Better Living Through Chemistry

It had to happen sometime.

Admittedly, it took a convenient confluence of circumstances - rain that stopped me doing work in the garden, a cancelled meeting at work so that I unexpectedly finished 90 minutes earlier than I expected - but here we are.

Not only have I started painting something, I'm blogging about it too!

Right. So, errr (clears throat). How do these things go again? Oh yes, targets.

I've always liked the American army in WW2. I suspect this comes from movies and video games that tend to feature the yanks heavily (often in fact to the exclusion of everyone else involved), but in Flames of War there's an obvious attraction - the US Army seems to have an unlimited supply of equipment (especially bazookas...) so playing as the Americans gives you access to a lot of fun toys.

When I first started playing FoW I got myself a US Airborne force, which I've had a fair amount of success with - big, Fearless units can be very effective when they're flung with reckless abandon at enemy armour, especially when they also have gammon bombs. Eventually I added some armoured support of my own, and now I have a full (fairly large in fact) armoured company that I'd like to play some games with. However, it's not painted.

We're planning a mid-war campaign at the club over the winter, and I'll be playing as the Americans. So my goal is to get a mid-war version of a US Tank Company ready for that, to allow me to alternate between the Airborne and the Armored guys.

I've also got some late-war tanks to paint, but I'll put those on the back burner for now.

There's not much of August left and I don't expect I'll get a lot of free time for painting (my wife is eight months pregnant, so there's a lovely list of DIY I need to do) so I'll start small and try to get three Shermans painted. That will give me eight painted Shermans, so I could field that as two command and two platoons of three.

Here they are as they stand at the moment - base coated with some highlights, but the tracks and stowage still need to be done.

I also started a couple of M18s, just because they were undercoated and sat on my desk...

 

I'd also like to sing the praises of some new technology I've acquired. First off, "Zip Kicker". I picked this up in Modelzone, it's an accelerator for superglue.

 

Really works, too! It makes it much, much easier to put fiddly things together, especially stuff like Battlefront tanks which have resin and metal components. The superglue bonds and sets immediately, so you aren't trying to hold things in place as it slowly dries.

Next, I thought I'd try some of Games Workshop's (boo! hiss! etc!) Liquid Green Stuff.

 

I'm not quite as big a fan of this as I am the Zip Kicker, but it does work, and I was able to fill some gaping holes in the hulls of these plastic Shermans pretty easily.

Using Liquid Green Stuff is a bit like painting with toothpaste - it's thick and dries quickly, so you have to move fast and use layers to build up any big areas. It is certainly easier than solid Green Stuff for things like this though.