Bolt Action Winter Germans- Complete!

After getting my winter Germans onto the tabletop for the first time it gave me the impetus to get the rest of the force finished!

And so, with a minimum of rubbish text from me, below is a whole lot of pictures of the completed army. Click on the pictures for a closer look.

As a reminder, the miniatures are from Warlord's Winter German range, and are all based on some of the fantastic cobblestone bases from Battle Kiwi (if all of our posts recently haven't been clear enough, we really like Battle Kiwi!).

The Infantry- 2 Grenadier Squads, 1 Volksgrenadier Squad, Flamethrower, Sniper, Panzershrek and HQ

The guns- 75mm, 105mm, PaK 40, Mortar, HMG and Goliath team

The armour- Tiger, Puma, Panzer III and 4 Halftracks

PaK 40 looking gorgeous on the cobbled base

Removable crew!

81mm Mortar 

More removable crew!

LMG team on a pill shaped cobble base

75mm Infantry Gun

More removable crew!

Grenadier with a panzerfaust.

Panzer III. I am very proud of my whitewashing

Panzer Bum

Tiger 1!

Side view of the Tiger

One of the halftracks. Looking much better for having crew and a splash of whitewash

Goliath team. For when you absolutely HAVE to spend points on a next-to useless unit

Sniper team for added sniping

Medic!

The boss.

And so there you have it, a Winter Bolt Action army. There are still some things I would like to add to it, mostly in the vehicle department, but for now, it is done!

Pooch

A little bit FlamesofWarrery

It's been a long time between posts. I've been busy about the place though. If you haven't had a look at McBeth's post or Pooch's post about the excellent work being done by Ollie at Battlekiwi (www.battlekiwi.com) then you should. I've also been doing some work on an Infinity table with Ollie's amazing terrain. I'll pop some piccies up of the board when I'm done with it. Here's a teaser tho:

Note sweet sweet matching base!

This post is a bit of a painting update. Something else I haven't done in fricking ages. With the release of V4 for Flames of War I think a bit of interest has been rekindled amongst the magpies and I have booked in my second serious game of V4 with Richard (and his musings) later in the month.

Some StuGs. Not all of them though. 

Big gun.

Bigger gun. 

Motorcycle scouts. Note absent motorcycles.

Smoke.

As a break from painting, I thought I might make up some cards for this game as well. These are a bit experimental and there's a bit of work to be done. I'm quite enjoying learning to use GIMP for the photo editing and making up some cool things to help my gaming:

I've promised Richard a set for the game too so I'll take some pics when we play it next weekend and you'll get to see what happens when I try not working solely in greyscale.

Next up from me? My Ikko Ikki (ish) for Test of Honour. I've painted all the cool stuff (that is, the warrior monk and the Samuari) so I just have to sort myself out and paint the peasants!

Review: BattleKiwi Part 2: La Belle Alliance

So as McB said in his post, we are all basically hooked on BattleKiwi products. Being the magpie that I am, I am no different.

When BattleKiwi posted up about creating a 28mm MDF version of La Belle Alliance, my first response was naturally "can I have it in 15mm?"

And, sure enough, this pile of MDF arrived with my latest base order....

Many, many pieces of cut MDF

So after having the last few weeks' modelling time only spent on writing, it was a nice change for the weekend to sit down and build some things, and La Belle Alliance was first on the list!

How did it shape up? Well, this is the real one...

And this is BattleKiwi's offering:

Old Guard added for effect

And the roof comes off!

How do I rate it then?

• BattleKiwi uses coloured MDF which is masked for cutting. This means that you can have a whole white wall (the coloured) with the bricks and windowsills in brown (the masking tape). This gives a really good effect, for not having to pick up a paint brush!
• Assembly was easy, my approach is to always dryfit stuff, then glue using Super Glue. This kit was no different, and it went together in only a few minutes (once I had figured out where all the pieces went!)
• Detail. Being a scaled down 28mm kit, there are some very detailed pieces here- especially the window shutters. These are seperate pieces, and can be modelled open or closed (I did a mix as you can see). While fiddly, they look awesome! If you aren't so keen on the fiddly detailing, you could easily leave them off.

The 15mm kit hasn't reached the BattleKiwi site yet, but I have high hopes for some more kits like it!

Pooch