Hi there folks!

Just a quick update on my progress with Project Platoon. I started at quite a pace before Christmas and was planning to continue straight after the holiday break. But we had a phone call on the 31st of December it went something like this: Builder ‘Hello there we are coming to rip your kitchen out and install a brand new one starting the 3rd of January.’ Well I thought great a new kitchen from the landlady, cant be bad. ‘Excellent, how long will it take?’ said I. Builder ‘shouldn’t be more than a week or two.’ ‘Ok see ya then.’

And this is were the nightmare begins, for the whole month of January we had no kitchen, well we did, but it just happened to be in my painting room, so progress was slow on that front. I think I have got myself back on track now with a couple of squads completed and the command and a few extras based ready to begin.

I had always been keen to add a few 28mm WW2 tanks and vehicles to my collection. When I first started collecting WW2 in this scale I used the tanks made by Battle Honours. The tanks were pretty good (although rather large) but cost quite a lot so I never got around to buying too many of them. Unfortunately since being sold to the USA they have been rather hard to get hold of. Various other companies have made 28mm tanks and vehicles but none of them really mixed with my originals, so I've ended up with tons of infantry and not many vehicles.

When I said  was going to try and make a platoon on a budget I initially thought vehicles and tanks would be a luxury out of my budget, or so I thought. Guy claimed to have located some good toy tanks that might look good painted up. I was a bit skeptical, but he swore to me they would do the job. Sure enough he got me four! Enough to do a German Panzer IV platoon! At just £3.99 each I got a platoon for less then the price of a single tank from most wargames companies.

Time for another update on Project Platoon! Here is the progress so far. in the lead by far is Christy, she's only waiting to finish off the last of her vehicles and troops before she's ready. In joint second we have Mark and Paul both who have squads assembled but not quite the full Platoon. Mark has tanks ready and Paul is close with a good two squads ready to go. Jasper has a good two squads done with more coming. Ah but I hear you ask, what of Guy, the Editor? What of me?

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WS&S are off to Yate (near Bristol, UK) today to have a chat with Rob Broom, the man behind War & Conquest! Expect a first look at this new game in our next issue, WSS 59, due out March 1st.

At last I managed to get a few hours to paint up my first figures for my Project Platoon Panzergrenadiers. After 10 minutes with a craft knife on a chopping mat cleaning up odd bits of flash they were stuck to 20mm x 20mm square bases made from GW movement trays and undercoated black by hand. Normally I spray them with a matt black spray, but for such a small number of figures it did not seem economical, so I went for the cheaper but slightly longer option.

The figures shown here are the cheap Artizan miniatures brought from a bring and buy a few years back. I think the front figure is meant to be for the DAK, but the zeltbahn being worn over the head like that screams 1944 Western Front to me, so fits in nicely. The rear figures are an MG42 team. I painted them all up using Anita's craft acrylics and mixing the colours with the only exceptions being the flesh and the silver which both came from Coat D'Arms, and a few ink washes from GW. Each figure took about 45 minutes to complete the paint job. Overall I'm pretty pleased with them.

The splinter pattern is about as reasonable as I can make it without spending hours on each one. Essentially it is a mixture of 50:50 light green and grey for the basecoat. The brown jagged splinters  are painted first as a series of triangles. Then about half the number of green splinters are added touching the brown splinters. Lastly with a very fine brush I attempted to add some of the thin tear drops. The camouflage pattern was all given an additional Devlan Mud GW ink wash and a few sections were highlighted again. The fieldgrey was a mix of 50:50 mid grey and dark green. I kept the black undercoat in the recesses for a darker shade. After another wash of Devlan Mud I gave a final mid grey highlight on the raised areas. Nothing beats having a few examples to look at when you paint up camouflage, so I had Mollo's classic Army Uniforms of WW2 and the obligatory Osprey with some nice colour plates by Stephen Andrew on hand for guidance.

The basing is sharp sand painted earth brown and drybrushed in a light grey followed by a sandy cream colour. To finish it off there is a bit of Silfor prairie tuft on each one. I brought the big economy packs of these from Mutineer Miniatures a while back and they might initially be quite expensive but look great and will last for several armies. I am right out of static grass at the moment, but I will probably add some to break up the base a bit more. Time wise this was pretty quick but had to be done in stages so that the sand stuck properly and the colours did not mix when drybrushed.

In the background you can see some of the trenches I made for the Brecourt Manor participation game we ran at The Other Partizan. More on how to make those later!


Happy painting and gaming!

Cheers

Mark

It's me again - WSS's resident newbie wargamer and demon painter. Since my last blog entry, I've manage to make huge progress with my platoon - I've finished my command team and two complete squads. I've got some interesting things I'd like to say about painting all of these figures, but I think I'll wait till another post to do that. For now, I thought it might be a good idea to try and give some structure for wargaming newbs like me who are really interested in the idea of a WWII platoon-based game, but just don't know what they need or where to begin. I know from experience that getting started with something like this can at times seem overwhelming when you don't know what you need to paint or buy to get a playable army together... and I've got an advantage since I can just pick the brains of any of our experts if I have a question.

Well I suppose an introduction is the best place to start. My name is Paul and I know Guy through our local games club. He mentioned that WS&S were about to commence on project platoon and asked if I would be interested in taking part. That is where it all begins.

For Project Platoon I elected to go for German Panzergrenadiers. There was a fair amount of discussion and ideas banded around before we came to our final choices. Initially I had been keen on converting and painting a partisan unit. In the end however we decided that we wanted to keep all of the units we would be collecting as regulars and loosely theme them around Operation Market Garden.