns, and the Perry kit gives you several. Again, I posed these with kneeling bodies, and use of convenient rocks to change the angle. I imagined the chap on the left dealing with low-flying aircraft, while the other fellow is doubtless poised overlooking the Halfiya, blazing away at enemy softskins and troop concentrations. The rocks are just cork, not even painted as it looks pretty rocky in its raw form, in this scale.
Close-ups to finish. These are painted in my standard 8th army scheme as described in an earlier post. The Brens (and other metal parts on firearms) are not painted metallic, as it looks grossly overscale on 28mm miniatures. Instead, they're overall panzer grey - and washed with either brown (for desert dirt) or blue (for a factory-fresh look).
The other half of this kit appears in another blog, assembled and painted as Italian Wars Condottiere. These six are modelled in white armour, on unarmoured horses - a common combination for the period;
The banner was chosen at random, not sure even which side they're on. The horses in this kit are really very good, and work just as well armoured or unarmoured. The horse armour comes in two styles, Italian and German. I've saved the six German armours from this kit, so the next box I buy I can do all 12 in German armour, with lances for maximum visual impact.
The heads are interchangeable with the other medieval sets from Perry, allowing for great variety of pose / weaponry / helmet. The arms have a clever two-part assembly, which makes them easy to position first, and attach the lance later (when the shoulder joint has cured).
The kit includes warhammers, swords etc. as well as lances, so I went with mostly these. With so much horse exposed, I tried to vary the colour and markings - otherwise from a distance they look very similar (being all in metal).
The mix of heads allows for some unusual combinations, like the fellow on the right, who has quite an old-fashioned 'great bascinet' type helmet on. I think if I did these again, I'd make the horse harness more colourful, and vary the leather colours.
