Book Review: Painting Wargaming Figures - Axis Forces on the Eastern Front

 
This is the third of Andy Singleton's painting guides that I have reviewed ( Early Imperial Romans and WWII in the Desert). As usual, they are well researched and give some useful background on the period and theatre of war.

As the title suggests, it covers more than just a painting guide to the German forces (Wehrmacht and Waffen SS) on the Eastern Front. Also covering the Italians, Romanians, Hungarians, and also the Finnish forces. Due to the changing allegiances as the war progressed some of these could be used on either side in the conflict, and the Finns could also be used for the Winter War (technically separate from WWII, a conflict between Finland and the USSR from November 1939 to March 1940).

The book covers the preparation of the miniatures, a painting guide aimed at reasonable quality and speed, and a guide to basing in the various terrains experienced on the Eastern Front.

So far so good, and there is no denying the quality of Andy's finished miniatures. However, this book suffers from the same drawback that was seen in the previous two books. The photos of the miniatures as they are being painted are all "long shots" that include a lot of wasted space featuring the clamp holding the miniature. In this book in particular it is a problem as Andy has chosen to paint 20mm minis instead of the larger 28mm minis in the previous books. This makes actually seeing the different stages of painting very difficult (if not impossible). I even tried using a magnifying glass, and on some of the guides it is impossible to tell the difference from one stage to the next.

The following two examples of pages from the guides, I hope, demonstrate the deficiency in the photos.

The photos would be far more useful if they included some close-up shots so we could actually see the development from one stage to the next.

Even with the problem with the poor photography in this guide, I think it would still be a useful addition to any wargamers collection if they were planning to start collecting an Axis army from the Eastern Front. 

I hope that Pen And Sword take on my criticism about this book and fix it for future volumes as I think they are developing into a valuable resource for wargamers.

The book is available now direct from Pen And Sword HERE.

Frostgrave Scenery Project - Trees

After a couple of rather long projects I have a couple of quicker ones to show.

First up we have some trees.

I bought a couple of bags of wintery trees from an Ebay dealer in China. The trees are supplied with the snow already on them, but just pieces of wire coming out of the trunk. For the two packs they cost around £16.

To base them I cut and sanded some random shapes out of some scraps of 6mm MDF. The edges are sanded down to the table level with the plan that they will look like snow drifts once complete.

I drilled 2mm holes where the trees were to be placed and glued them in with PVA woodglue.

Once the trees were firmly stuck in place I moved on to finishing the bases. Normally I would add sand at this point, but as they were snow covered I skipped this stage. I simply applied a nice thick coat of white emulsion paint and while the paint was still wet I sprinkled Woodland Scenics Soft Flake Snow over them.

I will give them all a spray coat of matt varnish to hold the foliage and snow in place.

A nice simple little project that took very little time at all...

New 28mm Laser Cut Long Shipping Containers

It has been suggested that I could add long (40 foot instead of the standard 20 foot ones) shipping containers to the range I produce. So I have been playing around with the idea. I have done a couple of test builds and I just need to tweak a few things before they are finalized!

They will be available in both 28mm scale and 20mm, like the standard 20 foot containers.