The matt varnished Shermans & Churchills

As promised in the previous post, the finished articles are here:  Plastic Soldier Company 20mm Shermans, 15mm Churchills, and Battlefront Bren Carriers all painted in Halfords cammo green.

This really has nailed that "bronze-green" effect I was hoping for!

PSC US infantryman based on a penny for scale.

Not quite sure what's gone awry with the varnishing on this flank of the tank, it's not as obvious in real life as on this photo.

The top decks look great to me - the "puddled" Army Painter varnish on the one in the foreground's read deck is something I'm quite happy about actually - maybe it could have been brushed out a little though?

And the Churchills... again a great result IMO

I am toying with the idea of a final drybrush, but the details already "pop" so much I'm not sure if that would be too much..?

The colour that's been achieved is pretty much perfect IMO

The early version turret AVRE. Several of the transfers have ended up showing their edges, which is annoying as this normally doesn't happen with my "two layers of clear gloss" technique - maybe my gloss poly needs replacing - or maybe they were just old transfers?

For essentially a one-piece casting these track assemblies are fantastic - well done PSC!

The drybrushing really picks out the stowage boxes too.

Morer slightly odd effects on the big blank flanks of the Shermans here - but again, not as bad in the real world, and in some ways quite good to have it so irregular (ish). The driver's face has done really well here.

 With a PSC infantryman in the foreground

The Battlefront bren carriers.

A final close-up of a rather smug chap - probably waiting for his cup of tea! Make sure you saw the first post too in this two-part series.

Using Halfords Matt Cammo Spray on WW2 vehicles

Halfords is a well known (if you are in the UK) cycle/car accessories retailer, and I am a signed-up and committed user of their range of spray paints for both white and black undercoat.

Recently they have offered a 3-tone range of "cammo" paints, including a khaki which was used as a base coat for these fellows, and also a Dark Green. The Dark Green looks pretty ideal for that difficult-to-achieve WW2 Allied AFV colour, so having some 15mm PCS Churchills, 20mm Plastic Soldier Company Shermans and a handful of Battlefront carriers to paint, I thought I'd give it a go.

Here are the Churchills - these are really well detailed kits, that go together very well and also give you options for a variety of vehicles, including cast and welded turrets and a couple of AVRE options. The Bren carriers are in the background. The spray provides a deep and very matt green finish, but as there is no matching paint pot, you have to be very thorough with getting good coverage.

These are the three PSC Shermans - I sprayed the tracks (which come separately ) with Army Painter Leather brown, which I also use as a base colour for the PSC US Infantry, which are having some heavy weapon crew added to them at the moment (in the background). The heavy weapon teams share the odd/inaccurate Y-shaped braces of the infantry..

The Sherman models are really well thought out for wargamers (as opposed to modellers) needs. They go together really easily (apart from some small gaps where the tracks join at front and back) and feel very robust - someone has thought about these as bits of kit which will get a lot of handling, and designed them accordingly. 

The "shiny" patches are where I have put a patch of gloss varnish as a base coat on which to add waterslide transfers at a later stage - adding a gloss base coat under each transfer and then sealing it in with a further gloss coat before the final matt coat really does wonders for removing the outline/edge of the transfer on he finished model.

Here they are again, this time with Allied stars on them. I think I may have gone overboard with the stars, having them on turrets and hulls, but it adds a little more life to these models anyway.

Here are the Churchills, with some fairly serious drybrushing going on. They have transfers from the Battlefront Allied Armour sticker set. The unit insignia are probably not appropriate for Churchills, but beggars can't be choosers. They will fight with my PBI PSC British Infantry

Very few of them ended up with space on the turret for one of these formation markings.

The carriers, with the little Battlefront blokes peering out.

Churchills again, showing the great detail on the rear decks.  For such simple models to make they come out really well.

I then gave the whole lot a liberal washing with Army Painter Dark tone (the strongest one). I think this will tone down a lot once I get round to doing a matt coat, but right now I am wondering if I will need to do another set of drybrushing.

The carriers - again with probably inappropriate unit markings!

Front view of the Churchills.

And the Shermans. I'm quite optimistic that the mix of base colour and Army Painter will end up as that sort of bronze green that WW2 vehicles seem to have in the real world.

About a week later I managed to Dullcote them and add the finished pictures to this site - see them in this post.

15mm PSC Infantry being painted

I bought a box of Plastic Soldier Company's new re-tooled WW2 British in 15mm recently. The box is excellent value, with three full platoons of figures, including light support weapons all in one box - almost 150 figures!

I decided to paint them up "on the sprue" as an experiment - and here is a full walk-through of that process, showing the paints I used and some photo's of the finished articles as well :

PSC 15mm British Infantry

I've been painting some of these chaps, and very nice they are too. This time it's an experiment in painting on the sprue. The base colour is an undercoat of Khaki spray from Halfords, which turned out very pale, so I added two washes of Windsor and Newton Peat Brown ink, and then did the straps in Faded Khaki from Coat d'Arms. 

Here they are with a final coat of ArmyPainter Strong Tone, prior to matt varnishing

The bases need some grass to hide the figures bases I think

Oh No - WW2 in yet another scale !

Having read lots of Very Good Things online about Too Fat Lardies latest WW2 ruleset Chain of Command, I actually bought a copy at the recent Warfare show ... and then, against my better judgement but in a rather inevitable development as well I had a last-minute splurge on a whole packet of Plastic Soldier Company US infantry.

This means I now have US WW2 infantry in 10mm, 15mm and 20mm for three different rulesets at battalion, company and platoon level, but hey, who's counting...

When I got home I also dug out my old (very old...) collection of plastic WW2 figures, which have rather been confined to "no, you can't touch those soldiers, but how about playing with these ones instead...?" duties and managed to find a handful of very old Matchbox US infantry who looked to be a very similar size and stature to widen the range of poses in the unit.

So far I've assembled and based up a platoon and a bit, and painted 4 figures as a test run - here are the results (each image can be clicked to show you a bigger version).

PSC infantry, painted and unpainted. The figures were first based (on UK Government-issue washers, the small brown ones that come without the holes and cost a penny each..) and undercoated in Army Painter Leather Brown (it comes in a spray can too, which I plan to use for the complete platoon, but it wasn't worth using for this test).

The figures were painted using the guide on the back of the box, but with the closest colours I had to hand rather than the specific Vallejo paints they suggested. The trousers are just the base coat. As you can just about see here, some of the PSC figures come with separate arms which you need to glue into place. This can entail a little bit of filling of gaps along the way, but it does mean that the figure poses can carry their rifles away from their bodies.

The jacket is painted in Coat d'arms 537 Faded Khaki (sold by Black Hat) instead of the Vallejo 884 Stone Grey suggested on the box. In these photos you can also clearly see one of the odd things about these figures - the Y-shaped webbing braces on the back of each figure. I'm no rivet-counter, so I may be wrong on this but as far as I know this style was a German thing, with allied troops having more traditional over-the-shoulder parallel braces or fully crossed-over ones. It would be interesting to see if the German figures from this range have the same poses, as perhaps the bodies have been "recycled" ?!

The webbing and gaiters are in Coat d'arms 228 Buff - the box art suggested Vallejo 976 Buff, but having looked at an online comparison chart on dakkadakka this may be a bit yellow (which is what I'd thought anyway), as the far whiter "Bleached Bone" GW colour is suggested as an alternative to Vallejo Buff.

FWIW Coat d'arms Buff is a great colour for ECW-era troops, and takes an ink wash or Armypainter varnish stain really well. For the bases this is the first time I've actually tried making a "gunk" out of sand and glue, and it is a little better to then drybrush than just glued-down sand. But a lot more effort!

The standing rifleman - although this chap is doing a slightly uncomfortable looking "advance" - which is easier to spot in the next photo. This was again a figure with separate arms, however about half the figures in the pack are single piece castings. Surprisingly (given my experience with Warlord Games 28mm ECW plastics) the arms do not mix-and-match across the bodies, and there are only enough arms on the sprue to equip (or maybe "arm") all of the figures.

I would have thought it might have been possible to provide some more variety by having more arms than bodies, or some more loose kit (or separate arms!) to glue onto the figures, or even make some of the poses interchangeable - especially as it sounds like PSC do exactly this with their AFV kits, with enough bits included to produce several variants on each sprue. I did try to mix some of them up, but the arms seem pretty unforgiving in the way they match to each body, so it would involve more cutting and filling than I am prepared to do to achieve this sort of more mixed look.

The helmets were painted with an old stalwart which now has a new name - GW Castellan Green, formerly known as Catchacan Green. I did fill the joints between the arms and the body on the painted model, but I may just rely on paint to do the job on most of the rest as they mostly fit together pretty well, with a few exceptions where filler is needed. Around half of the figures on the sprue have separate arms, the rest are one piece castings.

The box art suggested Vallejo 887 Brown Violet for the helmet, but I am a big fan of making US WW2 helmets look more, well, "green". Not sure why, it just feels more right (and helps differentiates them more from British figures too from a distance). You can see from the helmet on this guy that the level of raised detail on the unpainted figure (who has netting cast onto his helmet) does struggle to make it through two coats of paint and two of varnish and the same is true of some other areas on the figures, especially the webbing, where a little more relief in the casting/moulding might have been helpful to painters like me. .

Hands and face were a one-coat of Vallejo 019 Dark Flesh - it always seems a little pale to me, and maybe the box suggestion of 815 Basic Skin Tone is darker? As well as shooting and advancing riflemen the sprue contains a number of officers, one casualty and (I think) a medic.

The ratio of officers (or more accurately, blokes using radios or holding binoculars) to "men doing stuff" seems a little high, although with 50-odd figures in the box there is clearly plenty of scope to make a decent platoon and have a bit of attrition along the way. Maybe another reason why having more "arms" on the sprue, so some of the officers could have been demoted to riflemen, would have been useful?

The two PSC figures are here on the left, with the Matchbox ones on the right. The officer's coat is Coat d'arms 215 Leather Brown - not sure if this is historical but I guess an officer could rustle up whatever he liked really...and the colour is one I know from my ECW figures really takes a Darktone varnish very well.

Gun stocks were all painted in Coat d'arms 235 Horse Tone Brown, with black + gunmetal drybrushed metalwork. Plastic Soldier Review suggests that the Matchbox figures are 21mm high and the PSC ones are 24mm high, but I can't really see quite that much difference on the tabletop myself - can you?

Finally, they were painted in ArmyPainter Quickshade Dark Tone, (including the base) and Testors Dullcot'ed. The bases were drybrushed in Bleached Bone and then light grey, with Silfor tufts and some static grass added at the end of the process.

Not too bad for a quick and dirty paint job I reckon...   now, I just have to actually find some decent weather to spray the rest, time to paint them and somehow time, space and terrain to play an actual game!

Here's a set of photos of the whole lot being painted (which I've added to this post later on).

The in-the-plastic set. I've used nearly all of the 3 sprues, and tried to swap a couple of arms around, with limited success it must be said..

Undercoated, and with the Faded Khaki done.

Flesh painted...

...and now I've finally finished them - see some more photos of the finished unit here