Review - Anvil Industry The Blacksmith

Anvil Industry is one of my favorite miniature companies, and they recently turned 5 years old! To celebrate this, they released The Blacksmith, their special 5th anniversary miniature. Of course I ordered two, let's have a look!

The miniature come with a lot of pieces: a base plate, a body, an anvil, a pair of tongs, two heads,
two right hand options and three left hand options!

The quality is very good, as usual for Anvil Industry. But I was very surprised to see the amount of bubbles on the underside of the anvil piece:

Shocking! ;)
Well, luckily this is completely irrelevant for the look of the miniature because the rest of the anvil looks as sharp as  you can wish for:

 I can only speculate that the bubbles are caused by the process of casting such a complex form, but then again, they do not affect the look of the model at all.

I bought two sets so I can build one as an actual blacksmith and one as a warrior ready to fight.
Assembly is easy and everything fits perfectly:

Amazing character!

I chose the flaming sword and shield combo for my warrior. You could also use the hammer for the right hand and a dagger for the left.

The tools on his belt appear a bit out of place to me, but who knows what they will be used for after the battle...

I am looking very much forward to painting these two. It's a really cool miniature, especially when built as a blacksmith. Makes me wish I could do OSL...

If you want to pick up you own blacksmith, go to:

http://anvilindustry.co.uk/Boutique/special-edition/The-Blacksmith


And in case you are wondering what happened to my Bolt Action Hungarians... Well, I missed the tournament due to a severe plumbing issue (I spare you the details). There was some progress painting them, and I hope I will show some new pictures soon.

Overall I promise to take better care of this blog in the future - I have sorted out my wedding, residency and new job and it should be much easier now to post an article every other week or so.

See you soon!

Magyar Királyi Honvédség - Assembling the Force

My miniatures arrived a couple of days ago and I wasted no time building my army!

The army list I will use is as follows:

Second Lieutnant (Regular) - 50

Light Infantry Section (Veteran)
+ 4 soldiers
+ SMG - 120
Light Infantry Section (Veteran)
+ 4 soldiers
+ SMG - 120
Regular Infantry Section (Regular)
+ 6 soldiers - 110

Sniper Team (Regular) - 50
MMG Team  (Regular) - 50
Medium Artillery (Inexperienced)
+ Spotter - 70

Turan I
+ Upgrade to Turan II - 195
Toldi I - 75
Sd Kfz 234/2 Puma - 160 (Axis Support)

Total: 1000 Punkte

 And here are pictures of the some of the elements:

I went for a rather relaxed pose for the Lieuntant, and decided to arm him with just a pistol. Normally, I would use Officers to get some free SMGs in the force, but this time it somehow didn't feel right.

This is one of the NCOs with SMG. Hungarian used the Danuvia 39M SMG which looked a lot like a normal rifle:

The artillery is a hodgepdoge of miniatures: I stole the gun from my Italians, the metal crew is actually from a mortar and I built two additional crewmen from the Blitzkrieg infantry box.

The MMG on the other hand is straight forward out of the box. I just needed to find a way to mount the separate bases in a reasonable way.

And the sniper team. Due to the separate weapons it was really hard to pose them in a proper way, and I still hope nobody'll look at them too closely.

Last, but not least, the tanks:

I ordered a Puma at our local hobby store, but it didn't arrive yet. If it's not here in time, I'll go back to use the Szebeny's Tank Destroyer as a Marder II.

Next I'll have to remove the last bits of flash and tub, and then they'll all get a nice white primer.

Magyar Királyi Honvédség - The Plan

There is a Bolt Action tournament coming up on February 6th and I decided to use get some Hungarians done for that!

You might remember that I got a a whole bunch of Magyar Steel from Mad Bob Miniatures, and my first idea was to field as much of it as possible. A quick check of the army list showed me that I can get a Toldi I as my armored car and then use the Turan III as a count-as Panzer IV H. The army special rule "Axis Support" allows me to take another unit from the German army list, and the Marder II was a good match for Szebeny's Tank Destroyer.

That would leave me with a couple of hundred points for infantry, so my first list looked like that:

Regular Second Lieutnant - 50
Regular Squad (10) - 100
Regular Squad (10) - 100
Regular Squad (10) - 100
Regular MMG Team - 50
Regular Sniper Team - 50
Regular Panzerschreck Team - 80
Regular Panzer IV H - 235 (Turan III)
Regular Marder II - 160 (Axis Support, Szebeny's Tank Destroyer)
Regular Toldi I - 75
Total: 1000

Solid army,but sadly I completely neglected something I am still not used to here in New Zealand - up to 28 days delivery time for almost anything that is not in stock...

So I was limited to what I could get from the local retailers... And my budget isn't that large, either.

I decided to go for Blitzkrieg Germans as infantry. These pics here show that they should be a good match if just painted green:

I would have preferred great coats (or maybe SS-Smocks), but there was no way to get them in time and for a reasonable prize... So Blitzkrieg it is.

Checking availabilties showed me that this would be a viable list:

Regular Second Lieutnant - 50
Veteran Squad (9) + SMG - 120
Veteran Squad (9) + SMG - 120
Regular Squad (9) - 90
Regular MMG Team - 50
Regular Sniper Team - 50
Regular Medium Mortar Team - 50
Regular Panzer IV H - 235 (Turan III)
Regular Marder II - 160 (Axis Support, Szebeny's Tank Destroyer)
Regular Toldi I - 75
Total: 1000

I tried it today against Soviets with OT-34, Siberians with truck, Combat Engineers with truck, Sniper, Medium Mortar, ZIS-3 and inexperienced squad. We played Hold Until Relieved and Maximum Attrition, and I lost both quite significantly. The message I took home was that my army is too small and too slow (and that I absolutely positively hate vehicle-mounted flamethrowers...).

So there is not much I can do about mass (unless I happen to find another box of Blitzkrieg infantry in some dusty corner of my FLGS, in that case I might drop the Panzer IV to get two more squads), but I realized that a Sd Kfz 234/2 Puma costs exactly the same as the Marder II, but seems to be much more effective. And I am sure I saw one on the shelf the other day... Additionally, I can reduce the quality of one Veteran squad to get a truck in.

New army list:

Regular Second Lieutnant - 50
Veteran Squad (9) - 117
+ inexperienced Truck-  31
Regular Squad (9) - 90
Regular Squad (9) - 90
Regular MMG Team - 50
Regular Sniper Team - 50
Regular Medium Mortar Team - 50

Regular Panzer IV H - 235 (Turan III)
Regular Puma - 160 (Axis Support)
Regular Toldi I - 75

If my miniature get delivered on Thursday as promised, I have to paint a squad, a weapon team and a vehicle per week - Not too crazy ;)

A Quick Update

Hello everyone,
it has been a bit quiet in this corner of my hobby life...

My new job took a lot of energy from me (especially the late shifts till midnight) and I've had a lot of non-hobby-related stuff to do (as most of us, I guess).


So what IS going on?

I finished a 3-part review of the excellent Age of Tyrants for Bell of Lost Souls, which will be published over the next couple of days.
Additionally, I got a couple of their tanks to review, too, of which two are with a friend of mine who runs his own painting service to be made pretty.

 

A first glimpse at on of the Age of Tyrants tanks I got to review

 

Next I'll write my 2015 review (for BoLS, too), which means I am going and I  through all the posts on the Fix for this year - quite an effort!

Then there are multiple painting projects that need to be finished - foremost a bunch of Sigmarites I am painting as a commission, but I also started a vignette with modern soldiers, the 15mm diorama, and some bits and pieces for Frostgrave and DBA.

Spears to Blades - quite fiddly in 10mm :)

Talking about DBA - I did finish my army and played the tournament at the start of December, and I actually won! Well, it only had 5 players, but winning three out of four games was a very pleasant chnage from losing every match in my first two competitions. I guess it is true that miniatures painted by yourslef fight harder :)

I am still contemplating if I want to push to get a 1000 points Hungarian army for Bolt Action done in  the next 6 weeks to have them ready for an upcoming tournament - but I still haven't decided which infantry to use for conversions....

So, that was the short catch-up, I hope there will be more and better structured content soon.

Happy Holidays and see you in a bit!

Spray and Pray

I started with the 15mm SciFi diorama and painted the vehicles.

First, I used black spray paint as a foundation:

Then I apllied the the Anarchy Models stencil vinyl:

 

Next was a layer of light grey:

And more stencils:

Follwed by the main color:

The Tamiya spray is pretty good and the layers are reasonably thin. Now came the most exciting part - removing the vinyl bits:

I am quite pleased with the results. Of course the Anarchy Models masking vinyl is not designed to be used with spray cans, but the "stepping" is not too bad. The vinyl left some residue, I guess because of the rather hot temperatures around here, but those rub off easily. I think that the paint from the can is more likely to get under the vinyl than paint from an airbrush.

Now I should go back and paint some 10mm Normans - they need to be ready by sunday ;)

Tiny Normans Part I

Hello,
first, sorry for the long break. I wanted to post this last week, but then I had some trouble with my laptop and so it took a lot longer to get this one done than I wanted.

With a new DBA tournament coming up in early December Inow  started to build my 10mm Norman army.
Because my Normans are 10mm I am going to double base everything (i.e. use 6 miniatures on a 3Kn element) which I think is a great way to make the army even more impressive.

With what I have I can easily make enough elements to play Western Franks / Normans as well as Eastern Franks.

The spearmen line up very nicely into a solid block:

As do the bowmen:

These are two element of psiloi with crossbows (I fixed the "upright" weapons by now and removed the surplus metal bits):

But of course the main bulk of the army are the knights:

I had to cut the bases myself because I only got 40x20 bases. Front right is a base of camp followers.
Talking about the camp, I also started to build a Norman wwatchtower/keep:

 I'll add some windows and a gate made out of plastic card.

Most of the bases still need to be done, and of course there is the small issue of painting the 107 miniatures in the army... Well, at least I've started already ;)

I also did some work on the 15mm SciFi vehicles I showed a couple of weeks before. Hopefully I'll be able to post some pictures soon!

Anarchy from the UK

So, time for a new post. Real life got in the way of my hobby time a lot recently, and I started to work on a german version of the Afterlife rules, so I am just going to show some new hobby material that arrived at my doorstep: Stencils from Anarchy Models

They are designed to be used with an airbrush (which I don't own) but I am pretty confident that they will work with Tamiya spray cans. I'll use the digital camo on the 15mm miniatures for the display I was talking about before.

The material is vinyl, which makes them quite adhesive by themselves, and there is a lot of stencils on each sheet. They are supposed to be reusable, but I don't think that will work out if I use a spray can. Here is a picture of the actual diamond grid sheet:

The stencils above are all from the HD series. There is also a HS series which has thicker, less flexible material. That makes them easier to clean and to last longer:

In other news, a friend of mine who's running his own painting studio outsourced some basic work to me, so I have to take care of a bunch of Sigmarines this week: