Curia Julia

Below are some more tanks for my upcoming What a Tanker! games. Today I completed three T-34's for the Soviet forces. Along with my StuG III and Panzer IV they should compliment each other nicely and be a fairly even match-up.

I normally game in 28mm, I like the scale, its easy to paint and identify stuff on the table...I also like the larger models as they remind me of plastic soldiers when I was a kid. Anyway, I have been introducing a couple of work colleagues into tabletop games recently when one took a particular shine to my Greyhound Armoured Car. I thought what better game for a treadhead than What a Tanker! by Too Fat Lardies. - simple, quick and full of tanks. Part of the reason for all the tanks lately was to use them for games of Chain of Command, Bolt Action and What a Tanker! However, as I do not have a lot of space at home (my play surface is only 4 x 4) so I decided to buy some 15mm tanks to allow a more dynamic games. The models themselves are from Gale Force 9's 'Tanks' and are essentially Flames of War miniatures (no complaints there though). I found that I can utilise much of my terrain at the smaller scale and elected to take a break from the Mediterranean and dive ...

I finished up another StuG today, some German reinforcements for Italy. For my next german AFV I would like to try some camoflague, but I wanted to get the hang of the basics with this one first. I think it turned out pretty good!

Continuing with my Italian theme, and to support my US forces, I decided to paint another vehicle. This time a Sherman. The kit is from Rubicon and it went together quite well (a bit confusing in some parts of the instructions) and it was really fun to paint. I dont really like the crew models from Rubicon, but that has more to do with my bad painting then the models themselves. Now that I understand how to paint vehicles, I hope to do more. There is a hope that I can play a game of What a Tanker! now. Maybe the Sherman can verse the little Stug that could , or some Italian Armour that I have.

When I started painting miniatures it took me a while to get the hang of it. When I finally started to conquer my fears, I thought how hard could vehicles be especially given their size. Well the first vehicle I painted, a StuG III (my favourite AFV BTW), it was a disaster. The little I learnt from painting figures did not translate. This put me back to square one and I then concentrated on painting only figures and put vehicles, like I used to minis, in the too hard basket, something I would never be able to do. Well after painting a few US vehicles and, now with confidence, ordering a couple more I decided to go back and look at my first StuG. So of course I was nervous and wanted to go a good job originally. It was also my favourite vehicle and wanted to do it justice. I bought it, assembled it (which I had not done much of before) and then decided on a colour. I didn't really care that much for historical 'down to the commanders buttons' I just wanted to see how I...