On the Workbench: WOTR & WW2 Naval

I made pretty good progress this week towards completing the latest Wars of the Roses batch of figures plus a little dabbling in WW2 naval:

Completed and ready to join the ranks are two units of Shire Longbowmen. 

Also on the WOTR theme, almost finished crossbowmen, handgunners and a unit of Pikemen. All WOTR figures are by Baccus.

And now for something completely different:

Continued -

This is my second attempt at paint stripping. I found that using a stiff brush while submerged in nail varnish remover dissolved the paint well. There were some stubborn areas that need scrubbing with a small wire brush or picking out between crevices in the model. A few patches have been left as I was in danger of damaging the model after scrubbing and filing. I calculated though that if the paint proved to be that tough it would not present a problem by over-painting. 

This model is HMS Ramilles, a Revenge class Battleship. It is a Navwar model at least 25 years old. I am not sure how it compares in quality with the latest Navwar sculpts. Some I have purchased recently definitely have more clearly defined features. Hopefully though I will do it justice.  

It has now received it's coat of grey primer (Humbrol grey enamel). It is with some degree of caution that I am painting this ship. The last time I decided to paint up "just one ship" it completely sidetracked me into several months of naval and air wargaming! I will do my best though as I really need to maintain a degree of self-discipline in seeing projects through rather than flitting around various periods.

Rebasing my WW2 continues and I find myself once again vowing to never rebase in the future. Aside from attaching thinner bases I am taking the opportunity of improving them. When basing at this scale it is so easy to overwhelm the figures, particularly for WW2 where uniforms are designed to blend in with the terrain. 

Unfortunately I could not get the lighting quite right for this photo so the difference between old and new is not so obvious. You can see though that the two central bases contained larger rocks and when combined with the paint scheme I used made the figures a little less prominent. To speed up basing I did not fill the gap between figures resulting in their moulded figure bases standing proud. This time around I have corrected that and that extra time spent was definitely worth it. 

These should result in my standardised desert bases when I eventually get back to Colonial Sudan although for those I will revert back to my thicker card bases.

Tomorrow I will be spending the day shifting out unused furniture and appliances to a storage unit, after which I hope to find myself with enough space to continue gaming where I left off. I should know by the weekend. Watch this space!