The Lost and the Damned and the Stunted

 Today’s post brings my Dieppe Landing project officially to a close. I’m very pleased to see these boys finished as it’s been a bit since I’ve actually completed a project! 

*Please note the terms “finished and completed” are loosely used here are already I have additions to this army on the plastic & lead mountain…. It never ends, right? 

This ten man Section represent Canada’s finest army regulars, very well trained and poorly prepared for the landings August 19th 1942. 

The sculpts are older Commonwealth infantry plastic kits by Warlord Games. I think the uniforms and helmets are a little more suitable for later war actions but for their price point I felt they’d make do. Not the biggest fan of this kit as they were dead fiddly to put together but they look decent enough painted up and I have a second section primed along with a PIAT team for paint to be done at a later date.

 Here are the last five of the commando miniatures for my initial Dieppe Landing army list so now my squads are complete and all I have left to finish up for this army is my ten-man squad of Canadian Regulars.

I’ll be sure to take a pic of the commando squads and put them up in my next post. 

Stuck some sergeant and corporal markings in there and even managed to get decent eyes painted on four out of five of them. 

 As mentioned in my last post, I and not a fan of batch painting. It’s just not fun. I prefer the experience of putting all my effort into one mini until it’s done. Trying to get a system going on 10+ minis at a time just becomes “work”. Enough grumbling though. :)

With that said I only managed to get 5 of the 10 remaining Commandos completed but I’ll call that a victory! (The remaining 5 are also about 50% done so not all bad.)

On to the pics.

Like a lot of war gamers I am not a big fan of prone poses, but they are more realistic cos afterall, who wants to make a big target of themselves by standing tall?

Overhead shot to get a better look at this prone blokes.

The final 5 waiting to be done.

Thinking I need a palette cleanser mini to work on before i finish the commandos so expect that next.

Stay safe out there,

- Dai

 As I was working on the remaining 10 commandos for my WW2 Dieppe Landing army, I realized I had forgotten one very important piece that had yet to be built, a Canadian Army Chaplain! 

I’m not sure just how many chaplains accompanied the troops during the landing, but I am aware of the most famous Canadian Chaplain who was present, Rev. John Weir Foote, the only Canadian chaplain to date to ever have been awarded the Victoria Cross. He received the medal for his tireless dedication to both the wounded and deceased on the beach, even refusing to evacuate when the beach was obviously lost so he could stay with his charges though he would consequently be kept as a POW until the end of the war.

I couldn’t find an actual British Chaplain figure anywhere online, so had to resort to using spare plastic British infantry body parts that I had left over. From the pics I saw online I knew that chaplains required shoulder boards as they kept officer rank and minister’s dog collar as well as an armband with the Red Cross for their medic duties. I tried to sculpt these pieces from green stuff and so they look a bit blobby up close but from arms length they’ll do. 

Here’s a fuzzy pic of the mini with green stuff added. 

And here’s the finished result. Ingame chaplains “can” have a pistol tho I prefer them as being non-combatants so whilst I added the holstered weapon, I only did so for the option. Saying that, my grandfather was a royal naval chaplain and he was a big fan of the idea of blasting an enemy, so maybe not all chaplains are cut from the same cloth!?

And now back to painting those commandos... have I ever mentioned how much I despise batch painting? 

 Once again, real life has proven too needy and so my poor hobby desk has suffered neglect. Until that is, this windy weekend, when I was able to slap some paint on and complete these four Commandos for my 1942 Dieppe Landing WW2 project. 

They are (I think) all Black Tree sculpts and they are decent enough and had little to no flash to clear up prior to painting. They're all mounted on steel washers too. Their paint jobs are tabletop quality and I even managed half decent eyes on this lot. I have another 10 or 12 left to do and should have lots of time coming up later this week when I dog-sit whilst my better half is off on a short trip.

Next up is a little bonus mini I got done with a VERY quick paint job using washes, GW Contrast paints and drybrushing. This is my first dip into 3D printed miniatures by a Canadian company I found on Etsy called 3DShoppe. I ordered 5 sculpts and including shipping think I spent around $40 - not horrible. They arrived in a decent timeframe and were packed well. Sadly though, due to both how fine the sculpts were (TINY fingers!) and how brittle the material was, some parts were snapped/missing, like a couple fingers on two of the sculpts and a dagger blade from another. Easy fixes, but a bit annoying regardless. Aside form that though, I have been VERY impressed with the quality of these prints - there are no layer-lines, the minis have smooth surfaces much like any other sculpt, their details are very sharp too. I think I'd buy some again in the future, though I'll be more certain to let the buyer know to pack new orders a little better.

So here we have a Banshee for my roleplay minis collection. I really liked this sculpt as it had lots of cool movement to it and I guess she could double up as a ghost too in a pinch. Hope you like.

Next up are some more Commandos and perhaps another Fantasy offering, though of a much more diminutive stature!

Hope all are staying safe out there,

- Dai 

 First off, happy Halloween, Thanksgiving, Xmas, New Year and Valentines! O, and happy 9th birthday to this venerable blog too as of October 1st or thereabouts.

Right, now I got those important things out of the way... stuff my end has been (obviously) quiet hobby-wise since August. Lots of real life stuff being the reason, but, that’s all done now and I have managed to find both time and energy to get a little hobby done these past couple weekends.

As a small Xmas gift to myself I ordered the Warlord Games British Support boxed set as my collection needed a few pieces so that my Canadians can be used in later war games as well as for my Dieppe project.

First up a Medic, Platoon Sgt, Officer and Radio Operator. All painted to a basic tabletop standard to get them swiftly finished and off the mountain.

Got this 3”mortar team done too. Basing on all these is simple and to reflect the shale found on the very open beaches of Dieppe, France. After looking through pics of Dieppe, it’s a wonder any of those poor troops managed to make it beyond the waterline at all.

Next on the paint desk is a Vickers Medium Machinegun team. Should be done later today.

A Mobile Office also in mdf by Sarissa Precision. Trickier to put together with those vertical struts, but looks good on the table. Same as the helipad, kept the paintjob very simple which also got it off my table swiftly. Thinking some day in the future to make a white board and find office furniture for the interior.




These two are a couple of Warhammer 40K ruins scatter pieces. Very simple drybrush paintjobs. I have another 7 or 8 pieces to go with these two recently primed. The Statue is from the now out of print Urban Conquest Warhammer 40K expansion and the ruins behind it are the last of the 3 piece also out of print Honoured Imperium scenic set that included the previously posted Statue and giant Aquila that I'd painted up.


These two small 28mm resin WW2 stockpiles can be used as either objectives or scatter terrain. They were a kind gift a long time ago from the estimable Stew (Click his name to see his very cool blog) after he ordered the Chain of Command rules and realized he had no intention of playing in 28mm! I have two others in the painting queue as well.





I tried to add a little interest with the poorly painted signs, but otherwise they are very simple paintjobs and based to be suitable for both winter or greener seasonal games.


Did you see the two Brit troops in that first pic? Yeah, I painted those up too. Here's some better pics.

 Old 1980's Imperial Guard plastics mixed with more recent plastic Cadian bits and Genestealer Cult heads and nicknacks. Now I have three of these squads assembled, they just need some gap filling here and there and I can get to their basing so they can be primed.

As promised in my last post, here's the Churchill Mk1 from my Dieppe Landing force.


The kit is made by Madbob Miniatures in the UK and was very nicely detailed. The cast only had one airbubble to repair and it was a small one on the hull gun's barrel. Nothing that a bit of creative superglue application didn't correct though!


This was the first version of the Churchill tank that was used in the war and Dieppe was their first outing. The Mark 1 sadly though had an underpowered engine for being so large a beast and the hull mounted 3" cannon (Thought to be useful for bunker-busting) ended up being too difficult to aim properly along with it's additional ammunition taking up too much room inside. Along with that, the turret mounted 2-pounder anti-tank gun was not powerful enough to pierce most german tanks (As evidenced in the North Africa campaigns.) so the Commonwealth quickly upgunned their Churchills to carry a typical 75mm/6-pounder instead in later Marks.


During the Dieppe Landing very few of the tanks made it off the Landing Crafts and off the beach. The main reason being that the beach was not sand as the crews had been trained on in the UK, but large shale which caused all sorts of problems like tracks being thrown, etc. Still, the tanks were large enough and had heavy enough armour that many were able to protect the eventual withdrawal (Of the few remaining troops who weren't killed/captured) like bunkers as the German guns were mostly ineffectual against them.


Originally I had some trouble finding online accurate markings for this mark of tank that was at Dieppe. Lots of pictures of the Mark 3 versions with 6 pounder guns, but not this one. My first success was of an incorrect tank that had actually served in Italy and not Dieppe (The Canadians used the Mark 1 all through the Italian campaign) and was informed as much on the Bolt Action Facebook group. That in turn lead me to find other scale model kits of this tank to see if they could shed any light and in turn came across one that did. Lucky me.


But enough prattling! No-one came here to read my nonsense. On with the pics!








(And I've since found a resource to add some correct markings to the Universal Carrier from my last post - an update might be incoming!)

Here are some pieces I've been working on lately. Fast and dirty paint jobs to fit with the rest of what I've done.


Managed to get the Recon Universal carrier painted up for my Dieppe landing force. It's a Warlord games plastic kit and was fiddly as heck to assemble and paint up but I'm happy enough with the end result. Still needs a few id markings but I'll research those later.








Next up is a Bren Gun duo for my first Commandos squad. You'll notice the fellow on the left has a pretty blobby face - that's due to a 4 month old puppy taking an interest in my hobby. *eyeroll* lesson learnt there... (They are both Wargames foundry sculpts for those interested.)





Lastly I also got a sniper team in gillie suits done. This Warlord Games duo are smashing sculpts and were fun and easy to get painted up. Not sure snipers were present at Dieppe, but Commonwealth tactics liked to use platoon sharp shooters, so I felt it was okay to add them and heck, I liked the sculpts, so there.





I also managed to get the Churchill Mk 1 done for this lot but realized the pics I took were from when I originally painted on the markings and thanks to the Bolt Action Facebook group, was informed that they were incorrect. I've sorted that now, but still need to take pics, so will post that beast up tomorrow or so.


Still hoping all are staying safe and well out there.