Monday, August 24, 2020

Birthday Build Time


For my recent birthday my wife gave me this beautiful aircraft kit. The model itself is huge! The mold is a little older, 1974 I think, but the detail and fit are still good enough for my standard. I sat down with a choice "modelling fluid", which to me means a quality cream soda, and dug in. 

So far I have assembled the fuselage and painted the crew compartments. The P61 has a lot of glass so I wanted the cockpit and gunner compartments to look nice. Although it's a purpose built night fighter, some were used for ground attack in Europe. I will use it as a ground attack gunship for my U.S. army. It may see some use in my hex campaign.


Sunday, August 9, 2020

Generosity and Painting!

 Miniatures and Wargaming are truly wonderful hobbies simply because of the type of people that take part in them. Several sprues of soldiers were generously donated to me by Mannie Gentile of the Toy Soldiers Forever Blog. He is a talented craftsman and hobbyist whose blog inspired me to document my own amateur attempts. If you haven't seen his work I encourage you to check out his work using the link above. Well I have now completed all the kits he sent me and I thought I would go ahead and display them here. 





  First up is a modern U.S. sniper team. The kit included four figures but I am saving one for a special project. As I don't usually do modern subjects, I decided to build a small vignette for a friend of mine. He doesn't read my blog so he won't see it till his birthday, when hopefully I will have the base perfected. The Desert Storm uniforms were fascinating to me because of the mix of both woodland and desert camouflage patterns.




Next up were another set of Dragon Korean War Marines and three Tamiya Winter G.I.'s. As I just completed a set of the marines, and because one figure was missing his arms, I did some headgear and arm swapping from my spare parts drawer. I like the diverse look they have now. 



Here they are the four soldiers I had already completed. In the time span of a week, I went from having a handful of winter G.I.s to being able to field an entire skirmish force thanks to one mans generosity. I hope to have them on the table soon, either in the mountains of Italy or the Korean peninsula.