Painting & Repainting New & Old Stuff

After baking gently for one hour at 28C whilst painting the wendy house interior and remembering some unpainted Renault R40 tanks, I decided to switch to a sensible and indoors activity.

Painting in the conservatory

Thing is, right, once the storage boxes where my figures are segregated in neat little semi-landscaped fields were opened up and the plasticky, painty aroma wafted up, my modelling juices started flowing again. And my endless fiddling with tank squadron organisation. And buying more stuff.

I noticed a few highlit 'wanted' oddments in my excel figure lists (P16 halftracks originally from Ian Armstrong, Renault 1916 armoured cars from Heroics' WW1 range for the Beglians to potter around in and various odd single figures needed to complete certain foot troop bases) and added some DFS230 gliders to enable a platoon (well, it's better than nothing!) to be landed on some unsuspecting clump of forts. I decided against buying the H&R actual German Paratroopers but did order another infantry pack for good measure. And some French, command packs, a few standing & kneeling guncrews (good for making up the numbers on engineering & artillery spotter groups). Definitely at the 'filling up the corners' stage now!

Hardly any of the aircraft bought yonks ago were painted so research was started on paint schemes for the Morane Saulnier and thanks to Za Rodinu at WW2 Talk I was directed to Urban's Colour Charts and introduced to the science of camouflage colours. A couple of trips to Marquee Models (support your local hobby store-it's only 10p extra for a Humbrol tin!) bagged me some shades of brown and blue-grey, close enough for my purposes without mixing 4 or 5 different colours.

The recommended tins for the schwarzgun & dunkelgrun German splinter camo are 91 and 116 or 30. With my eyes, 116 looked almost indistinguishable from 91 so 30 was used for a bit of extra contrast but think it is overlight so will probably go back to 116. There is no easy match for gris bleu clair on lower surfaces of French planes. Plumped for 87 first of all but may change to another shade.

So current work in progress is:

• filing excess Araldite off Stuka wings & repainting
• paint Fairey Battles#, Boulton-Paul Defiants, Me109s, Lysander, Fieseler Storch, Morane Saulnier 406s and DFS 230s
• paint numerous BMW combos, Kfz69s & 70s and Horch Kfz15s
• paint Renault R40s & repaint* Char Bs/Hotchkiss H39s

#These may well end up as Belgian, for a bit of equality

*All Char Bs, H39s & S35s were daubed an overall green of some description, at a time when I cared even less about authenticity. In time this will all be rectified somewhat, to something more wiggly & intricate