Soldiers, Toy Soldiers and Nothing But Toy Soldiers!

 Its official! No more holiday snaps from the S Island. The weather here has also been rather inclement the last couple of days, so weekend bush walks will be less frequent for the next few months, meaning this blog may be restricted to its original purpose of recording wargames (lets hope!) and the models used to play them!

The first batch of Spanish Nationalist troops are nearing completion, but having restrained myself for a fortnight, tonight I opened the third box (of six) that arrived here on 6 May - the Female Militia (or Milicianas) pack!

To be fair to myself, this was partly due to the fact that the painting guide book Rick leant me the other day only features one 20mm figure, and that is the Milicianas Officer. So, as a bit of an experiment, I have had a try at replicating the work of the very talented artist in the book - how successfully - well you can judge! I am happy with the results but I dont have the eyesight or talent to recreate exactly the example in the book

Front and rear view of the box the figures come in - as Lawrence (I think) remarked on the previous example, the art work is pretty dramatic!

The contents - above front is the officer figure I painted

As with the Nationalist command box, the Militia come complete with three handy dandy standards to choose from!

Relevant pages from the said painting guide

Stage one (after black undercoat) is chocolate brown base coat

English (sic) Uniform jacket and my version of Russian Uniform for breeches and puttees. Beret repainted matt black

Uniform highlighted and leather belt/holster repainted

Black edging added, brown leather highlighted and the flesh painted "tan"

Collar patches added and flesh highlighting done

The finished product from four different angles

Not quite up to the book example but looks ok to me and it will look about 50% better once based

Finally, I popped into a local (to work) hobby store yesterday to pick up some plastic cement (when did it get sooo expensive??!), and got chatting to the proprietor. Its mainly a fantasy/Warhammer/40K type store, but they have paint and basing products any gamer can use. They also have a large area at the rear set out with tables so I asked how that worked and the guy was happy to give me a little tour and explain how they operate. The upshot being, we (my group of gaming buddies) may have found an ideal location for week night games of up to six or even eight participants, all for a very reasonable financial arrangement - each player pays $10 for table hire but this translates into a store credit - so we really only have to buy something to the value of $10 to have access to several tables, neoprane gaming mats and a significant amount of mdf scenery - couple of images below give some idea of the facility

You hire the table "for the day" so in theory on a weekday, you could front up around 10-11am (opening time varies) and paly until 10pm! Weekends they close up at 6pm and they are shut all day Monday - but I dont think I have ever played a game on a Monday anyway!

Note a couple of mid week, mid day gamers in the top right - one appeared to be a middle aged woman although I could not swear to it!