Identifying and painting Japanese armour is not the easiest task for many of us. Japanese armour is just not as familiar to us growing up in wargaming as German or Allied. It is even harder than identifying Italian or Romanian simply because for most of us in the west the names are just tricky to remember and then to place against less familiar profiles. Secondly the lack of easily accessible source material on the use and battles of Japanese armour has contributed to general

Over the years I have had loads of German WW2 stuff pass across the painting desk, mainly in 28mm but also in 15mm. German commissions outnumber all the other nations by at least 2 to 1 and there are few vehicles I havent painted. Some are obviously repeat offenders and I wont be including the Panzer IVh, the Puma, the Stug IIIg or the Panther here. Instead these are my favourite vehicles by looks, rarity or oddity. They are in no particular order as there are no real criteri

A different sort of Blog this week as I thought I would do a bit of a Pantherama. A run through some of the Panthers I have painted in both 28mm and a few 15mm (at the end). This is a obviously only a selection. As one of the iconic WW2 AFVs it is a rare German Army that comes to me Pantherless. If nothing else it can be a camo resource showing some of the myriad schemes available other than the usual 3 colour wavy lines common in Normandy in 1944. First up we have a couple o

As everybody knows Germany invaded the USSR on 21st June 1942 in Operation Barbarossa and was spectacularly successful in terms of enemy killed/captured/acreage but fell short before Moscow and Leningrad due to some combination of starting late due to the Balkan Campaign or early autumn mud "glueing" German units in place. From here the story goes that thanks to Hitler believing it would all be over by Christmas after the whole rotten communist edifice collapsed there was no

I recently had a commission to paint some SS infantry wearing the rarely painted Rauchtarnmuster camouflage, sometimes known as smokey or blurred edge camo. It is a version of the much more common plane tree camo which i painted a version of here.... https://www.firstcommissionpainting.co.uk/single-post/2019/11/12/how-i-paint-waffen-ss-oak-leaf-camouflage-and-pea-dot However the difference is basically the blurry edge of Rauchtarnmuster - not easy in 28mm and therefore as alw

The Shinhoto Chi Ha was apparently just a normal Chi Ha but with a 47mm Anti Tank gun instead of a 57mm infantry support weapon. I think that this came about after meeting Soviet armour in 1939 and coming off worse. In any event this is Warlord's Shinhoto painted up in a slightly later version of the Japanese three colour camo. Reading other people more knowledgable than myself (almost everyone in this case) the nice yellow stripe and black outlining was dropped in 1942 so do

A few Bolt Action Soviet bits recently completed and in one place. The BA10 armoured car is one of my favourite vehicles from an aesthetic point of view as it has plenty of nice open panels for some subtle modulation. I always thought it was called the BA 32 but apparently that was just a later version. Seems it was used extensively early war successfully against Japan and less so against Finland, although the tracked version can be made from the Warlord kit. Something like 3

I recently had a dinky T26 Kht 130 to paint for a commission and actually remembered to take some snaps of how I went along. First of all though I need to acknowledge that almost everything I do when painting WW2 armour was learned from the master Ruben Torregosa on his Heresybrush website. In fact if you want to skip the rest of this guide here is the link to Heresybrush https://www.heresybrush.com/en/ If you're still with me what I've done is to adapt all that I learned fro

WW2 British Infantry are some of my favourite ww2 figures to paint both because of the aesthetic and the challenge. The aesthetic is that their uniform is frankly dull and designed to be that way. It was a uniform without frills built for function rather than form and as it continued throughout the war and into the 1960s with only small changes It obviously did the job. There are no high leather boots or shiny leather here, just a khaki coloured workmans clothes with webbing

Recently I have winter Camo’d several vehicles for various customers and thought to take some pictures while doing this T34. As a result here is a quick “How I do…” on winter camouflage. Step 1 First take your painted T34. Here I’ve got a Bolt Action 28mm T34 and painted up and varnished in the usual manner with the modulation probably overdone for the purpose. Subsequently I’ve discovered that cruder slightly darker modulation actually works better with snow camo. Some mino