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.  

 

Update!

Sorry for the unexpected break from posting! Life has a way of throwing curves. I am swinging with all my might and occasionally putting the bat on the ball. I am sorry to say that although I ran and photographed both the Five Men Battle in Sicily and the solo moose hunting game, I do not remember them enough to post the reports.  However I have been steadily building and painting!

I took advantage of the snow cover to show off my Korean War air support, including my freshly completed Bell H-13. The stretchers are magnetic and can be switched with a pair of .30 caliber machine-guns.

 Continuing the Cold War theme ( couldn't resist the pun) Here's the first tank kit I ever built, the Tamiya M-41 Walker Bulldog. I never had the nerve to paint it until recently. 

Finally I took a commission to paint some pieces for the Imperial Assault board game. These are much smaller than anything I've painted before so I struggled with the details. The client liked them which really is all that matters. 

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I have a scheduled game day with a friend in the first few weeks of January. We plan to run a WW2 skirmish using Fistful of Lead, which I purchased from Wiley Games recently. It is exactly what I have been looking for to run squad vs squad actions. I will stick to my modified rules for solo gaming, but FFOL looks like a wonderful club/game day rule set for all my eras.