I found time between nappy changes to do some painting

It's a busy life, being a dad, as I'm sure many of the adoring millions who read this blog must already know. 

On the one hand you have to go back to work all too soon after the little bundle of joy arrives, and on the other you spend most of your free time when you're not at work either looking after your offspring or catching up on some of the sleep you've missed. 

Family members are drawn to the new arrival like moths to a flame, and your doting partner doesn't get much time to do anything other than mothering during the day so there's always housework to help out with when you get home.

Even if you didn't have to do all this, having your own child around is fascinating and a lot of fun, and you can happily waste hours playing with them and seeing what faces they're going to pull, or things they're going to be sick on, next.

This all makes finding time for painting a bit tricky, but I have persevered, and by not paying enough attention to my daughter waiting until my daughter is asleep, I've managed to achieve some results - the M3 halftracks for my US Armored Rifle platoon for Flames of War!

The photo isn't great unfortunately, but hopefully you can make out that I've used the same style of painting as for my other recent US armour models - a base coat with two layers of highlight, trying not to go too overboard with it and make the highlights unrealistic. I've also left off the transfers for now, and I'm going to stick to the plan of doing these all in one go later.

After some deliberation I decided that my "purple heart boxes" would have the mid-war style mounts for the machine guns, instead of the pulpit mount which appears in late-war. I've reasoned to myself that there must still have been some older unmodified half tracks in service in the later war, and it makes more sense to use mid-war models for late-war than the other way around!

Obviously I now need to paint the infantry for this platoon too. That should probably be my next target (the club FoW campaign starts next week after all), but in fine wargamer's style I've been distracted by something new, so details of that will follow...