How to paint vehicles the Viking way

This one's for Anne, who asked how I had painted my little Kübelwagen.

The vehicle in question

Well, unfortunately I didn't take many WIP shots while I was painting it, but I will try and explain using photos of other vehicles I have painted the same way. So, where to begin? First of all, painting vehicles is nothing like painting figures. Although in theory you could employ the same techniques you can't use them the same way.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrgh! Roowwrrrr... Grrrrf!

[Translation: Let the wookie win.]

Friends, let me introduce the mighty Chewbacca and Gaarkhan, fierce warrior.

In case you didn't get it. Let. The. Wookie. Win.

Well, it had to happen sooner or later. I finally caved in and bought Imperial Assault, Fantasy Flight Games' dungeon crawling skirmish boardgame with a Star Wars theme. I actually had given in some time ago, and started to buy the expansions a couple a time some months ago. I knew I was only prolonging the inevitable and how hard it would be to catch up with all the expansions later, so why not start buying them in advance?

I'm not going to do a full review, other saying that it's awesome! Go out and get it now! If you don't trust me, watch this review by Tom Vassel and Sam Healey on Miami Dice:

More pictures after the break

Doing a headcount.

As I mentioned previously I happened to aquire some Wargames Foundry German infantry -- a friend gave them to me, honestly -- and was thinking about how to use them. I then bought the Warlord Games German engineers to use the engineery bits to convert Perry DAK figures into... yes, engineers.

A good start for a platoon, although there are far too many officers!

So, my plan is to use the left over Warlord figures along with the Foundry figures to build an early war platoon. Not sure what I'm going to use it for, but I do have some early war British infantry and if Thomas buys the Home guard he has promised to, we can play Operation Seelöwe, the (planned but not executed) invasion of Great Britain.

However, I wasn't sure exactly how many figures I needed for an early war platoon, and when reading up on it a bit it varies quite a lot between the invasion of Poland in 1939 ) and Fall Gelb, the invasion of the low countries and France 1940. I don't know what organisation they used during the invasion of Denmark and Norway, but it's bound to be one or the other. In the interest of flexibility and be able to adapt my platoon to various different historical scenarios I plan to paint enough figures to be able to switch between 1939 and 1940 platoons.

The wheels and tracks of the Afrika Korps

I almost called this blogg post "Dune buggies". Anyway here are the Afrika Korps vehicles I did for the convention this easter.

My platoon commander and his second in command.

 If you missed the infantry just go to the previous post or click here.

A captured Bren Gun carrier in gerrman service.

More pictures after the break.

The Might of the Afrika Korps

I have finally got around taking pictures of my Deutsche Afrika Korps force I painted for the easter convention.

Platoon commander, 50mm mortar team, AT rifle team and the platoon sergeant.

To be honest they are not 100% completely finished; when taking the pictures I noticed some stuff I forgot to paint here and there, and the bases really needs a unifying drybrush to tie them together. I have used textured paint from Tamiya and Vallejo and they differ slightly in shade despite both of them being called desert sand. The vehicles could use a dusting with pigments and perhaps a few decals, but by and large I'm calling them table ready. (A proven fact since they have been used on a gaming table!)

The rest of the figures behind the break.