Road to Art of War Pt.4

So, its now three days until Art of War. Crap!

The tigers are getting there, with only the final details and decals to go. At the end of last week, I needed to finish building them! The main tigers are PSC, with the 1ic and 2ic battlefront's offerings. One is a standard tiger 1e, for the other I chose the Hungarian special guy from Stafford Games. I hacked off as many bits as I could be bothered with, the side skirts being moulded into the hull made it slightly difficult. I purposely swapped and mixed hatch styles, turret models and road wheels to try and match the description given in Bridge by Bridge. The tank crew are all BF from my various kits.

As they were on Friday night

I'm still using the Plastic Soldier Company Dunklegelb spray, as I like this once I've given it a brown wash to darken it down.

Airbrush ho!

I then applied a two colour cammo (using Vallejo Air) with my Aztec airbrush. It's been quite annoying, as I've started to struggle with the flow, with either the paint being to thin and running (spidering) on the model, or clogging the nozzle. I'm looking into if an Iwata works better, but more on that another day.

The disc cammo was applied using Anarchy Models HD Stencils using the 1mm uber small discs that are currently in production. 

After a wash, Drybrush middlestone, and tracks

I washed them with brown shade, then drybrushed it back up with with middlestone to brighten them up and sharpen the edges. The tracks and replacement panels/parts were flat browned, then Cavalry Brown drybrushed to give it the red hew. 

They were tested at the Guildford Games Club against Justin 'the troll' Carnzu's 7th AD list, which he is also taking to the tournament. 

Tigers Marsch!

After taking some posing pictures, we rolled for mission and I was attacking in Breakthrough. I put the 2 strong platoon in delayed reserves, leaving me to deploy 10 tigers. AWESOME

They looked good rolling across the open... until the AT 13 easy eights opened up and turned my tigers inside out. Not being able to roll a moral test lead to the army running away. Not good.

However, we reset with me defending, and I drew it out to a bloody win! Justin's list is very competitive, with my tigers being a rather silly one, so I'm not too sore. I learnt some good lessons about smoke, and biding my time - being gone to ground rather than taking 1 or 2 shots that would probably hit a Jumbo and bounce anyway.

As they are now

I noticed that the 'Frankenstien' aspect was missing in the pictures, with the RotBarun replacement panels merging with the brown cammo - So I decided to go further, adding even more parts in the brown primer (including an entire early war turret) and some barrels in the bakerlite grey primer, and one even in bare metal. Once I've added the chipping, decals and some general weathering, I'm looking forward to seeing the finished result.

More soon, Thanks for reading,

Fez