Warhammer Fantasy Empire Army

My younger brother Alec and I were first

introduced to the wargaming hobby in the summer 2000 by a mutual friend. We started playing Mage Knight and moved on to Warhanner Fantasy. I started collecting a Dwarf Army and Alec started an Empire army. Alec's Empire army never got much past the assembled and primed stage, aside from character models and a steam tank which he had painted. He could just never get into painting rank and file models. In January 2007 Alec passed away. I planned to finish his empire army, and just finally got started working on it in February. So far I've painted two units of 10 knightly orders, a unit of 15 Swordsmen, 12 Handgunners, and 5 Pistoliers. The General on Griffin Alec had already painted, I just hand to do some repair and touch up work to it, such as pinning the wings and fixing a few paint chips.

I've got another 12 Handgunners on the painting table now, along with the Steam Tank which I'm touching up and repairing. After that I'll probably start work on the Great Swords and Flagelants.

In other news, I managed to make it to Cold Wars last Friday. It's the first time I've managed to make it to a convention. I picked up some FAA Moroccan troops for my 1940 french army, as well as a few Frontline Belgian T-15s from the RLBPS stand, and some more 1/600 scale ironclads from Thoroughbred Figures in the dealers area.

The nearly impervious Char B1

The Char B1 Heavy Tank, the most powerful tank of the early part of ww2, with a forward hull mounted 75mm gun, at turreted 45mm gun, a Coaxial MG and armor that in some places reached a thickness of 65mm. At the beginning of the war the German's didn't even have a anti-tank gun that could pierce the armor except when a direct hit to the main vent was achieved. Of course they could be taken out by repeated hits, they could be slowly pounded into non-functionality. I'd imagine that repeated direct hits would have quite a negative effect on the crew morale.

Enough history though, I've recently finished painting six of these monsters. I painted three in a camo scheme and three a basic green paint job. This is the first real camo job I've tried on an AFV and I'm relatively pleased with it.

Early World War II French Armor

Ahhhh..... the Early War French army. The Early part of the War holds great interest for me, I've been reading everything I can get my hands on about 1940 France, 1939 Poland, and even the Winter War between the Finns and the Russians, I've been picking up miniatures for pretty much all the above as well. The French however are the closest to being done. I've uploaded some pictures of some recently completed French armor here.

They are all RAFM models, there are 4 Renault R35s, 2 Hotchkiss H35s and 2 Lorraine APCs.

I'm pretty pleased with how they came out. While the french had some great armor camo schemes it's my understanding (and in this case I'm going to stick by that understanding no matter how wrong it turns out to be) that a quite a few French tanks of the period didn't get the camo treatment, so for these models I decided not to go the way of camo. That is of course just a lame excuse, because I hate painting camo and I'm not very good at it either.