'Armour' from DavidL: Matilda Mother

For this bonus round, a small entry.

One of my goals for the Challenge is to get started on my WWII East Africa collection. I'll be writing and sharing more about this project in future posts, but to get things rolling (as it were) here is my first completed miniature for that project: a Matilda II tank of the 4th Royal Tank Regiment.

Nothing too exciting about the color scheme of this beastie, so I decided to sneak in a little Pink Floyd reference for giggles in the form of the tank's name.

"And fairy stories held me high/On clouds of sunlight floating by"

The Matilda series is one of my all-time favorites from the Second World War: both the I and II models have such great looks about them, albeit in totally different ways. This is the first time I've had the opportunity to paint one, and I'm quite pleased with the results.

"Oh mother, tell me more"

The model is from Blitzkrieg Miniatures and is 1/56 scale; apart from having a ton of residual mold release film still clinging to the resin (and obligating several curse-inflected trips to the sink as I repeatedly watched the primer bead up on the surface), it painted up quickly and beautifully. Indeed, I probably fussed over it a little too much, as I am wont to do with WWII tanks!

'Defensive Terrain' from DavidL - 'A Mighty Fortress'

A few weeks ago, I scored a really good deal on one of my Oldhammer "bucket list" items: the old "Mighty Fortress" from Games Workshop. I remember drooling over ads for Warhammer Fantasy Battle featuring the venerable Fortress, but it was well outside my price range as a young lad, so I was quite happy to lay my hands on a copy now (even if my set came with an extra gate section, which may explain the good deal I got...).

My very own "nostalgia figure"--a Ral Partha barbarian who featured in an AD&D campaign of long ago--will provide a tour (and sense of scale).

January has been awful in terms of finding time to paint (and I'm sorry I haven't been able to keep up with everyone's marvelous posts--hoping to rectify that starting next week), but I still made an effort to get out to the painting room at least for a half-hour every night before bed. This involved hand-primering everything with black gesso, then airbrushing all the pieces in several shades, then coming in with inks and washes to add some weathering effects.

Behold! A pale horse.

The whole kit is a proper toy set, with doors that open and close. I was vaguely reminded of my beloved He-Man "Castle Greyskull" set of youthful days long past, but this of course is a whole order of magnitude more awesome.

One of the noteworthy elements of the set is that it comes with tons of extra parts and pieces. Way more trapdoors than I'll ever have need for, extra doors and gates, extra ladders...great stuff for the ol' bits box.

I'm contemplating picking up another set if I can find another good deal, just so I can set up larger city wall or citadel arrangements, as well as do some ruined wall conversions. But this will more than tide me over for now. ;)

All in all, I painted four towers, six wall sections, four gate inserts, 20 door inserts, 11 trap doors, and 17 ladders...