Intermezzo in Historia

Reading between the lines of my previous posts you might get the sense that I'm burning out on the death guard. And you would be right!


One of my personal challenges is that my mind is constantly bursting with new idea's, new projects...a typical example of  "the new shiny thing"-syndrome. I'm easily enthusiasmed by an  idea.
This has it benefits but also some serious pitfalls.


To prevent rushing the death guard to subpar completion. I've partly given in to the sentiment that I needed to do something other than death guard. Last October I've started painting a tiny (1/48 scale) PanzerKampfWagen IV Ausf H. The occasion/motivation for it was a half day workshop at scale model challenge in Veldhoven, the Netherlands. I had the opportunity to follow this workshop from Jose luis lopez, diving into his Black & White technique for painting scale models. during this short course I prepared my Black and white undercoat for the panzer with some tricks here and there to extra highlight some interesting features of the model. Afterwards a very thin and controlled "Dunkelgelb" was applied. But after the workshop, the panzer remained WIP on my desk. Constantly reminding that something had to be done, But I never took it up.


So back to the present situation: I needed a distraction and the panzer needed attention, so we found each other. In the following pictures you can find the current state of the tank: after the airbrushing I added scratches, started painting some of the details & gave it all a nice coat of Tamiya X22 clear. All in preparation of the following oily steps!
Some important things to note are the lack of Schürtzen. I've convinced myself to try and soler some nice edged brass. This however wasn't finished in time for the workshop. So it still needs to happen.

And what would be a lonely panzer without some interesting setting. So during the last couple of evenings, I've built a solid foundation for a nice environment for this vehicle.

As a consequence, I've given myself the challenge of some serious conversions on a couple of resin figures. But that will be a different story.

Here's the current mock up of this vignette.

Down in Southern Russia a PzIv is guided across an improvised bridge with the help of the dismounted crew. Simple, yet I hope effective. Comments, remarks and ideas are greatly appreciated as I am a bit out of my comfort zone in this strange historical part of the hobby :-D

Wait for it.........

What happend to my intentions of updating more often?




Well actually, not taking pictures and limited hobby time happened!
The last couple of weeks I've been slowly grinding on the next 5 breachers.
And actually they are pretty close to completion.
I've also built my grave wardens and started on their bases. That way I can airbrush/prime them at the same occasion.

But back to the breachers. At a certain point I decided to not use the stellar decal/transfer sheet from forge world. This meant lots of small freehands. But as I figured the army wasn't going to be that massive, I kinda accepted the consequences. In reality this always becomes a point in time where my progress stalls a bit. I like doing the freehands but dread it at the same time.


But after leaving the dread behind I slowely started to make some headway:

Not perfect, but good enough hidden partially behind the breacher shield.
Likewise I added legion symbols, roman numerals and other minor marking to all the models. Minimal, as we are talking about death guard. And then I assembled the models and started finishing the breachers shields and backpacks on the model itself.

And another hesitation for the next freehands :-/
And more cursing about not using the transfer sheet....
But lets start with blocking in some green banding:

So let's hope this evenings painting session brings more tiny scribblings, less fear and some steps closer to finishing these 5 breachers. I can't wait to have the first 10 troops surrounding Mortarion on picture.
And yes....again I've come up with the idea that this is the last army I'll ever do. So much other cool projects are haunting my dreams. But I will persist, I will not rush and I will do my death guard army justice!