There may be something of a slowdown...

In the previous thrilling installment of Paintbrush and Superglue, I mentioned that we were expecting a baby girl, and had lowered my painting expectations accordingly. Well, a couple of weeks ago, Jessica arrived...

"Wait, what are you going to do with this photo?"

... and I haven't picked up a paintbrush since. Still, I'm going back to work on Friday for a rest, so we'll see how things go from that point.

However, before the 4:30am drive to the hospital, I managed to do some work on my Stuarts:

These pictures aren't fantastically well exposed...

... since I was taking them between nappy changes and didn't have time to set them up better.

I'm not approaching the tanks for this army as I normally would - I'm putting more highlights onto them than usual. Now, I'm never really sure about highlights on things like tanks that have a lot of flat surfaces. A lot of the models you see that win awards and suchlike have highlights that just look wrong to me - they've been very carefully blended and all the rest, but the effect for me just doesn't seem convincingly like a real life tank. Maybe it's me, but highlights that are way over the top seem to be in fashion as a way of showing how good you are at applying highlights rather than making the models look realistic. Anyway, I'm giving it a try but I'm trying to keep them reasonably muted. There are two layers of highlights on these, but I'll be taking those down with ink later, after I apply transfers. The transfers should be going on to the entire army in one go once I have it ready, so for now, these are done.

With the Stuarts completed, I decided that the next thing my US Armor company needs is an armored rifle platoon, since tanks without infantry support can be very vulnerable to assaults from enemy infantry (something I like to exploit with my Airborne company, heh heh heh). The .50 cal machine guns strapped to basically every vehicle the Americans fielded help a lot with this, but I still want some infantry support and so I started on the halftrack riders. 

Like Kieron, I've realised that the recon platoon is basically bits of an armored rifle platoon plus jeeps. So, with the aim of acquiring table-ready platoons for as little work as possible, I've started to paint a halftrack and a jeep. I also started the anti-tank gun from the armored rifle platoon, since it was just sitting there.

Errr... that's it. I'm not sure when I'll next paint, or post, or anything, but as life with a daughter sinks in and gets less hectic, something like normal service should be resumed in due course, and I'll ramble on about it as boringly as possible here. I'm sure you're looking forward to that as much as I am!

Mobile Phones Don't Have Very Good Cameras

The month has ended, and I've painted something. 3 Shermans, in fact:

Apologies for the not so great photo - the good camera is now packed in the "The Baby's Coming, We've Got To Get To The Hospital" bag, so I used my iPhone to take this.

Anyway. These still need transfers adding, but given that I have a big pile of tanks to paint I've decided to do all of the transfers together at the end. I particularly like the baseball bat on the the turret of the lead tank, nice bit of character for a US tank I thought!

As I hinted at oh so subtly above, Mrs Matt is due to give birth this month, which is likely to have something of an impact on my ability to paint stuff. Since I've started them already, I'm just going to aim to paint 5 Stuarts, which would probably make my US Tank Company big enough to use in some games (although until I do the armored rifles I think it will struggle a bit with no infantry support at all).